Fun City Cinema
Fun City Cinema is a podcast about New York, and the movies that made it.
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“As you see, we’re flying over an island. A city. A particular
city. And this is a story of a number of people, and a story also
of the city itself.” That’s from the opening voice-over of the 1948
movie The Naked City, which was a very big deal when it was made,
because it was a rare studio film that was shot entirely, lock
stock and barrel, on the streets of New York City. You see, the
American motion picture industry began in New York, at the end of
the 19th century – Thomas Edison and other early innovators had
their laboratories here, and shot their early films in and around
Manhattan. But the movies moved to California in the 1910s, and
rarely came back. Plenty of films were set in New York… but
astonishingly few were shot here. Studios constructed fake New
Yorks on their Hollywood backlots; maybe, if they couldn’t fake it,
they’d shoot a scene or two in New York, or send a crew to shoot
exteriors, or use stock footage. But that all changed with
Executive Order No. 10, issued by Mayor John V. Lindsay on May 31,
1966. That document formed the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre
& Broadcasting—a one-stop shop intended to eliminate the red
tape and copious permits of New York filmmaking, and to lure
filmmakers East. It worked - perhaps too well. The problem was, the
explosion of production that followed the establishment of the
Mayor’s Office in the mid-1960s coincided directly with the
beginning of the most troubled period of the city’s history… a
quarter-century of rising crime, increasing debt, decreases in
public service and servants, and general urban anarchy. And that
period was captured over the course of the next two decades,
vividly, in the likes of Midnight Cowboy; The French Connection;
Death Wish; Dog Day Afternoon; Taxi Driver; The Taking of Pelham
123, The Warriors; Fort Apache, The Bronx; Do the Right Thing; and
After Hours—portraits of a city’s decay and downfall, and ones
that, ironically enough, might not have existed at all were it not
for the incentives provided by the city itself. Now, from the safe
distance of a Disney-fied and gentrified Manhattan, these films
provide us with a window into a past that’s been razed and replaced
by a safer present. 9/11 took a toll on The City… so did the rise
of income inequality, rendering New York City, more than ever, a
place solely by and for the rich. That shift, and the rapid
suburbanization that accompanied it, has left New York nearly
indistinguishable from other large American cities. And thus these
movies…. become a valuable reminder of what once was. And what
we’re witnessing, in the films made in New York, and set in the
present, is a conversation of, of connections and reflections
between the fictional lives in their foregrounds… and the real
lives happening behind them. So in their own unique ways, every
great New York movie is an accidental documentary of what The City
was - at the precise point of its production, and not a moment
longer. All of those movies, taken together, tell their own version
of the history of New York. That’s the history we’re here to tell.
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