2007–2014
MAN ON A LEDGE (2012) By the second decade of the twenty-first century, even the most ambitious and risky filmic scenes—once reserved for the controlled environs of a “green-screen” stage—were now routinely being shot on location in New York. For Man
on a Ledge, in which a falsely accused policeman (Sam Worthington) seeks attention by threatening to jump from the twenty-first floor of a midtown hotel, filmmakers constructed a two-story “skybox” hotel room set atop the venerable 1924 Roosevelt
Hotel on 45th Street and Madison Avenue. To allow vertiginous shots of Worthington clinging for life on the narrow fourteen-inch ledge, an eighty-five-foot-long camera crane, weighing three and a half tons, was raised to the roof and swung out several
lanes over the avenue, more than two hundred feet up. All cast and crew members were required to empty their pockets of loose change (to avoid any damage to people below) and to wear elaborate safety riggings, removed digitally in post-production.
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ENCHANTED (2007) In a witty, updated version of a classic
Manhattan. Transformed into an actual three-dimen-
Disney fairy tale, a cartoon princess named Giselle finds herself banished (by her fiancé’s evil stepmother) from a timeless animated kingdom called Andalasia to a strange and distant land: modern-day
sional woman (Amy Adams), Giselle rises in her wedding gown from a manhole in Times Square, dazed and disoriented by the bright lights, rush of traffic, and people in the heart of the city.
I think some movies probably wouldn’t have gone up 225 feet and done it. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, producer, Man on a Ledge
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MICHAEL CLAYTON (2007) Produced on the eve of the financial crisis, Tony Gilroy’s portrait of a Manhattan law firm’s all-purpose “fixer” (George Clooney) carefully employed New York locations to suggest a culture of greed and immorality beneath the sleek anonymity of the corporate world. The film’s climax—a confrontation between Clayton and the corporate attorney (Tilda Swinton) who has tried to have him killed—transformed a bland reception space outside the New York Hilton Midtown’s ballroom into a theatrically charged setting, its wide vistas remaining uninterruptedly open thanks to cinematographer Robert Elswit’s decision to place huge banks of lights atop twelve eighty-foot–tall scissor lifts just outside the windows.
WALL STREET II: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS (2010) In Oliver Stone’s sequel to his celebrated 1987 film Wall Street, a young
proprietary trader named Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf) walks solemnly past the site of the destroyed World Trade Center as a new and different kind
of disaster unfolds—the great financial crisis of fall 2008.
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MEN IN BLACK 3 (2012) Part of the Men in Black series carries Agent J (Will Smith) back in time, to the New York of the late 1960s, in search of a fearsome alien nemesis played by Jemaine Clement. His hunt leads him to a loft on a cast-iron street in SoHo: Andy Warhol’s legendary Factory, recreated lovingly by production designer Bo Welch, and populated with an array of downtown “characters”—mods, hippies, fashion models—whose unusual appearance and outlandish outfits (rendered in high period style by costume designer Mary Vogt) is explained simply by their true identities as space aliens.
DATE NIGHT (2010) Attempting to reignite their marriage, a New Jersey couple named Phil and Claire Foster (Steve Carell and Tina Fey) choose to forego their routine suburban “date night” for dinner at an upscale Manhattan restaurant, a decision that triggers a series of adventures after they are mistaken for thieves and chased across the city. By turns scary and amusing, the extended pursuit comes to a climax on South Street, where—in a sequence filmed almost entirely on location—Phil finds himself clinging to the top of a New York City taxicab, which has leapt off the shore and into the waters of the East River.
The idea that aliens are hiding in plain sight is very easy to believe in New York City. Mary Vogt, costume designer, Men in Black 3 257
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SARAH JESSICA PARKER (AS CARRIE BRADSHAW), IN SEX AND THE CITY II Once upon a long time ago, there was an island…some Dutch, some Indians and some beads. And those beads led to steamboats and skyscrapers, Wall Street and electric lights, newspapers, Ellis Island, the Yankees, Central Park, and the first World’s Fair, Broadway, the Chrysler Building and Studio 54. I like to think of that as New York City B.C.: Before Carrie.
