Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Monday, May 05, 2003 The Pitch: It's like Serpico meets Maid in Manhattan! Around twenty years ago, I went to New York. Fortunately, that trip is not the subject of this entry. But I remember being struck by how, when I did go, New York was everything like the movies I had seen about it, and then some. Of course, those movies were Death Wish, Serpico, Fort Apache: The Bronx, and The Warriors. From the pollution-gnarled tombstones running along the side of the highway, to the sepulchral towers of the projects where trash bags dashed between the legs of the boys playing b-ball, New York made its grungy, sad, powerful hand known from the first. Robberies, bodies, drug deals, prostitution, people shooting up--I saw all of this during my time in New York. I was there for two days.My friend John, who went to school there (and grew up in New York state) went back with his wife recently (four or five years ago, I guess) and told me how different it was. "It's cleaner, it's safer," John told me. "I couldn't believe the difference. We're thinking of moving back. What a difference a police state makes!" Indeed. This morning, on my way to work, I was thinking about this screenplay idea that had come to me in my sleep a week or so ago, and was trying to figure out how much research I would have to do to make it convincingly seem like it was happening in New York. And after fretting about it, I thought, "Wait a minute, why New York?" It had just seemed to me like a New York type of movie--a cutesy, harmless romantic comedy. What a difference a police state makes. Twenty-plus years ago, the last place anyone except Woody Allen would have set a romantic comedy was New York. (In fact, although I could be wrong, twenty-plus years ago the setting for a romantic comedy would have been San Francisco.) It was all about bodies being thrown off roofs, robberies, drug deals, prostitution and the grotty influence of Times Square. But now the influential New York movies are romantic comedies (Maid in Manhattan, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) and, frankly, not even movies: Sex and The City, although its power is finally waning, still holds sway over the public conception of New York, and is very much a small screen concoction. Even Martin Scorsese, trying to make a New York movie about filth and squalor and violence, had to set it at the turn of the 20th Century, as if such things were now the stuff of history for the Big Apple. Would I trade New York's comparative bliss for its earlier, violent and more squalid self, in the hopes of getting some grittier cinema again? Hey, I don't live there, so why not? Maybe it would be easier to find a Hollywood movie with a little more backbone if in-your-face New York felt it imperative to show its brutal bloody face again. As long as I don't have to visit, let it rip! posted by Jeff Lester | 9:11 AM | |
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