Patell and Waterman’s History of New York
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Best use of New York as a setting in the new film Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief?
For my money, it’s not the Empire State Building. Nope: it’s the water towers.
[The poster above, which shows the Empire State Building but also invokes the scene to which I'm referring, is the official UK poster. Note the title at the top: "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone."]
Woody Allen apparently once said to Groucho Marx, “I don’t know how you live in California. For a man of your piercing intellect to be able to live on the West Coast is incredible to me.”
When we get to Allen’s film Manhattan in our Writing New York course later in the term, one of the subjects we discuss is the rivalry between New York and Los Angeles over the production of what we might call the national imaginary. New York’s place as the preeminent producer of cultural images and symbols, by virtue of its role as the center of the U.S. publishing industry starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, was challenged and — arguably — overtaken by Los Angeles, which became the center of the U.S. film industry in the early part of the twentieth century.
Allen has a love-hate (well, mostly hate) relationship with Los Angeles. The year after Manhattan was released, he said:
What I feel about New York is hard to say in a few words. It’s really the rhythm of the city. You feel it the moment you walk down the street. There’s hundreds of good restaurants, thousands of brilliant paintings, you see all the old movies, all the new ones … It has to do with nerves, with the blood that runs through the city. It’s dangerous, noisy. It’s not peaceful or easy and because of it you feel more alive. It’s more in keeping with what human beings are meant to feel about the world … There’s more conflict than anywhere else. The struggle to survive here is much more exciting than Los Angeles, say, where everything is pleasant. I mean, all those people sitting in their tubs, can you imagine it?
I imagine that Allen would have approved of these passages from Rick Riordan’s book The Lightning Thief:
“Well now, there’s Mount Olympus in Greece. ANd then there’s the home of the gods, the convergence point of their powers, which did indeed used to be on Mount Olympus. It’s still called Mount Olympus, out of respect to the old ways, but the palace moves, Percy, just as the gods do.”
“You mean the Greek gods are here? Like … in America?”
“Well, certainly. The gods move with the heart of the West.”
“The what?”
“Cow now, Percy. What you call ‘Western civilization.’ Do you think it’s just an abstract concept? No, it’s a living force. A collective consciousness that has burned bright for thousands of years. The gods are part of it. You might even say they are the source of it …”
*
“You’ve been to Olympus?”
“Some of us year-rounders — Luke and Clarisse and I and a few others — we took a field trip during winter solstice. That’s when the gods have their big annual council.”
“But … how did you get there?”
“The Long Island Railroad, of course. You get off at Penn Station. Empire State Building, special elevator to the six hundredth floor.” She looked at me like she was sure I must know this already. “You are a New Yorker, right?”
*
“The entrance to the Underworld is always in the west. It moves from age to age, just like Olympus. Right now, of course, it’s in America.”
“Where?”
Chiron looked surprised. “I thought that would be obvious enough. The entrance to the Underworld is in Los Angeles.”
Tags: Hollywood
My older son, who is in now fourth grade, devoured Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books when he was in second grade, though he had to wait until third grade for the fifth and final book to be released. I haven’t read them myself, though I expect I will now that the movie is here. (Okay, I confess: I just had the first one, The Lightning Thief, which we had borrowed from the library, beamed to my Kindle).
My son loves fantasy — Star Wars, Harry Potter, Yu-gi-oh, Chronicles of Prydain, though not yet Tolkien — and he loves book series. But he’s also been quite taken with the narrative voice and general sensibility of — egads — Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, which means that the Percy Jackson books are like a perfect narrative storm for him. (He agrees that the two narrators have somewhat similar voices.)
The first chapter of The Lightning Thief is entitled “I Accidentally Vaporize My Pre-Algebra Teacher,” and it begins this way:
Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.
If you’re reading this beause you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever lie your om or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.
Being a half-blood is dangerous. It’s scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.