All the fashion magazines in New York have a sense of being in a special world. David Frankel, director of The Devil Wears Prada
THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (2006) Offering an extended look at the inner workings of a Vogue-like magazine called Runway, the film carried viewers into the very heart of a “junglethemed” photo shoot on the Pond in Central Park. Even while giving audiences
a close-up vantage point of the rarefied, exclusive “world” of the city’s elite fashion culture, the scene within a scene also recalls the way in which, over the past century, New York’s great fashion photographers—from Richard Avedon to Norman Parkinson to David La Chapelle—have imagi-
natively employed location photography to draw on the rich and varied scenography of the city (much as, in recent decades, location filmmakers have learned to do).
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SEX AND THE CITY: THE MOVIE (2008) As if to acknowledge the bittersweet passing of its era, the extravagant feature-film version of the popular cable television series opened with a scene of Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) outside Tiffany’s, catching the admiring notice of four younger New York women—a new, generational cycle of the familiar foursome who, in their long-running romantic and professional adventures, had reinvigorated for modern audiences a vision of the city as a place of glamour, excitement, and possibility.
AMERICAN GANGSTER (2007) In adapting the true-life story of a 1970s drug lord named Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington)—whose capacity for bloody violence contrasted with his understated, businesslike demeanor and devotion to family values—the director Ridley Scott saw the opportunity not only to sketch a dramatic criminal biography but also to draw a portrait of a certain time and place—the poor, struggling, yet somehow stately environment of 1970s Harlem. In this view, a harried working-class detective, played by Russell Crowe, finally captures his man—on the steps of an ornate Harlem church, where Frank has just attended Sunday services.
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BLACK SWAN (2010) To root his eerie ballet thriller in familiar terrain, director Darren Aronofsky left the rehearsal halls and dressing rooms for the fountain at LINCOLN CENTER (recently redesigned by Diller Scofidio + Renfro) for a troubled conversation between ballerina Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) and director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel). Though hardly historical, the 1960s complex is now recognized as a “landmark”—not least for its appearances in film.
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LEFT BRIDE WARS (2009) Drawing its premise from the emotional significance that can attach to landmark spaces, the film traces the conflict between two lifelong friends Emma and Liv (Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson) who, having witnessed a wedding in the PLAZA HOTEL as young girls and dreamed since of a June wedding in its glittering Edwardian interiors (including the Grand Ballroom and Terrace Room, shot on location) must now stage competing nuptials on the same day.
ABOVE A LATE QUARTET (2012) A portrait of the growing tensions among a renowned New York chamber music group, the film takes place largely in various Manhattan apartments (the literal “chambers”), where its members rehearse—interior scenes counterpointed by several location sequences in Central Park, such as this still image of violist Juliette Gelbart (Catherine Keener) on BOW BRIDGE, the park’s longest and perhaps most graceful span.
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LAW & ORDER There is no substitute for New York City– the look, the people, the locations. That is what differentiates “Law & Order” from other so-called New York shows that are actually shot in Los Angeles or other locales. It brings a certain cinema verité that you cannot replicate. The lighting, the backgrounds, the locations–New York is unlike any other city in the world, and that uniqueness shows on screen. Dick Wolf, executive producer, “Law & Order”
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“LAW & ORDER” Though the location-shot police “procedural” drama stretches back to the late 1950s, the form was all but revolutionized in 1990, when the veteran producer Dick Wolf created “Law & Order,” an hour-long series whose episodes spend their first half looking at the police department’s efforts to solve a crime, and their second half on the District Attorney’s attempts to prosecute the suspect. In its twenty years of continuous production–the longest run in history for a live-action primetime American television show–the series became a virtual industry, spinning off two additional hour-long shows (“Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” which premiered in 1999, and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” which began two years later), employing over a thousand New Yorkers, and spending more than a million dollars a week during production. (The Mayor’s Office calculated that the original series alone pumped over $750 million into the
city’s economy in the first years it was on the air.) Produced almost entirely in New York, the series used location shooting more extensively than any television series before it, setting not only action sequences but many of its characters’ ordinary conversations in the city’s streets, parks, and public spaces, thus making New York the series’ most consistent element– especially given its constantly evolving cast of characters, including detectives Mike Logan (Chris Noth) and Max Greevey (George Dzundza), shown questioning witnesses on a Manhattan sidewalk (OPPOSITE PAGE); district attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) and assistant district attorney Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy), confronting a suspect in Central Park (LEFT, TOP), and detectives Leonard R. Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) and Reynaldo Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) taking a coffee break on Worth Street in lower Manhattan (LEFT, BOTTOM).
