For our annual Reasons to Love New York issue this year, we're celebrating how New York makes the movies — and how the movies make New York
Photo: Bill Jacobson Oscar season in New York is always packed with sentimental movie galas, but it’s safe to say the November premiere of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story was more emotional than most. The film had been sitting on a shelf, waiting to meet its public for a whole year , and the original show’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, had died three days before.
And appropriately so. Because New York is where the movies were born and reborn — and where they almost died, over and over again. It’s where film was projected to the public for the first time and where most of the first movie studios were formed, from Biograph in the Bronx to Vitagraph on Nassau Street.
When productions did return to the city in the late 1940s and ’50s, they found something different from a dreamland but no less dramatic. Lighter, faster cameras made shooting on streets and rooftops possible. A burgeoning independent movement — fed by the international cinema on movie screens, the art world rising downtown, and the underground films showing in basements around the city — forged a grittier aesthetic that, in turn, transformed the mainstream and saved a moribund Hollywood.
We decided to make this year’s edition of “Reasons to Love New York” a love letter to the movies and to the way the city shapes and is shaped by them. One of the immortal films about New York is King Vidor’s silent melodrama The Crowd. When you think about it, that title could belong to just about any film about the city.
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