Fun City Cinema

Bailey Jason Bailey

Description

A visual history of 100 years of filmmaking in New York City, featuring exclusive interviews with NYC filmmakersFun City Cinema gives readers an in-depth look at how the rise, fall, and resurrection of New York City was captured and chronicled in ten iconic Gotham films across ten decades: The Jazz Singer (1927), King Kong (1933), The Naked City (1948), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Taxi Driver (1976), Wall Street (1987), Kids (1995), 25th Hour (2002), and Frances Ha (2012). A visual history of a great American city in flux, Fun City Cinema reveals how these classic films and legendary filmmakers took their inspiration from New York City's grittiness and splendor, creating what we can now view as "accidental documentaries" of the city's modes and moods. In addition to the extensively researched and reported text, the book includes both historical photographs and production materials, as well as still-frames, behind-the-scenes photos, posters, and original interviews with Noah Baumbach, Larry Clark, Greta Gerwig, Walter Hill, Jerry Schatzberg, Martin Scorsese, Susan Seidelman, Oliver Stone, and Jennifer Westfeldt. Extensive "Now Playing" sidebars spotlight a handful of each decade's additional films of note.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 26 octobre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781647004699
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 11 Mo

Extrait

Bailey s book is a double anatomy-one of a city, the other of its filmic depictions. His astonishing talents as a researcher yield historical ore that his astonishing critical acumen turns into film-lover gold. Even when you disagree with his conclusions, the connections he makes will send your own thinking into heretofore unconsidered dimensions.
-Glenn Kenny, author of Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas
Fun City Cinem a is a beautifully exhaustive, insightful, and engrossing study of New York City and the movies that reflected its political, economic, and cultural shifts over a century. Bailey writes eloquently not just about the importance and artistry of these films, but also how they helped shape our sense of the city in which they were set. This is a marvelous history of the Big Apple seen through the eyes of an incisive film critic who serves as a knowledgeable, ingratiating tour guide.
-Tim Grierson, author of This Is How You Make a Movie
Fun City is an astonishing history of NYC told through the films that shot on the streets and the politics that shaped each era. From the glamor of early talkies to the grit of film noir to the dirty old New York of the 1970s. Page after page of fascinating behind the scenes tales of classics like Sweet Smell of Success , Midnight Cowboy , Taxi Driver , and Uncut Gems . It s a book full of insightful prose and great photos that I found impossible to put down.
-Larry Karaszewski, cowriter of Ed Wood , The People vs. Larry Flint , and Dolemite Is My Name
Fun City Cinema is my favorite sort of film book. Jason Bailey takes us on a tour through not just New York cinema, but the city that gave birth to it and the fantastic, absurd, glorious ways in which New York s history is, all on its own, stranger than fiction. New York owes much to the cinema, and the cinema owes much back, and Fun City Cinema is a wild and gorgeous ride through that brilliant relationship.
-Alissa Wilkinson, film critic for Vox
An un-put-downable work of political, cultural, and cinema history. You ll walk away from it knowing so much more about New York, about America, and about how some of the greatest films ever made came to be. You ll also have a mountain of new movie recommendations to start making your way through.
-Bilge Ebiri, film critic for New York magazine/Vulture
Fun City Cinema is an express train that makes local stops at long-forgotten stations, pausing long enough to conjure the ghosts out of their hiding places and up onto the streets where they stalk, strut, and drift through a city that is, on the surface always changing. Jason Bailey s accomplishment is that he sees and feels his way through those changes to the city s tough irreducible core. He could have called this book The Lights Above, the Grit Below . He s in touch with both.
-Charles Taylor, author of Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American 70s
Still image from Stranger Than Paradise (1984), directed by Jim Jarmusch, photographed by Tom DiCillo

To Lucille and Alice-my two favorite New York productions.