DICK WOLF Even though the city has experienced a dramatic drop in crime and disorder since 1990, we still read about victims on a daily basis. When I pitched the show to [NBC president] Brandon Tartikoff in 1988, he asked, “What is the ‘bible’ for the show?” I said, “The front page of the New York Post.”
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THE CABLE REVOLUTION
ABOVE LEFT AND RIGHT “SEX AND THE CITY” Based on the best-selling novel by Candace Bushnell, the HBO series followed the adventures of four young Manhattan women (Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, and Cynthia Nixon) and marked the advent of cable television as a major force in New York location production. Freed from the restraints on subject matter and language that have traditionally limited network television, and willing to pursue more complex storylines and adult themes, episodic cable series found
a natural setting in contemporary New York. Making more extensive use of New York locations than any other show on television (except perhaps “Law & Order”) the series broke ground cinematically and thematically, making way for (and also creating an archtype to rebel against) female-centric shows set in the city, like “Girls.” Initially cynical about the realities of dating in the big city, the series grew increasingly romantic, presenting not only a glamorous vision of urban life, but also a frank emotional commitment to the city and its values.
At Silvercup Studios in Long Island City, Carrie Bradshaw’s stuffed designer-shoe closet has been torn down to make room for the modest Ikea-style student digs of Hannah, the perpetual intern on “Girls,” played by the series’ creator, Lena Dunham. Dan Bilefsky, The New York Times, July 29, 2011
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“GIRLS” Invariably compared to “Sex and the City” in its focus on the adventures of four young female friends making their way in New York, Lena Dunham’s comic-drama series “Girls” was as notable for the differences as for the similarities to its celebrated predecessor. Set in the recession-haunted landscape of the post-2008 city, the series jettisoned the stylish, fashion-obsessed ambience of the earlier show for a far more circumscribed vision of urban life, as its four main characters (Lena Dunham as Hannah, Zosia Mamet as
Shoshanna, Jemima Kirke as Jessa, and Allison Williams as Marnie) struggle at every turn with romantic failure, lack of professional opportunity, and the increasingly tenuous bonds of friendship in a hyper-connected digital era. Notably, the series also left behind the romantic Manhattan settings of “Sex and the City” for the more prosaic landscape of post-industrial Brooklyn—from stoop sales on India Street to hipster landmarks such as Café Grumpy in Greenpoint—which had become the true center of the city’s youth culture.
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CITY OF STORIES THE NETWORK EXPLOSION
Filming “PERSON OF INTEREST” In recent years, the rise in cable production in New York has been matched by a startling new development: an explosion in network television, including series such as CBS’ “Person of Interest,” which brings a post–September 11th sensibility to the New York police procedural. Immersed in the culture of high-security alerts and video surveillance that has pervaded the city in the early twenty-first century,
the series features Michael Emerson as Harold Finch, an eccentric billionaire who has pioneered a new software that can predict criminal behavior—which he uses to carry out high-risk games of cat and mouse in locations from Madison Avenue (LEFT) to Central Park (ABOVE).
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TOP LEFT AND RIGHT “30 ROCK” Drawing from her experiences as a writer on “Saturday Night Live,” produced for decades in 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Tina Fey set her own situation comedy in the studios and offices of a fictional comedy show being produced in the historic NBC broadcast center.
In following the escapades of head writer Liz Lemon (Fey) and her colleagues, the show maintained an abiding affection for what was, in some ways, its central romantic object: the art moderne landmark of “30 Rock” itself.
