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Brian Lehrer: Now we'll continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. Today is number 95, 100 Years of Movies Set in New York City. With me for this is James Sanders. He's an architect, author, filmmaker, co-writer with Ric Burns of the PBS series, New York: A Documentary Film. See that ever? It's companion book, New York: An Illustrated History. Spot on relevant to this, he's also the author of the 2001 book, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies. James, always great to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

James Sanders: Thank you, Brian. It's like coming home.

Brian Lehrer: Let me say that you break up the last 100 years of film in New York City into four movements. Let's start with the first. The silent film era, before and during the 1920s, 100 years ago. Why were New York City and silent films a good match?

James Sanders: Well, the movies were born in New York. American movies, at least. When Hollywood was still basically orchard fields and completely empty, the very first filmmakers were beginning to invent the art of film on the streets of New York in around 1900 to 1910.

Brian Lehrer: Is there a first major New York City movie that sets the scene for other filmmakers to say, "Wow, that works"?

James Sanders: There were a whole bunch that were shot. They were fairly short. Well, actually, the very first ones weren't anything we would recognize as a film. We would call them sort of documentaries, but they called them actualities. Basically, they set their camera up somewhere interesting in Manhattan or Brooklyn and just filmed whatever was happening. That was pretty exciting to audiences in 1903 or 1904. There's literally one which has a camera attached to the front of a newly built IRT train, the number six, we would call it today, going from 14th Street to Grand Central. By the '20s, still in the silent era, you're getting real filmmakers beginning to get very excited about the possibilities. Specifically, I'd call out something like The Crowd by King Vidor, which was made in the mid-'20s, which tells a classic New York story of a guy from the hinterlands who comes to the city and thinks he's going to surmount it all, only to find that he's just one of the crowd.

Brian Lehrer: If I heard you right, in your earlier answer, you said New York was kind of where the first movies were made. Was New York Hollywood before Hollywood was Hollywood?

James Sanders: Yes, exactly right. There was a pretty booming film industry in New York around the time of World War I. By the '20s, most filmmaking production had actually begun to move to California. There were still studios. Those of you who live in Queens, or know it, and visit the Museum of the Moving Image, that wonderful museum. That's in the old Paramount studio that was built in the 1920s in what was then called Long Island City. We think of it more of a Astoria. That was a full fledged movie studio running in New York City.

Brian Lehrer: Movement number two. At the end of the 1920s, we get the talkies. How did incorporating dialogue and sound into film change the way filmmakers depicted New York City, if it did?

James Sanders: When the talkies were introduced, it was late 1920s, '27, '28. There were high hopes at the very beginning, because you could suddenly do things like musicals. Of course, New York was the center than is now of musical comedies on Broadway. Problems began to arise very quickly. It had been pretty easy to shoot New York with silent film cameras. These lightweight Bell and Howells that you could take around. When you suddenly had to deal with microphones and amplification and synchronization, it just wasn't feasible to shoot on the streets of the city.

In part because the city was just so noisy, that these early microphones kind of picked up everything. Production of films really had to move to a quieter place. That quieter place were the backlots and soundstages of California.

Brian Lehrer: Are there any iconic examples, at least to you as a film historian, of getting the vibe of New York right despite being filmed on set in California in those early days, or get it embarrassingly wrong?

James Sanders: No, I think that it's kind of a myth that you have to shoot in the city in order to get the city. If you look at films like, oh, 42nd Street, or Swing Time, or King Kong, all of them, of course, made in Hollywood. They're all fantastic renditions of versions of the city that show us things that we didn't see before about the city that we know. They mix a kind of fantasy and reality in interesting ways. They created what I call the mythic New York. The one that really went all around the world and engraved itself on the imagination of people everywhere.

Brian Lehrer: After World War II, we get our third era, or Movement 3 of New York City films. You refer to that as the Golden Age. Why was that your Golden Age?

James Sanders: The Golden Age, to me, lasts the whole early sound period and includes the Hollywood films. After World War II, things change a little bit. In part because audiences have been seeing so much actual footage in newsreels. What seemed okay in the 1937, '38, now seems kind of artificial. Filmmakers are also being very influenced by what's happening in Europe, particularly in Italy, with neorealism. They're hankering to shoot on the streets of the city. About in '47, '48, they begin to do so, in films like The Naked City, which is kind of modern. It's the original version of the police procedural of Law & Order.

Brian Lehrer: Wait, wait. Stop for just a second, because we pulled an 11 second clip from The Naked City, because we knew you were going to talk about it, and who could resist?

Mark Hellinger: Another day, another ball of fire rising in the summer sky. The city is quiet now, but it will soon be pounding with activity.

Brian Lehrer: Also, nobody talks with that accent or addiction anymore. Right?

James Sanders: That was Mark Hellinger, who had produced the film and actually narrated it. Yes, the theme of the film is 24 hours in the life of New York. New York becomes the central storyteller, and then even genres which were hard, harder, notably musicals. Gene Kelly decides that he's going to give it a shot and produces On the Town, which kind of works. They have the very memorable opening, New York, New York sequences shot on location brilliantly, but then notably, the rest of the film was shot in the studio.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you want to text us your most iconic film set in New York City, what's the one that if somebody landed from Europe or Asia or Mars and said, "What can I learn about your city by watching a movie?" What's the one you would tell them? Text us. 212-433-WNYC. Just text for this one. 212-433-9692. One listener is already citing one that he says is obscure, The World of Henry Orient.