FOREWORD by Matt Zoller Seitz
INTRODUCTION
1920-1929: The Gaudy Spree, Mass Media, and The Jazz Singer
1929-1939: The Crash, the Depression, and King Kong
1940-1949: The War, the Boom, and The Naked City
1950-1959: The Power Brokers and Sweet Smell of Success
1960-1969: Fun City, John Lindsay, and Midnight Cowboy
1970-1979: Fear City, Blackouts, and Taxi Driver
1980-1989: Two Cities, Ed Koch, and Wall Street
1990-2000: City in Transition, the Indie Movie Boom, and Kids
2001-2010: 9/11, Recovery, and 25th Hour
2011-2020: Wealth, Bohemia, and Frances Ha
EPILOGUE
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
IMAGE CREDITS
FOREWORD
By Matt Zoller Seitz
I m sitting here beside you on a southbound B train, going from Columbus Circle to Atlantic Avenue, reading Jason Bailey s Fun City Cinema . It s a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book-what Vanity Fair writer James Wolcott memorably termed a lap-crusher -and thus not the kind of thing you d normally see a person reading on the train. You ask me why I brought it. Or maybe I just imagine that you asked me. This is New York, and in New York, people start talking to you on trains for no reason. This is what I tell you:
New York is not just a city. It s The City.
Los Angeles is the city of angels and the city of dreams, but it will never be The City.
New York knows it. Los Angeles knows it. And the entertainment industry knows it.
That s why movies and TV shows are shot in New York despite the expense and hassle, or shot someplace else (Toronto, Cincinnati, Yonkers, downtown Los Angeles, a backlot in Culver City) and ask us to pretend they re in New York. Whaddayagonnado , change the setting to Cleveland? * Moviemaking as an industry began on the East Coast of the United States but migrated to Southern California, where the weather was nicer, the real estate cheaper, and where producers could re-create almost any environment. But mentally, spiritually, and often geographically, moviemaking always tends to drift back east, because New York City was always the greatest standing film set of them all-because it was real. You could feel it, hear it, smell it . . . even when it was filmed to evoke dreams or nightmares. When the Avengers assembled, they didn t do it in Los Angeles. When Godzilla finally surfaced in the US, he didn t descend upon Houston. Like Holly Golightly and the Corleones, they went to New York.
How many cities have this many nicknames and fictional alter egos? New York is the Big Apple. But it s also Metropolis: Fritz Lang s and Superman s. And it s Gotham City, even though Chicago keeps trying to muscle in and claim the name ( Fughedaboudit , Chicago). New York is the place Snake Plissken escaped from. Eighteen years later, Snake escaped from LA and nobody gave a shit.
Every fictional city since the origin of mass-produced pictorial art starts to sketch its vision of urban density, glamour, and scale with New York as its muse, then adds or subtracts details. New York is realer than real, hard as hell, and it s an Emerald City calling seven generations of Dorothys. It s the city of mean streets and the sweet smell of success, the place where gutters ran red in the summer of Sam, just five years after the real-life dog day afternoon. See the midnight cowboy and the taxi driver, the working girl and Tootsie, the Joker and the King of Comedy and the Black private dick who s the sex machine to all the chicks, all moving among the masses in Times Square. See the pickup on South Street and the verdict of 12 angry men and the torment of the 25th hour. See the sun rise over Brooklyn Heights as Loretta Castorini, buzzed on love and dressed to the nines, kicks a can down the street.
You can t ask for a better book about this setting than Fun City Cinema: New York and the Movies that Made It .
And you couldn t ask for a better guide than my friend Jason Bailey, who wrote this book.

The first thing you should know about Jason is that he s a self-identifying rather than native-born New Yorker-part of a group that E. B. White identified as a person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Speaking for myself, as a similarly naturalized New Yorker who left his hometown of Dallas in 1995 and never looked back, this detail enhances rather than diminishes Jason s credentials, because New York is a lot-seriously, goddamn it, for real now, a lot -to take if you weren t raised there. Learning to live in New York is like learning to live in the ocean if you spent your whole life on land. You don t just have to acclimate, you have to evolve. That s never gonna happen unless, like Jason, you were secretly a New Yorker all along.
I d had many online interactions with Jason since he moved to New York in 2006, but I didn t meet him in person until a cold night in November 2013 when we ended up sitting next to each other at a film screening. Jason had arrived a few minutes before me. He had not yet removed his topcoat and porkpie hat. He seemed lost not merely lost in thought, but in misery, shoehorned into the theater s too-narrow seats, half hunched over the row in front of him, chin on the chair-back, staring at the blank screen as if it might suddenly light up and show him the answers to whatever conundrum had put him in a funk.
Once I got to know Jason, I understood it wasn t any one thing that put him in that zone. It s his default vibe. Jason has that irascible/romantic I fume because I care energy that radiates off the sorts of New Yorkers who are described by neighbors as The Mayor of the Block. He has the thoughtful/edgy face of a character actor who would ve acted in ten New York flicks a year back in the 70s, most likely playing the chain-smoking detective who makes horrifying jokes at crime scenes or the henchman who delivers a message to a state s witness in a racketeering case while they re taking their kids to the zoo.
His favorite curse words are motherfucker, asshole, and shit. His favorite insults are dispshit, dumbfuck, and dumb asshole. His favorite New York bridge is the George Washington, because it s the one that he could see from his apartment window while he was writing this book. His favorite subway lines are the A, because of Duke Ellington, and the 6, because it s the one in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three . I ll always associate that last movie with Jason because every time I rave about a film that he thinks is garbage, he looks at me like Walter Matthau right after he hears Martin Balsam sneeze.
Jason is almost six-foot-four, by the way. I didn t realize this until after the screening, when he stood up. It was like watching a Swiss Army knife unfold. When we walk side by side down New York streets, we look like Joe and Ratso.
One time I ate dinner at an Upper West Side diner with Jason. He griped about the coffee for two hours w