“THE MICHAEL J. FOX SHOW” Returning after his real-life struggle with Parkinson’s, the former “Spin City” lead takes on a new role within the urban firmament: a New York news anchor, who (like the actor himself) must balance health issues with the demands of city life.
BOTTOM LEFT
BOTTOM RIGHT “SMASH” This series updated and transferred to television one of the most enduring traditions of New York features: the “backstage musical,” which follows the production of a glamorous Broadway stage show.
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REBIRTH OF THE STUDIO
“TOTAL REQUEST LIVE” A countdown show of popular music videos, hosted by Carson Daly, became a remarkable urban and media phenomenon when MTV relocated the show to studios in an office building in Times Square with large windowwalls overlooking the celebrated crossroads, which encouraged crowds of fans to gather below to catch glimpses of—and perhaps interact at a distance with—the show’s visiting celebrities.
“LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN” The network television talk show began in New York, an outgrowth of the earlier radio talk shows, which, like their televised successors, fed on the unending stream of entertainers and celebrities performing in (or simply passing through) the city. David Letterman’s late-night program, which in 1992 relocated to the former Ed Sullivan Theater (itself the site of one of America’s most popular televised variety shows in the 1950s and ’60s),
has distinguished itself in recent years by often leaving the stage to make imaginative use of its urban setting. In November 2002, the evening’s broadcast ended with a fireworks display by the Grucci family, who, on Letterman’s go-ahead, lit two long fuses that ran down the facade of the building, setting off 1,020 individual fireworks atop the theater marquee.
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TOP LEFT AND RIGHT “TODAY SHOW” Ever since its debut in 1952, the NBC “Today” show, one of the longest-running television programs in history, has taken immense advantage of its location in the heart of Rockefeller Center, and of its sleek, glass-walled studios opening onto the sidewalk— whose distinctive New York mix of urban display and media spectacle have drawn crowds since the 1950s, when the show’s host, Dave Garroway, cavorted with his mascot, the chimpanzee J. Fred Muggs
(TOP RIGHT). Contemporary hosts such as Katie Couric sometimes venture out into the public spaces of Rockefeller Center itself to host sequences larger than the studios can accommodate, such as this segment on the construction of a model house (TOP LEFT).
“LATE NIGHT WITH JIMMY FALLON” Rising to prominence on “Saturday Night Live,” Fallon continued his allegiance to NBC’s Rockefeller Center studios by taping in and around the complex as the host of “Late Night.” Selected to host “The Tonight Show” in 2013, he insisted that the legendary program be brought back to New York—and Rockefeller Center—for the first time since Johnny Carson’s muchlamented departure in 1972. BOTTOM LEFT
BOTTOM RIGHT “LATE NIGHT WITH CONAN O’BRIEN” New York’s increasing dominance of talk-show television was extended by several other personalities, including (LEFT TO RIGHT) Stephen Colbert,
Jon Stewart, and Conan O’Brien—shown here dancing madly through the hallways of 30 Rockefeller Plaza for O’Brien’s NBC show—who transformed and revitalized the late-night format, and made attending a “live taping” one of the city’s main visitor attractions.
