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World Film Locations New York

Intellect Ltd

NEW YORK

UPFRONT

City of the Imagination

NEW YORK CITY IS PHOTOGENIC. Of course, it is. As one of the world's greatest cities – some would say the absolute greatest – it is intrinsically photogenic. As a five borough city crammed with people and their stories, and chockablock with actors, writers, producer, directors and designers ready to observe, react to, record and interpret these stories, New York City would, by sheer numbers, have to be photogenic. As a centre of arts, commerce and industry, it would de facto be photogenic. So what if the city's industries are shrinking in the early part of the twenty-first century? The fashion industry continues to thrive – and the models populating it are certainly photogenic.

The sprawling, brawling, bawling, crawling, galling, mauling, appalling, enthralling metropolis is one of the most obvious locations for movies to be made and movies to be about – and has been for well over 100 years. And this is true even though, for many decades in the middle of the twentieth century, movies about New York City were filmed on Hollywood back lots, on the studios' standard New York City brownstone-lined thoroughfares, and frequently underscored by the sweeping theme Alfred Newman composed for King Vidor's 1931 Street Scene. Does anyone have to ask where the scenes on that Street Scene street are located? No, is the correct answer. Does any other city on the planet have as recognizable a theme riff? Possibly 'Hooray for Hollywood' for Hollywood or the George Gershwin's American in Paris themes for Paris, but, really, no is again the correct answer.

Mention New York City to moviegoers and instantly their heads fill with footage. Minds are aglow with endless images of scenes set in the city. Many of them will be mentioned in great detail throughout the book you're holding and don't need to be enumerated here. But it's still instructive to list some of those locations: Wall Street, Broadway, the Brooklyn Bridge, JFK and LaGuardia airports, Staten Island, the Statue of Liberty, Battery Park, the United Nations (which is admittedly on international territory within the City), Central Park, the East River, the Hudson River, Astoria, Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side, the Upper East Side, Harlem, the Staten Island Ferry, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Plaza, Macy's, Tiffany's, the Empire State Building, the Twin Towers ... you name the venerable, ballyhooed landmark and mental images from film tumble over one another, crowd one another out, compete for attention.

The reason is clear: New York, as much or more than any city in the world, is a melting pot. It's a crucible. Just about anything that can happen to man, woman or child happens in New York City and perhaps with even greater intensity. Look at any film genre and New York City – where what remains of some Hollywood studios still base their business offices – is a repeated character.

Big city romances? What big star hasn't locked lips with another big star in the Big Apple? Comedies? Obviously. Family dramas? Definitely. Mysteries? Of course. Even Westerns! How many police procedurals adhering to the plot structure of Westerns have been shot in the five boroughs?

And there is one genre that sometimes seems as if it couldn't exist without New York City, sitting there with its bare, tempting, vulnerable cityscape hanging out: the endof-the-world film. In how many movies is New York City under attack? In how many is it being escaped from? In how many is the Statue of Liberty shown having her head decapitated or lying in pieces or buried under leagues of sand or water? In how many crowd scenes are New York citizens and tourists fleeing on foot while a monster of one sort or another crushes the unfortunate? How many metal shards come hurtling towards the camera from blasted cars that minutes before were innocently negotiating New York City streets or blithely parked at New York City curbs? The answer to all is: too many to count.

It's hard to imagine a time when New York City ceases to be the apotheosis of the city on film. Certainly, the City's government doesn't want the eyes of the world to stop watching. An especially significant reason why NYC is a moviemaking Mecca is its support system for the industry. Just start with the sixsoundstage Kaufman Astoria Studios. Beyond that, the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting – aware that the hefty revenues involved indicate this is another local industry not shrinking – has for quite some time been easing the stresses on on-location filming.

The result is that there's hardly a native or adopted New Yorker who hasn't watched a movie being filmed on his or her block and, as a result, hasn't felt a part of the never-ending process of New York film-making. As far as New Yorkers are concerned, they're all in the movie business. For movies about New York City – bless its airy highs and asphyxiated lows! – it seems unlikely there will ever be a final fade out.