If you think you’re a normal kid, reading this because you think it’s fiction, great. Read on. I envy you for being able to believe that none of this ever happened.
But if you recognize yourself in these pages — if you feel something stirring inside — stop reading immediately. You might be one of us. And once you know that, it’s only a matter of time before they sense it too, and they’ll come for you.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Anyway, if you’re a reader of this blog, you’ve got a book that puts Mt. Olympus above Manhattan and makes the Empire State Building the access portal. Our former WNY TA Spence puts it this way: “In the novels, Olympus sits atop the Empire State Building (it moves with the epicenter of Western culture).” We’ve heard that they change quite a few things in the movie, but they didn’t change that:
What gives me pause: the director is Chris Columbus, director of the first two Harry Potter films, which are fine but don’t hold a candle to the later entries.
What I’m looking forward to: Uma Thurman as Medusa.
In preparation for Monday’s lecture on Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street,” we’re showing Jonathan Parker’s film adaptation Bartleby (2001) this Friday evening to our students. The film stars Crispin Glover as the title character, who comes to work not in a law office but in a public records firm headed up by a character listed in the credits as “The Boss” (David Paymer). One of the clerks is transformed into “Vivian,” the office manager (played by Glenne Headly), while the others are named “Rocky” (Joe Piscopo) and “Ernie” (Maury Chaykin).
Despite these changes, the short story’s signature phrase — “I would prefer not to” — remains prominently featured.
New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott writes that “Mr. Parker has brilliantly updated his source and grasped its essence, composing a sorrowful and hilarious tone poem about alienated labor, or an absurdist workplace sitcom, as if a team of French surrealists had been put in charge of ‘The Drew Carey Show.’” We’re hoping our students will agree.
As Bryan noted yesterday, Tavern on the Green has gone the way of all things. The restaurant happened to be the place where my family celebrated my graduation from high school at the end of the same spring, ahem, when Woody Allen’s Manhattan was released. But I remember the spot less for that event than for its appearance in a film that was released five years later.
Meanwhile, work has begun on Ghostbusters III, which is scheduled for a 2012 release. The film reunites original cast members Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, and Harold Ramis with director Ivan Reitman, who confirmed the other night on MTV that he will be directing. The script, written by Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, is currently in its second draft. The participation of Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis, and Annie Potts is rumored but not confirmed. For more on the story, see this article at totalfilm.com.
One of Bryan’s favorite concepts is metatheatricality — those moments when a play seems to be aware of its own status as a piece of theater and comments on it. Bryan talks about the concept in our “Writing New York” course and in his contribution to our Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, using an example drawn from Royall Tyler’s play The Contrast.
Well, here, for your viewing pleasure is a metatheatrical trailer — designed to promote what would become one of the most famous and beloved Christmas movies of all time. The problem was that the producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, was determined to release the movie in May, because he felt that people were more inclined to go to the movies at the beginning of the summer rather than at the end of the year. So this trailer is designed to promote the film without revealing that it’s actually a Christmas movie. It depicts a fictional producer complaining about the trailer he’s just seen, which promises too many things: “hilarious, romantic, tender exciting — make up your minds, it can’t be all of those things!” He then proceeds to the back lot where he meets a series of stars — such stars as Rex Harrison, Anne Baxter, Peggy Ann Garner and Dick Haymes — who tell him that the movie is, well, all of those things.
Have you guessed what movie I’m talking about? Click the continuation link to find out.
Tags: Cambridge Companion
Irving Berlin believed it was the best song he — or anyone else — had ever written. Maybe he’s right. It is, after all, the best-selling, most recorded song of all time. (The Bing Crosby original on its own was the world’s top selling recording for over 50 years.)