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ABOVE AND OPPOSITE
“BOARDWALK EMPIRE” While location filming in the city’s streets and public spaces continued to provide the backbone of New York’s film and television industry, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the expansion of the city’s inventory of soundstages and production facilities crossed a crucial threshold with the dramatic growth of all three
of the city’s major production complexes—Kaufman Astoria Studios, Silvercup Studios, and Steiner Studios—as well as countless other facilities around the five boroughs. A notable marker of this change—and harbinger for the future—came with an astonishing outdoor standing set, the first of its kind since World War I, that took shape on a lot near the water’s edge in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 2009:
a sprawling re-creation of the Atlantic City boardwalk as it appeared in its 1920s Prohibition-era heyday, built for the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire.” Though the show— the fictionalized story of an actual politician-turned-bootlegger named Enoch “Nucky” Thompson (Steve Buscemi) and his circle of supporters and enemies—takes place in New Jersey, its producers (including Martin Scorsese, who
also directed the pilot), chose to produce the project in New York, working with production designer Bob Shaw to create, at a cost of more than five million dollars, a painstakingly detailed, three-hundredfoot-long rendition of the famed historic boardwalk and its adjoining buildings— including storefronts, vaudeville theaters, restaurants, and the facade of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
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The Atlantic City boardwalk is like Times Square on the ocean. Terence Winter, Creator/Executive Producer, “Boardwalk Empire”
OVERLEAF Filming INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (2013) As the decades progress, nearly every day of the year brings a small army of film and television crews onto the streets of New York, for major productions and minor ones, for screens large and small, mixing the most advanced camera and sound technology with scenic and lighting techniques as old as filmmaking,
all in an attempt to trigger the potent alchemy that, for more than half a century, has turned the real urban environment of a great city into a glimmering fictive place—the ultimate setting for the dream-life of the modern world.
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WOMEN IN FILM
Since the rise of the film and television industry in New York in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, a small but dedicated group of women filmmakers have played a major role in defining the distinctive character— and quality—of the city’s outsized presence onscreen. In feature filmmaking, for example, the great Dede Allen— considered by many the finest film editor of her time—deployed her inimitable, razor-sharp cutting style to propel the restless energy and breakneck urban pace of such classic 1970s New York movies as Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico, both directed by Sidney Lumet. The screenwriter and producer Eleanor Perry, working in partnership with her husband Frank, brought daring structural innovations to the couple’s haunting filmic renditions of contemporary literary works, from John Cheever’s The Swimmer (filmed just north of the city limits, in Westchester County) to Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife. The director Joan Micklin Silver created a pair of unforgettable portraits of Manhattan’s historic Lower East Side, showing the area first in its peak years as a Jewish immigrant enclave at the start of the twentieth century in Hester Street, then again as the more established, multi-ethnic district of the 1980s in Crossing Delancey. A little later, the director Susan Seidelman (Smithereens and Desperately Seeking Susan) and producer Jane Rosenthal (co-founder of the Tribeca Film Center and the Tribeca Film Festival) helped reinforce lower Manhattan’s place as the undisputed home of a burgeoning “independent” film culture. In television production, where New York had long dominated the world of news, documentary, and children’s programming, the
impact of women in the industry was even more obvious. The producer Joan Ganz Cooney literally revolutionized educational television—first in America then around the globe—with the creation of “Sesame Street” and the Children’s Television Workshop that produced it and other landmark series. The correspondent, reporter, and producer Barbara Walters became the first female network news anchor in history—which in turn became merely one among dozens of breakthroughs and firsts in her epic, six-decade broadcast career. Another former TV news producer, Judy Crichton, inaugurated the modern era of history documentary programming by creating “The American Experience” series for public television. Scores of other gifted women, meanwhile—in ways celebrated and not, and on both sides of the camera—contributed in crucial ways to the building of a genuine production industry in New York. Over the last two decades, the growth of the city into a major force in American film and television production has been driven in great part by the extraordinary drive and accomplishment of hundreds of New York women, a sample of whom are recognized in images and words in this special section of Scenes From the City. Overcoming the formidable array of obstacles that still hold sway in an era when, nationally, fewer than one in five directors, writers, producers, cinematographers, or editors on feature films are women, the creative contributions of these remarkable individuals have not only allowed New York’s film and television industry to achieve its current level of economic energy and cultural eminence, but offered audiences— on screens large and small—countless moments of excitement, pleasure, and wonder.
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TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM
Writer/director Jennifer Westfeldt on the set of Friends with Kids. Director Mira Nair on the set of The Namesake. Writer/director Nancy Meyers on the set of It’s Complicated. Co-writer/director Mary Harron on the set of I Shot Andy Warhol. Writer/producer Tina Fey, on the set of “30 Rock.” Co-writer/director Julie Taymor on the set of Across the Universe. Writer/director Lena Dunham on the set of “Girls,” with writer/producer Jenni Konner. Writer/director Dee Rees on the set of Pariah.
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