Fun City Cinema
New York City and the Movies that Made It
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- £16.99
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- £16.99
Publisher Description
A visual history of 100 years of filmmaking in New York City, featuring exclusive interviews with NYC filmmakers
Fun 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Film critic and historian Bailey (It's Okay with Me) takes an exhilarating look at the history of New York City through films spanning the past 100 years that have become "valuable reminder of what once was." Combining his impressive knowledge of cinema with fascinating historical context of the cultural moments that gave rise to each film, Bailey illuminates how movies functioned as an "act of preservation" and "a conversation of connections and reflections between the fictional lives in their foregrounds and the real lives happening behind them." In the 1920s, as filmmakers relocated from Hollywood to the Big Apple, the lurid grit of the city became the ultimate backlot for "quick, dirty" 1940s film noirs, such as 1948's The Naked City, which was filmed in 107 locations over one summer; 1950s riffs on the brutal postwar business world (Sweet Smell of Success); 1960s and '70s views of the city's urban decay (as an antidote to the "bloated, lumbering musical extravaganzas of mainstream studios" in the '50s) in such seminal films as Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Taxi Driver (1976); and, later, trips beneath the "shiny, cleaned-up surface of the city" that explore the excesses of wealth, including the 2019 drama Uncut Gems. Cinephiles will relish every stop of this entertaining tour of the big city.