The tune debuted, along with a few other chestnuts, such as “Happy Holidays,” in the 1942 film Holiday Inn, about a country retreat opened by some Manhattan expatriates tired of the demands of the city’s night life. The eponymous resort only opens on major holidays, offering the opportunity for a whole slew of holiday songs to roll out. “White Christmas,” of course, outstripped them all. When the song first turns up in the film, Bing is teaching it to leading lady (and love interest) Marjorie Reynolds, whose singing voice is dubbed:
Lost in this version (which won an Academy Award for best original song) is Berlin’s original opener for the song, which locates the song not in the snowy Connecticut countryside but in sunny Beverly Hills. Apparently he hated spending Christmas in California:
The sun is shining
The grass is green
The orange and palm trees sway.
I’ve never seen such a day
In Beverly Hills LA.
But it’s December the 24th
And I am longing to be up North.
Berlin inaugurates the tradition of American Jews providing long-lasting expressions of Christmas cheer. (Here’s Babs’ version of the song, the most unselfconsciously Jewish and California-inflected one I know.) If this seems a little strange, consider Philip Roth’s take on the matter, quoted by Jody Rosen in his breezy, highly enjoyable book about the song:
God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ — the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity — and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.
Rosen has a little more fun along these lines; he also provides interesting commentary on the use of “White Christmas” as background for the lead-in to the film’s Lincoln’s Birthday number: a minstrel tune called “Abraham” in which Crosby appears as a blacked-up Honest Abe. Crosby’s character talks Reynolds into blacking up as well — in order to keep her hidden from a rival lover. Spike Lee features a clip from the start of this scene in his famous Bamboozled montage. Apparently “White Christmas” wouldn’t have been quite so white without a little blackface to throw it into relief:
A revision of Jolson’s backstage scene, blacking up for his shiksa girlfriend, in The Jazz Singer?
The Fales Library exhibition that accompanied our recent Lost New York conference will remain on view through November 6. If you’re in the area, stop by the Bobst Library (Washington Square South at LaGuardia Place), tell the security desk that you’re going to Fales, and head up to the third floor. It’s a wonderful exhibit. You can read more about it in this post from earlier in the month.
While you’re there you can pick up the volume essays that accompanies the exhibit — not exactly a catalog, the volume takes both the exhibit and the conference theme as a point of departure.
If you aren’t able to visit before November 6, you can download a copy of the volume here in PDF format. (The download is approimately 28.5 MB.)
And, for a limited time, readers of this blog can request a complimentary copy of the book itself, which is printed on glossy stock and makes a handsome addition to any library of books about New York. Just send an e-mail with your mailing address to cyrus@ahistoryofnewyork.com.
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We’ve been big fans of thirteen.org’s documentary series The City Concealed since its inception. (If I’m not mistaken, we’ve featured every one of its episodes on this site, and I think I’m the one who suggested the old Fulton Ferry Hotel to them as a possible site to explore!) We’re excited, then, to see another series of documentary shorts from the same production team — this one focusing on New York people, its hidden workers, rather than on its hidden places.
The debut episode of the new series, New York on the Clock, profiles Gerry Menditto, who’s overseen operations on the Cyclone at Coney Island since 1975:
New York on the Clock: Coney Island Cyclone Operator from Thirteen.org on Vimeo.
The producers had this to say during a Q&A on the new series:
Q. What challenges did you face in filming the premiere episode in Coney Island?
Daniel Ross: The most challenging part of filming at the
Cyclone is deciding what not to film. We had four 32GB memory cards,
which can hold about 2 hours of HD video. We spent an hour interviewing
Jerry, and then moved on to shooting B roll. There’s just an endless
amount of visually exciting subjects to shoot in and around Coney
Island. We kept having to remind ourselves of what shots took priority
because it’s so easy to get excited and distracted by all the weird
sights.
We can only hope some of the weirdness remains once developers are through with it.
A special shout out to the episode’s associate producer, Susannah Herbert, one of our former students from Writing New York!