THE JAZZ SINGER (1927)

LOCATIONHester and Orchard Streets, Lower East Side, Manhattan

THE JAZZ SINGER is frequently recalled as the first 'talkie', heralding the ascendance of synchronized dialogue in movies, and the decline of silent film. But what many forget is how it remains a pointed and poignant parable about an immigrant's heritage. It takes on issues of bigotry, Jewish identity and commitment to artistry: subjects of great consequence when it was released that are no less important today. A great many scenes in the film help enrich these themes, and its very first ones are no exception, as it begins with shots overlooking the Jewish ghetto in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. To view them today is to appreciate one of filmdom's great gifts, which is to serve as a time machine. We see the streets of Hester and Orchard overflowing with people. Pushcarts, shaded stalls and goods sold left and right. A makeshift merry-go-round so packed with children that sardines would complain. Horse-drawn carriages are the way things get around, and housewives crowd the roads to get what they need. It all looks positively Dickensian. Who knows what audiences back then thought of these scenes? Perhaps they were not as in awe as we would be due to the disparity of the times but, just maybe, they were held rapt to some of these very first scenes of the city. Their images helped define what people thought of New York back then – very different from what we think of today. ->Michael Mirasol

LOCATIONOutside Pennsylavania Station, Seventh and Eighth Avenue, between 31st Street & 33rd Street, Manhattan

FILMED LARGELY on location – and featuring two living landmarks in baseball players Babe Ruth and Lou 'The Pride of the Yankees' Gehrig – Harold Lloyd's last silent comedy is one of the great New York films, its importance and appeal only enhanced because it celebrates an NYC that no longer exists: a pre-skyscraper city of trams and horse cars (or rather, a single horse car – the last in operation). One of its funniest scenes sees Lloyd's eponymous character, Harold 'Speedy' Swift, living up to his nickname when, apparently promising him his first ever fare as a taxi driver, two men jump into his cab and shout, 'Pennsylvania Station – and step on it!' Rushing through (now gloriously archaic) New York streets, Speedy's (now gloriously archaic) cab is seen by a policeman, who gives chase on his (now gloriously archaic) motorcycle. Arriving outside Penn Station, Speedy asks his passengers for payment, and is instead shown two police badges. The officers are in search of a suspect and dash inside. The motorcycle cop catches up and, inevitably, hilarity follows. The pillars of Penn Station visible here are, despite the extensive renovations that have taken place at the station since the 1920s, still recognisably those that stand today. The building and vehicles and people and city that surround them, however, are now of another age. Seeing Penn Station in Speedy and then seeing it as it is in the twenty-first century feels like looking at a man's baby pictures and then attending his 100th birthday. ->Scott Jordan Harris

LOCATIONAn exaggerated, stage version of 42nd Street, Manhattan

WELCOME TO 42ND STREET, New York, Philadelphia. Yes, Philadelphia. For that is where the demands of American theatre have swept director Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) and his troupe for the opening night of their latest show. After mishap, misunderstanding, one broken ankle and several broken hearts, the stage is set for the final dance number. And the set just happens to be an artistic reconstruction of New York's 42nd Street, right down to its subways and fruit stands. In the background, a matte painting trails off towards a false horizon. Which would add up to very little were it not for the great Busby Berkeley's choreography. Dancers dressed as cops, clerks, newspaper boys, bums, dandies, gangsters and molls sashay across the screen, in a lively vignette of New York life. A police horse lifts its hooves in time with the beat. Cars whizz past from nowhere. And by now the stage seems to have swollen beyond its original confines and beyond the confines, too, of dull, everyday logic. Marsh has delivered the extravaganza he promised. This one's going to be a smash. It is a wonderfully optimistic end to a film that hasn't previously shied away from the harsh realities of Depression-era America. As the camera swoops in towards Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell's pair of lovers, the abiding message is this: there's always a reason to tap your feet. ->Peter Hoskin

LOCATIONThe Empire State Building, 350 Fifth Avenue (in model form), Manhattan

THE POSTERS for King Kong never quite got it right. What they show, on the whole, is a devil ape with malice in its eyes. Yet by the time Willis O'Brien's stop motion creature begins his climb up the Empire State Building, we know that there's little real malice in him at all. Kong is an animal, plain and simple. And one who is taken away from his home, cast into chains, and subjected to the gasps and bursting camera bulbs of Broadway. His escape into New York City is destructive and deadly – but he never should have been there in the first place. If this is what lends King Kong's finale its tragedy, it also lends it a subversive sort of humour. The Empire State Building had opened less than two years before the film premiered. It was one of the modern world's most emphatic achievements. Yet here it was being clambered all over by a gigantic, primeval gorilla. There are few, if any, more delightfully preposterous scenes of Old versus New in all of cinema. And, in this case at least, we are guided into siding with the Old. Human progress may have brought us the glittering towers of New York, but it also delivered the planes and guns that killed Kong. And, oh yes, it was the planes and guns that killed Kong. When Robert Armstrong's Carl Denham says at the end – 'It was beauty killed the beast' – that's just a get-out clause. ->Peter Hoskin

