Innholdsfortegnelse for December 6-19, 2021 i New York Magazine

THE INVITATION MAY BE 71 YEARS OLD, but it’s still irresistible. Come here, it says. Come here, to the city where everyone is making art and laughing uproariously and suffering melodramatically. Come here, where the parties last all night and there’s still somewhere great to go afterward. Come here, where people speak entirely in impeccably constructed aphorisms and comebacks fly through the air like poison darts. Don’t worry if you don’t quite have what it takes to join our club. Just fake it till you make it. How do you think most of us got here? That last part is the message of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s brilliant, caustic, and enduringly seductive All About Eve: While talent helps, the sociopaths get ahead faster. This isn’t a movie that valorizes authenticity but…

JULIET TAYLOR, casting director: “This was in 1969. Marion Dougherty had been sort of the queen casting director in the world of live television. She had done some movies as well, but movies weren’t being made in New York. It was too expensive. And then when Mayor John Lindsay came in, he really tried to bring movies back. Suddenly, Marion was just besieged by every offer in town. Everybody wanted her. So she decided to start a sit-down office, and I joined her. When I arrived, she was casting Midnight Cowboy. One of the reasons I liked casting for film more than for theater was that we could use real people. One of the first movies I basically did on my own, under Marion, was The Panic in Needle Park.…

New York is not the easiest place to shoot a movie. (That’s why they invented Hollywood.) The city is crowded, cranky, and expensive. So why do filmmakers keep coming back? Because the city has an energy you can’t get anywhere else: the bebop beat, the sidewalk theater, the sense that the unpredictable is just around the corner. The architecture’s not bad either. As a veteran location scout put it to me, you get millions of dollars in production value just by setting up the camera. From the early days of silent shorts, the movies have always loved shooting on New York’s streets. The industry’s migration to the West Coast dampened things somewhat—films like Rear Window were made entirely on studio back lots—though even then productions sometimes earmarked a few days…

SAMUEL FULLER (1912–1997) became a newspaper copy boy when he was just 12. By the time he was 17, he was working the murder beat for the New York Evening Graphic, a tabloid so lurid it was known as the New York Pornographic. Fuller knew a good lede when he saw one. It was a talent he carried over to a filmmaking career that saw him turn out 20 potboilers between 1949 and 1965, movies with testosterone-drizzled titles like The Steel Helmet (1951) and Forty Guns (1957). All of them had good ledes (just watch the beginning of The Naked Kiss). But for me, the first two minutes and 35 seconds of Pickup on South Street (1953) is the top, the best NYC-centric opening sequence in film history. It’s rush…

HOLLYWOOD DOESN’T OFTEN GET ART RIGHT. From The Agony and the Ecstasy, about Michelangelo yelling at the pope, to Lust for Life and its martyrdom of Vincent van Gogh, to Velvet Buzzsaw, which features Jake Gyllenhaal as a mean L.A. critic—a character supposedly based on me—most films about the art world seem to be made by a bunch of dramatizing romantics acting out what they think it is to be an artist. Maybe it’s because being an artist is such an internal, private thing. How do objects interact with one’s times? What is the role of talent, luck, drive, jealousy, and lifestyle? Most movies about artists seem fake to anyone in the art world. It may come as no surprise, then, that the three best movies about the mysteries of…

ACCORDING TO THESE CRITICS: JASON BAILEY, ANGELICA JADE BASTIÉN, CHRISTOPHER BONANOS, JEN CHANEY, BILGE EBIRI, ODIE HENDERSON, JORDAN HOFFMAN, MATT ZOLLER SEITZ, and ALISON WILLMORE. What makes a great New York City movie? Not just a movie set in New York—there are plenty of those. We’re talking about a great New York City movie that transcends establishing shots and dodgy accents to immortalize something distinct about this place. The anxious pace of a weekday commute, the philharmonic-style overlapping of sidewalk talk, the sweaty jockeying for position on any square foot. Great New York City movies find beauty in the rot of Times Square and ugliness in the penthouses of Central Park West. Many reflect the perilous reality of living in Brooklyn today and the Bronx yesterday; others, the urbane fantasy.…