James Sanders: One of my favorites.

Brian Lehrer: From 1964.

James Sanders: Yes, it's a beauty. It opens, it's about two schoolgirls who go to Brearley. It opens with the bus that's picking up the students along Park Avenue in the morning to get to school, and you follow the route of the bus on Park Avenue, turn right on 79th Street, and there they are dropping them off right in front of Brearley. It goes on from there. It's really a lovely film.

Brian Lehrer: Another listener writes, Miracle on 34th Street. Another one says, Nothing Sacred, which includes what must be some of the earliest color aerial footage of Manhattan. Continuing on on the timeline. Excuse me. In 1966, then Mayor John Lindsay made filmmaking in New York City a lot easier by creating the country's first film office. Politics comes into it. Apart from the noise, what made filmmaking difficult before Mayor Lindsay changed the process? What are some of the films we get as a result of his action from City Hall?

James Sanders: Well, of course, it was one of the great ironies of New York history. The technology had improved. It had become possible to shoot on the streets of New York by the 1960s, but it was very difficult for, let's call it, logistical reasons. It was hard to get permits. It was hard to get the attention of the police without bribing them. Sidney Lumet told me all about that. How they literally-- they budgeted in the police bribes as part of the production cost of the film. John Lindsay comes along, he's a great-- very handsome. He looks like a movie star himself.

He decides to innovate by making a new kind of office. First, I believe, not only in the country, but in the world, to help filmmakers make their films in New York. Great idea. It worked brilliantly, with the one problem that the first round of films that they made, largely, in that very dark nadir moment of New York history were some of the grimmest portraits of a city ever made. Things like Midnight Cowboy, and Taxi Driver, and The French Connection. They're hardly advertisements for New York.

Brian Lehrer: Soylent Green, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

James Sanders: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: Oh my goodness. The '70s and '80s on screen about New York. Right?

James Sanders: Right. Brilliant films in many cases. The American New Wave, it's sometimes called. Incredible filmmakers, like Scorsese and Spike Lee coming up, Woody Allen making his films, but hardly a advertisement for the city.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, these texts that are coming in by the dozen. Melanie Griffith on Staten Island Ferry in Working Girl, Moonstruck, Taxi Driver, you just mentioned it. The Thin Man movies. In The Avengers movie, my company's building had an alien go through it. All near Grand Central. Not sure exactly what that refers to. You've Got Mail, Do the Right Thing, Home Alone, Home Alone 2, King Kong, of course. Dog Day Afternoon, Saturday Night Fever. Oh my goodness. Right there.

James Sanders: Unbelievable.

Brian Lehrer: No city can probably compete in terms of sheer quantity. You think?

James Sanders: Not touch it. It is the case that-- let me say it is in two ways. Every filmmaker will tell you that virtually wherever you point a camera in New York, you're going to get something interesting. The density of the city, the compactness of it, the verticality of it, just makes a powerful frame. As a filmmaker, before you do anything else, you've got to fill up the frame, as Hitchcock said. The other thing I think you're hearing in that is, since the city keeps changing all the time, you can keep making different kinds of films in it, and no two films 15 years apart will be of the same city.

Brian Lehrer: After Hours, with Griffin Dunne. The Little Fugitive, 1953.

James Sanders: Wonderful film.

Brian Lehrer: About a little boy that runs away to Coney Island. Listener writes, "Here's one for every baseball fan." Oh, it already got lost in the mush, but it was a Buster Keaton film that somehow involved New York Yankees at that time. Sweet Smell of Success, Shaft, Fort Apache The Bronx. That was another one of those dark 1970s or early '80s films. Radio Days, Annie Hall, other Woody Allen ones. As we start to run out of time, if New York City itself could be considered a character in a film, what are its traits, if there are ones that endure over the 100 years? How did its characterization evolve as the city changed? I know we were just talking about some of it with the dark period.

James Sanders: Yes, I avoid the term character. I don't feel that does-- that's a helpful metaphor. I talk about it as a city, and in my book I talk about it as an invented city that has a life of its own that's kind of parallel to the real place, but is very different. In important ways, some of the things I talked about before, the physicality of the city lend itself to and have stayed the same. The fact that it's fast moving, movies are fast moving. It's a place of action. Movies are a place of action. If you think compared to a novel, let's say. All these things contribute.

It goes on and on and it has all these different worlds within it. Beyond that, it's a place where almost any kind of story, a rich man and a poor girl, a poor man and a rich girl, meet. Well, in a small town, would that really be likely to happen? Not so much. In New York, we absolutely accept it as a kind of a trope, and there you've got your story.

Brian Lehrer: The Warriors, Godspell, James and the Giant Peach, The Apartment, Crossing Delancey. Listener writes, "Let's give Joan Micklin Silver some love." There we will leave it, with James Sanders, architect, author, filmmaker, and co-writer with Ric Burns of the PBS series, New York: A Documentary Film, and its companion book, New York: An Illustrated History, and spot on relevant to this conversation, which is why we invited him, he is the author of Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies. 100 Years of 100 Things. Number 95, 100 Years of New York on the Silver Screen. James, thanks so much.

James Sanders: Of course. Thank you.

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