Movie Sets Usedover and Over Again
It was only a few months into my career equally a movie location scout in New York City that I was first asked to find a neighbourhood that didn't exist.
In 2008, I was scouting on a gritty police thriller, and had been assigned the job of driving one of the designers around to various potential shooting locations. He took a particular involvement in a scene set in a downwardly-and-out neighbourhood, and asked me to take him through the "bad sections" of Brooklyn.
This posed a slight problem: I had no idea where to go.
I started with Bushwick – at the fourth dimension, a heavily industrial area notwithstanding years away from its current revival every bit a haven for young artists. Equally we drove by the crumbling factories and weed-strewn lots, I was certain I had a winner. "Not residential enough," the designer groused.
From there, we headed south through Bed-Stuy, where crime rates were even so particularly high (a friend had recently been mugged and beaten with an aluminium bat while returning to his apartment late one night). Some other misfire: with its tree-lined streets and rows of beautiful townhouses, "downwardly-and-out" was the terminal way anyone would describe Bed-Stuy, even and then.
After striking out in Crown Heights, Brownsville and East New York (often referred to as the "murder capital of New York"), I was literally out of options. The designer was undeterred. "Y'all know what I hateful – the bad neighbourhoods! Called-for barrels! Trash everywhere! Homeless people in the street! Where exercise nosotros observe it?"
That'southward when I realised we were looking for something that simply exists in the movies.
There is no other city ane can know as completely from the movies and idiot box as New York. Even if you've never set pes in Manhattan, at that place's a practiced gamble you can instantly picture a multitude of its neighbourhoods: Carrie Bradshaw's favourite cupcake spot (the Village); the Ghostbusters' firehouse (TriBeCa); the deli where Harry met Sally (Lower Eastward Side).
Every bit a scout, information technology'due south my job to find the existent-world locations that best match the director's vision of New York. The problem arises when that vision comes not from real life, but from the movies.
Take alleyways, for example. From the movies, you lot'd retrieve Manhattan to be riddled with dank, unsafe, trash-strewn back-alleys, complete with rusting fire escapes and aging, graffiti-covered brick walls. So it often comes equally a full daze to near directors when nosotros tell them that Manhattan really has only iii or four of these types of alleys (Cortlandt Aisle, Cracking Jones Alley, Broadway Alley, Staple Street), and none are dangerous in the slightest.
Will this cause a picture-maker to rewrite the scene for a location that actually exists in modern-24-hour interval, gentrified Manhattan and treat New York as a living, breathing world? Never, which is why you've seen these iv alleyways used over and once more, perpetuating the aforementioned tired cliche. Similarly, the nonexistence of a "bad neighbourhood" every bit described above didn't cease that particular manager from simply dressing downwards a random street to fit his desired look.
This has not e'er been the case. For decades, pic-makers came to New York City non for a generic urban backlot ready, but to capture the essence of the urban center. Consider Taxi Driver and Annie Hall. Despite being made less than a year apart (1976 and 1977, respectively), their competing portrayals of New York couldn't exist more unlike. Whereas Scorsese'southward New York is a simmering cauldron of filth, fail and despair, Allen'due south is a playground for the upper-crust intelligentsia and middle-aged hippies.
And yet both are valid representations of New York at the fourth dimension. Each director but focused on and exaggerated the elements of the city that pertained most to his story.
Exaggeration has always been a fundamental aspect of film-making. You'll often hear a director or production designer complaining that a particular neighbourhood "does non look enough like itself", and making various cosmetic changes – a nondescript wall in the Due east Village might exist gussied upwardly with flyers for punk shows, for example, or a Chinatown byway given additional Chinese signage and decoration, as was done on Disney'due south The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Exaggeration is ane thing. Apartment-out lying is some other.
The trajectory of this unfortunate shift in New York film-making is peradventure best exemplified past looking at how Coney Island has been portrayed throughout film history. Since the dawn of movie theater, Coney Island has been a beloved shooting location. From the early on 1900s through the 1950s, film-makers emphasised its glorious, one-of-a-kind splendour, from silent shorts starring Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton through the seminal 1953 cinéma vérité classic, Little Fugitive.
As Coney Island's fortunes shifted into decline in the 1960s and 1970s, its portrayal in the movies followed suit. Allen emphasises this in Annie Hall past contrasting the nostalgic perfection of the park from his childhood to its then desolate state. By 1979, it was so dilapidated that The Warriors was able to describe information technology equally a postal service-apocalyptic wasteland with only minor changes.
Today, Coney Isle is a neighbourhood desperately trying to discover its identity in the 21st century. While the Cyclone rollercoaster, the Wonder Wheel and Nathan'south Hot Dogs continue to thrive, much of its iconic architecture has been bulldozed, leaving enormous vacant lots and an otherworldly feeling of abandonment to what should be a joyous, funfair temper. How fascinating information technology would be to capture such a singular neighbourhood in flux on film.
And nonetheless today, film-makers instead simply treat it as a backlot set, a blank slate to create whatever version of amusement park best fits a script. A smashing case of this can be found in two competing episodes of Police force & Order: SVU. In the season ten finale, Zebras, the park is shown equally a thriving joyland, packed to the gills with parents and children enjoying state-of-the-art rides while munching on popcorn and cotton candy. But just iii seasons later, it would exist depicted in another episode, Strange Beauty, every bit a mysterious, freak-filled carnival home to body-mutilation enthusiasts, the last place a family would think to get. The fact that neither of these portrayals resemble reality hardly seems to have bothered the motion-picture show-makers.
A few summers ago, I was hired to spotter for a motion picture existence shot entirely in the Bronx. If you lot believe its Hollywood portrayal, the Bronx is hell on Globe, a lawless Gomorrah of sin and vice where crime runs unchecked and if your car breaks downward in the Bronx, you ameliorate run like hell.
I knew this wasn't the case, but I was however a chip nervous when I first started scouting. We were shooting in some of the more dangerous neighbourhoods, and walking the streets with a big stack of neon flyers and a $5,000 camera around my neck, my heed kept returning to ... well, the movies.
Sure enough, on my kickoff day, a tough-looking guy came right upward to me as I was walking down the street. "Squeamish camera," he said.
This was it. A scene I'd watched a million times over. I knew exactly how information technology was going to end.
"What kind of lens you lot got?" he asked.
"Canon 24-70mm L-series," I replied.
"Cool. I've been thinking of getting 1 myself."
With that, he walked off down the street and disappeared.
Only like in the movies, right?
For the rest of my scouting gig that summer, I had more than casual, friendly exchanges like this with people on the street than I can count. In New York City, random conversations with strangers are normally to be avoided like the plague. And yet the Bronx reminded me of my travels in the midwest, where a visit to the grocery store might pb to a five-minute conversation with a clerk yous've never met earlier about your recent vacation to Hawaii. There's a wonderful, almost small-town spirit that permeates much of the Bronx, and I can easily say it's the friendliest borough in New York.
Of course, y'all'd never know it from watching the film I worked on. In one case again, the Bronx was treated equally a desolate hellhole. I'm not even sure if the director had ever gear up foot at that place before. But he had seen information technology in the movies.
Nick Carr is a location spotter and writer. Read more at Scouting NY
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/12/confessions-of-a-location-scout-why-the-new-york-beloved-of-the-movies-doesnt-exist-any-more
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