IS THERE ANY FILM IN WHICH EVERYONE TALKS FASTER than His Girl Friday? Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are the quintessential city-newspaper people, leaping from interview to interview and tip to tip. Speed, really, is the defining quality of the great New York news movies. In Ron Howard’s underrecognized The Paper, a tabloid city editor—Michael Keaton in top form—presides over a newsroom full of aggressive eccentrics who are simultaneously out for the story and out for themselves. Howard shoots past, around, and toward the newsroom clocks, and we can feel the daily deadline pressure as it just keeps building. Richard Brooks does that too in Deadline-U.S. A., the 1952 film noir with Humphrey Bogart as editor Ed Hutcheson, and the time crunch is even more intense because his paper, The…

’CIAO! MANHATTAN,’ made between 1967 and 1972 by current or newly expelled members of Andy Warhol’s Factory, featuring cameos by Warhol Superstars and countercultural icons like Allen Ginsberg, and funded, in turn, by a furrier and a rumored marijuana entrepreneur, is, by objective measures, a disaster movie. It involves no earthquakes, tsunamis, or meteor strikes. But the film and the making of it—the distinction is spurious—involve disappearances, hospitalizations, incarcerations, and death. It wouldn’t exist at all had it not been charismatically bullied into being by its co-director David Weisman, a man described by one collaborator as a “full-on pirate.” Shot at first in black-and-white, Ciao! Manhattan was conceived as a quasi-cinéma-vérité portrait of the ’60s underground lifestyle seen through Edie Sedgwick, one of the Factory’s most mesmerizing collaborators (or commodities),…

THE “IT” PIZZA Sample an obscure pre-margherita pie. THE COSACCA PIZZA, invented in Naples in 1844 as a gift to the Russian czar, had seemed lost to time. But there have been recent sightings: in a video shot at Eataly Chicago; at fast-casual Simò in the Meatpacking District; at Naples’s own da Michele, where any addition to the two-pie menu (marinara and margherita) constitutes major news. Then, in June, Una Pizza Napoletana’s Anthony Mangieri Instagrammed a zaftig cosacca, its scarlet surface dusted with grated cheese. The caption read: “Thinking about this pizza a lot lately. Maybe one of my very favorites … Just tomatoes, oil, basil, salt, and Pecorino-Romano cheese.” Find it at his flagship, reopening any minute now. 175 Orchard St. THE BOOZE BIBLE Delve into David Wondrich’s magnum…

HERE’S A REFRESHING little twist on the usual yarn that young chefs on the verge of opening their first restaurants conjure up with publicists: Christian Rowan, who unveils the French bistro Marian’s in the West Village this month, claims he did not catch the cooking bug at the knee of his grandmother. Nor did he stand on a stool in Grandma’s kitchen at age 7 so he could reach the stove to stir the pot-au-feu. Even more shocking: Grandma didn’t like to cook. Yet Rowan says he named his restaurant after her anyway because she was his biggest fan and told him to just do whatever the hell it was that made him happy, which was graduating from the Culinary Institute of America, then working in the kitchens of joints…

ALANA KANE, the tempestuous 25-year-old played by Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza, is waiting around for adulthood to happen to her. She lives at home with her parents and two older sisters (all played by the other members of the Haim family) and works for a school photographer, a job that isn’t helping since it keeps her circulating among teenagers. At one portrait day, she meets Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), a 15-year-old who is doing his damnedest to will himself right into middle age, and he makes a pass at her that is so ridiculous she’s intrigued despite knowing better. He invites her to swing by the upscale Tail o’ the Cock restaurant, where he claims to dine regularly. Given the actual men Alana meets over the course of the…

THE AFTERMATH OF the Supreme Court’s oral arguments last week on the fate of Roe v. Wade—in which a phalanx of right-wing justices made plain their disdain for the law—has been a festival of finger-pointing and recrimination by those who were startled to have woken up in a world where it looks very much as if the right to legal abortion care will soon cease to exist at the federal level. I understand the impulse to point fingers at individuals and have myself felt the gratification that comes from naming the villain responsible for a mess. It feels so very good, in such a very bad time, to hate Donald Trump, as well as Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and, somehow, Susan Sarandon. This was, surely,…

WHEN HAROLD LLOYD SET OUT TO MAKE 1928’s Speedy (which would turn out to be his final silent comedy), the Los Angeles–based comedian desperately wanted a change of scenery. So he planned an extended location shoot in New York City, an appropriate place for a story of speed and movement—the picture’s opening title cards describe New York as a city “where everybody is in such a hurry that they take Saturday’s bath on Friday so they can do Monday’s washing on Sunday.” During the shoot, which stretched from mid-August to mid-October 1927, the crew staged scenes in midtown, on Wall Street, on Coney Island, and at Yankee Stadium, where Lloyd, driving a taxi, drops off Babe Ruth for a big game. The most significant undertaking was the film’s climactic chase…