LOCATION13 West 52nd Street, Manhattan

BILLY WILDER'S stark and sorrowful drama, based on a novel by Charles R. Jackson, charts the spiralling degeneracy of failed scribbler and desperate dipsomaniac, Don Birnam (the Oscar-winning Ray Milland). After an abortive attempt at writing turns into a frantic hunt for liquor, Don spots a discarded matchbook advertising 'Harry & Joe's, 13 West 52nd St, NY'. When we next see him, he is seated in the aforementioned bar, requesting the cheque. Unable to pay in full, he instead orders another drink and, in desperation, swipes the clutch-bag of the woman seated beside him. Don retires to the washroom, where he removes the required $10 to cover his bill, inserting a carnation in its place. When he returns to the scene, he is confronted by the couple and the bar staff in an excruciating public humiliation. As he is removed from the premises, howling 'I'm not a thief,' the piano player strikes up with 'Somebody Stole a Purse' (to the tune of the popular song 'Somebody Stole My Gal') and the assembled crowd cheerfully sing along. As well as representing a particularly sorry episode in Don's breakdown, and further stripping away the glamour of boozing (a consequence-free staple of Hollywood films of the era), the sequence shows us the blasé reaction of New Yorkers to the crime – showing them collectively as sassy and irreverent urbanites, inured to such delinquency. ->Emma Simmonds

LOCATION77th Street, heading south to 151 West 34th Street, Manhattan

THIS CLASSIC YULETIDE story of a Manhattan department store Santa put on trial when he claims to be the real thing has been re-made several times. However, the 1947 original remains definitive, not least because of its copious location filming. George Seaton's film thrives on rooting its fantasy in the everyday world, the story revolving around Macy's flagship store on 151 West 34th Street. In addition to filming several sequences inside the store, Seaton's bid for authenticity saw him take cast and crew to the actual Macy's Thanksgiving Parade in 1946. The film begins with Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) discovering that the actor due to play Santa is inebriated. When parade organiser Susan Walker (Maureen O'Hara) spots Kringle's white beard and kindly demeanour, she hires him on the spot to replace the drunk. Macy's allowed Seaton to shoot Gwenn and O'Hara as the floats were being set up on 77th Street, with the caveat that the parade wouldn't wait if the scene wasn't in the can. Gwenn then took the reins of Santa's sleigh and rode on the float to 34th Street. The documentary-style footage of him wowing the crowds is the real deal, not least because nobody knew 'Santa's' secret identity, as Gwenn's participation wasn't promoted until after the parade. By 1994, such cooperation was a thing of the past. Macy's refused permission for its name to be used in the remake starring Richard Attenborough, removing much of the film's verisimilitude – and the geographic specificity of its title. ->Simon Kinnear

Above Macy's, 151 West 34th Street

LOCATIONWilliamsburg Bridge at Delancey Street (Manhattan) and Grand Street (Brooklyn)

THE NAKED CITY was shot on location – and how. Jules Dassin's 1948 crime flick sprawls out over New York: winding through its streets, capturing its people, and trudging through its underworld. It's no surprise that this one was produced by the former newspaperman Mark Hellinger. Nor that the photojournalist Weegee (Arthur Fellig) was an on-set consultant. The whole thing has a documentary feel that was rare for a fiction film at the time. It still is now. The film saves its most bravura location shooting for its climax: a chase across the Williamsburg Bridge. Out ahead, the murderer Garzah (Ted de Corsia, a child of Brooklyn). Behind him, the persistent foot soldiers of the NYPD. Gunshots are traded, and Garzah – bleeding, sweating and beat – drags himself up into the steel innards of the bridge. The East River dozes below. Central Park sits, unreachable, in the distance. It is in these moments that The Naked City starts to play more like a film noir than a standard police procedural. The wires and struts of the bridge slice across the screen like prison bars. Its stairways come to an unforgiving dead end. As Garzah's body plummets inevitably to earth, Dassin's camera dwells on the New York skyline, unmoving and unmoved. In the end – after all that – this city couldn't care less. ->Peter Hoskin

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Excerpted from World Film Locations New York by Scott Jordan Harris. Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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