Tags: coney island, cyclone, New York on the Clock
Bowery Boogie has faithfully covered a sad saga in my neighborhood: the imminent closing of our local video rental store, Cinema Nolita. (Even the Times has chimed in with lamentations.) Formerly in a tiny, exposed-brick sliver of a storefront on Elizabeth, for the last year and a half or so the store has occupied much roomier digs on Mulberry, between Broome and Kenmare. Not quite Nolita, but whatever — we don’t dig real estate broker neologisms anyway, and a store this quaint makes the “Nolita” seem kind of ironic to boot. The new location should have been good for the store, but apparently the customer base didn’t expand as much as hoped. They’ve been in business only for seven years but have the feel of a community mainstay nonetheless, at least for those of us who make several trips there a week. (They have over 8,000 members on record.)
Cinema Nolita is one of the last of a dying breed: a video store that not only still stocks plenty of VHS tapes (much to the delight of my 13-year-old daughter, who has a huge case of technological nostalgia) but has a large and varied DVD collection that leans toward classics and foreign while still covering all the requisite new release bases. Perhaps even more importantly, it’s the kind of store where knowledgable employees remember your name and call up your membership before you get to the counter, and where they remember your rental history and taste and may even warn you away from a turkey — though they’ll not sneer at your guilty pleasures or shame you if you have to ask who directed what (since many films are filed by director’s last name). They screen cult favorites late on weekend nights, sometimes with directors present, always with cheap beer. Staff members produced hand-made posters for these films to display in the front window.
When Cinema Nolita loses its spot on Mulberry this month — which seems to be a foregone conclusion — it will be the first time since the early 1980s that I haven’t had a video rental store at least a bike’s ride from my house. And though I’m guilty, like many, of shelling out my monthly $16 to Netflix, those little red envelopes have never replaced the need for a local store. Your queue rarely matches your mood, for one thing, or a desire for instant gratification (last night I wanted to see Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals, for instance, which I brought home on VHS) might not even be able to find fulfillment in streaming options.
And in addition to a knowledgable, friendly, human staff, there are other things Netflix will never replace, just like Amazon — for all the wonders of one-click used book shopping — will never completely replace the emotional experience of a bookstore. Browsing. Real time. Handling objects. Reading jacket blurbs. Discovering something you never knew existed, or being reminded of your favorite filmgoing experiences of the past and returning to them on a whim. Overhearing someone else’s conversation about what they’ll rent, or seeing a bit of something on the store screen while you wait in line, and making a note to check it out later.
Cinema Nolita seems to be about $8K in the hole. The “Store for Rent” sign in the window is down, but I’m taking that to mean the space will have a new tenant soon. The owner and staff had originally announced a fire sale on the collection, but rethought that plan and now hope to keep their library together — perhaps to find a new space, perhaps a new business model. They want, above all, to maintain a presence in a neighborhood community they’ve helped to organize.
How to give back? Anthology Film Archives will be hosting a benefit screening, TONIGHT (8/15) at 10 pm, of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992), starring Harvey Keitel, with Ferrara director present for discussion and Q&A. If this event goes well, we’re told, there may be another Ferrara event in store next weekend. $15 donation. “Abel uses the video store as his library,” says one store employee. “He’s been
such an advocate of saving the shop, and he said, ‘Anything I can do to
help in any way. We’ve gotta save this shop, you know, man, we’ve gotta
save it.’” She admits Ferrara has been known to keep films out well
past their due date, but “by doing these screenings he’s essentially
paying his late fees.”
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue
New York, NY 10003
(212) 505-5181
Also, on Monday (8/17), neighborhood hotspot Santos Party House will host a musical extravaganza to benefit the store. The Beets and The Virgins
will play, followed by an Animal Collective DJ Set featuring
Avey Tare, Geologist, and Deakin. $20 donation, doors @ 8 pm.
Santos Party House
100 Lafayette St
New York, NY 10013
(212) 584-5494
PLUS: You can donate to the store directly from its website — or drop by and drop off a check!
Photo from Bowery Boogie’s Flickr pool.
Tags: Cinema Nolita, video rental
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