START BY LOOKING. Scouting helps you define the look of the movie, and it happens early on. In the mid-’90s, I did Kids, which was supposed to look like a documentary—gritty and naturalistic—then Party Girl, with Parker Posey, which was supposed to be a stylized, romantic New York for a young person, then James Gray’s first movie, Little Odessa, which was set in Brighton Beach. It’s a Russian neighborhood, and it’s wintertime, sparse, dark. It was important to be in the neighborhood and scout there, to represent the full range of feelings that you have living in that specific pocket of New York. When we went to Brighton Beach, we were taken by how the commercial strip is just one block off the boardwalk and one block off the Atlantic…

FOR THOSE WHO MAKE THE MOVE from urban to suburban, the excuses to trek back to New York become fewer as time goes on: You replace your OB/GYN on 81st and Columbus with one in your new Zip Code and shop online instead of spending an afternoon boutique hopping; those friends you had to see for biweekly happy hour become less of a lifeline. There’s one enticement that withstands a long-haul life in the burbs and seems to grow more intense as time passes: the need for a libido-quenching, doldrums-busting, life-affirming affair. Sure, the Don Drapers of the world have been keeping a second apartment in midtown since the invention of the secretary, but the best films are about the suburban housewife who boards a train from Pleasantville to Grand…

‘After Hours’ is a one-crazy-night movie about how much work sucks. On the way home from his boring job, a series of misadventures befall Paul, a data-entry drudge played by Griffin Dunne, amounting to a Martin Scorsese screwball noir that flopped in 1985 and is beloved today. According to Dunne, the Soho shoot started with a unique mandate. Is it true Scorsese asked you to refrain from sex during the shoot? I’m afraid it is. It went well until a scene with Linda Fiorentino where she’s massaging me. We started filming on a Friday and then on Monday, I was just too goddamn relaxed. Marty went, “Cut! Let me talk to you. You got laid, didn’t you?” He was really pissed. That early scene in the taxi, when you’re speeding…

THEY MUST HAVE been very tall,” Robert Turner says of the original owners of this nearly 300-year-old stone house overlooking a creek in the Hudson Valley that he and his partner, Peter Speliopoulos, bought three decades ago. “Because normally in these Dutch houses I hit my head on every beam. This one has unusually high ceilings.” Turner and Speliopoulos were slow to renovate the place beyond ridding the interior of stenciled hearts and wreaths, added by the previous owner, that were a bit too quaint for their taste. Restoration and renovation work began in 1995 with architect Jim Joseph of Hottenroth + Joseph Architects. The couple reconfigured the second floor, carving out space in the hallway to create a guest room (which some visitors have said is haunted), and built…

➸ IT’S A PRETTY well-established fact that while everyone loves black-and-white cookies, no one likes black-and-white cookies. By which we mean: They look great. They smell great. They induce practically Proustian pangs of nostalgia, even in people who didn’t grow up eating them and have never seen season five, episode 77, of Seinfeld. But they almost always disappoint thanks to dry, flavorless innards and junky fondant frosting. Despite an inherently flawed recipe, though, black-and-whites exert their mysterious pull on the collective appetite. Even hardened detractors weaken in the presence of a fresh batch at some old-school bakery into which they’ve stumbled. “And, oh, why not?” they hear themselves saying to the counterperson as if compelled by some hypnotic spell. “I’ll take a black-and-white, too.” So it’s no wonder that in…

THE SERIES Station Eleven is the inverse of everything we’ve come to expect from the postapocalyptic genre. Rather than a gray, desaturated landscape, the show’s post-pandemic world is lush, green, alive. It occasionally depicts the magnitude of the catastrophe, but it is mostly about small things: the mundanity of the apocalypse inside a small midwestern airport, a marriage that is falling apart. “It isn’t this Cormac McCarthy–bleak desert landscape,” director Hiro Murai says. “It has, weirdly, a childlike wonder to it.” Showrunner Patrick Somerville took his cues from the source material. The Emily St. John Mandel book the series is based on follows a handful of characters before and after a near-extinction-level flu wipes out most of humanity. It’s a looping story that slips swiftly from a present-day pandemic to…

MOVIES 1. See The Lost Daughter An Elena Ferrante adaptation. In theaters December 17; Netflix, December 31. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s stunner of a directorial debut exploring the forbidden topic of material ambivalence is powered by Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley as present-day and past versions of the same character. ALISON WILLMORE TV 2. Watch And Just Like That We couldn’t help but wonder … HBO Max, December 9. We haven’t seen a single minute yet of the Samantha-less Sex and the City sequel, so we have no idea if this is a quality series or not. But, of course, we have to watch. JEN CHANEY POP MUSIC 3. Listen to KEYS Unlocking the Keys process. RCA Records, December 10. R&B vet Alicia Keys’s latest set has an “Originals” and an “Unlocked”…

Vulture Festival 2021 was back in LA for a weekend we’ll certainly never forget, with talent and fans reuniting in person across three outdoor stages. Jeff Goldblum wore fringe, Henry Winkler led an acting class, and Mira Sorvino taught us the “kick, open, side to side.” Fans got the inside scoop with exclusive previews and thrilling reveals from Cowboy Bebop, SHOWTIME® series Yellowjackets, and Search Party. The cast of 3rd Rock From the Sun reunited, and it made John Lithgow laugh with such joy that we actually cried. Seth Rogen convinced us to make ribs on Thanksgiving. Celebrities from Niecy Nash to Issa Rae got to relax in the Pluto TV Green Room, hang with fans poolside at the Vulture Lounge, and win prizes from The Price Is Right. It…

IN 2014, MICHAEL SMITH was 19 and living in Arizona when he was introduced to the avant-garde fashion designer Rick Owens. “My friend showed me a pair of shoes, and I hated them,” he says. “Six months later, I thought, Oh, those are kind of cool. Then another six months later, it was like, If I don’t own these shoes, I’m gonna die.” Within two years, the designer made up 90 percent of his wardrobe, and Smith had found his place in a community of devoted Rick Owens fans and collectors, hosted on the instant-messaging app Discord (it had begun as a thread on 4chan before going private in 2016). Members of Rick Owens Discord, or ROD, convene to discuss new collections and share eBay links. They also like to…

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 (its initial release date had been December 18, 2020), and the original show’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, had died three days before. As Spielberg took the Rose Theater stage at Lincoln Center to pay tribute to his legendary friend and colleague and introduce his film, he prefaced his remarks by thanking Bob Iger, the former CEO of Disney (the parent company of 20th Century Studios), for deciding not to release the film on Disney+ and to wait until it could safely open in…

You shot in Harlem? We went everywhere. The success of the movie was because Larry Cohen shoots guerrilla style and I’m the Hammer and people know me. We shot a scene coming out of a store. As I’m crossing the street, the bad guy passes me. We meet in the middle, and he shoots me. We’re blocking traffic. I got a fake-blood spat in my hand so I splat it on my white jacket; looks like I’ve been shot. I fall down on the street, I’m rolling around on the street, the cars … nobody’s blowing their horn, everybody’s looking. I get up, I’m crawling. I fall across the street into a wastebasket. You’re kidding me. So traffic stopped? It stopped both ways and watched me writhe around. Were you…

IT’S A SMALL MOMENT in The Namesake, directed by Mira Nair and adapted from the first novel by Jhumpa Lahiri. Gogol Ganguli has grudgingly brought his girlfriend, Maxine Ratliff, home to meet his mother, Ashima, en route to Maxine’s summer house for a long stay with her folks. His father, Ashoke, is away on a teaching gig. His parents settled and raised their kids in the bland suburbs north of the city, a short drive but psychologically far from Gogol’s posh 1990s Manhattan apartment—though he spends most of his time at either his fancy architecture job or the Ratliffs’ cavernous and lovely redbrick Greek Revival in Chelsea. Gogol, proper name Nikhil, has dispensed with his pet name, which humiliates him. He’s Nikhil now, a Yale School of Architecture grad; with…

EVERY HORROR MOVIE HAS THAT “Go back!” moment when something isn’t quite right—when the setup reveals itself to the audience but the protagonist presses on. In the distinct subgenre of New York Apartment Horror, this often happens when a future victim is touring a prospective new place. In Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) finds the piece of furniture that has been mysteriously moved by the previous (now dead) tenant to block the hall closet. In Dark Water, Dahlia Williams (Jennifer Connelly) meets the weird super of her new Roosevelt Island building before glancing up at an inky stain on the ceiling (which will eventually drown her). Miss Logan (Ava Gardner), a real-estate agent in The Sentinel, suddenly drops the rent of a giant floor-through one-bedroom on the Brooklyn Heights…

WHIT STILLMAN, director: “For my first movie, Metropolitan, I had the idea of What could I do essentially in one big living room—in one big, elegant living room? And I thought, Well, all right, this story will be one long after-party or a series of after-parties and debutante parties. With Sally Fowler’s living room, we were trying to duplicate being in one of those big Park Avenue buildings, and those Park Avenue buildings all tend to be coops with boards and a lot of people who can get offended and upset and kick you out, so our goal was to try to get things that looked like those kinds of apartments but were single houses where you wouldn’t get kicked out from one day to the next. There’s a foundation…

TRAFFIC-CHOKED STREETS and grimy tenement hallways. Gunfights and car chases. Mobsters, street gangs, urban blight, pervasive corruption. Plainclothes cops chasing suspects through alleyways and beating them senseless. This was the dominant mode of New York cinema in the 1970s, and the all-is-lost vibe produced countless masterpieces steeped in cynicism, paranoia, and mayhem, from The Godfather and Mean Streets to Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver to late-decade milestones like All That Jazz and The Warriors. A friend calls them “burning-trash-can movies” because no matter what the plot, they were likely to contain at least one shot of a bunch of guys warming their hands over a burning trash can. But there was a countermovement happening in the ’70s that produced nearly as many pictures as the doom-and-gloom mode. These movies…

YOU REALLY NEED a road map to find this place,” muttered someone at our table after making the long trek to the latest Danny Meyer venture, Ci Siamo—a journey that begins on some nameless sidewalk in midtown. (Pro tip: If your Uber driver attempts to career into the Lincoln Tunnel toward New Jersey, start yelling.) From there, you ascend to a featureless spot called Manhattan West Plaza in the back end of what may be Hudson Yards, complete with its own freshly minted Whole Foods. When you get to the entrance, there are several more darkened staircases to climb before you arrive, at long last, in a serpentine dining room that features many of the famous Meyer touches—a long bar designed for eating as well as drinking; comfortable, if slightly…

CHICAGO NATIVE Emmett Burke has been in New York since college, but he remains a midwestern boy at heart. Eight years ago, after abandoning a finance career, he opened a South Village bar celebrating his hometown cuisine, chiefly the deep-dish pizza New Yorkers love to hate. But Burke has always proselytized for the Second City’s second pie: the thin-crust tavern-cut pizza (pictured) he started shipping around the country during the pandemic. That’s the style he has brought to his new West Village outpost, a 75-seat space with a more robust menu and a full liquor license. Here, he delves deep into the “midwestern tavern” supper-club canon with shrimp cocktail, baby back ribs, grasshopper cocktails, and a forthcoming Friday-night fish fry. “It’s the kind of place I went to growing up,”…

WHAT IF STEPHEN Sondheim had never written a word, or a note of music, after his 30th birthday? What if, grief-stricken at the death of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, in 1960, the young composer had simply decided that he had done his part for musical theater and was ready to try something new? Had that happened, we would still, today, more than six decades later, be memorializing a man who, via his lyrics for Gypsy and West Side Story, made an indelible contribution to the history of American musical theater—specifically, to modernizing it, to darkening it, to helping it burst what were then thought to be the boundaries of its form. Sondheim did not stop, of course. His writing for those two seminal shows was, in the context of…

WHEN I GO ABOUT my day and a casually ignorant comment comes my way—something we used to call “microaggressions”—I usually give very little. Maybe a cocked brow or an “Uh-huh.” It’s, like, Whatever. Sabi, the gender-fluid protagonist conceived and played by Bilal Baig in CBC and HBO Max’s Sort Of, gives a great whatever. Sabi uses they/them pronouns; they have choppy bangs and long curls and a penchant for bangles, crop tops, and shiny things. They’re perceptive and droll, someone who knows their body can elicit a response—some form of confusion as cis-normie people attempt to mentally slot them into a preexisting taxonomy. Sabi might stonewall or deadpan: Totally. They work two jobs, as a bartender and a nanny to two half-Asian, half-white kids (very Toronto). In the pilot, the…