Movies – CIVIC TV – Channel 83

Archives: New York, III – Scorcese

November 10, 2018October 23, 2023Posted in MoviesTagged Goodfellas, New York, Scorcese, Taxi DriverLeave a comment

As I mentioned in the previous post, mention New York filmmaking and Scorcese would be the first name that comes to mind for many people. (For others, I guess Woody Allen would hold that position.)

As with the city of Ferrara, much of the iconic New York landscape – certainly that contained within Manhattan, at least – has changed beyond all recognition since the days of Travis Bickle, Jimmy the Gent and co. Whilst there are still some more recognisable locations out in parts of Queens and Brooklyn, those would take more time and commitment to reach than I’ve thus far had; we’re talking either get an Uber or hire a car, and a good hour or so negotiating traffic just to visit one spot – not high on the list of things to do on most people’s Big Apple vacation itineraries! (I’ve also read that certain of the locations are in neighbourhoods where, even nowadays, you’d be ill advised to hang around with cameras and a touristy-looking demeanour.)

However, there are still one or two glimpses of locations from Taxi Driver, Goodfellas et al to be had here and there.

Taxi Driver

Of the places Travis Bickle roamed in ’76, several that I’d love to be able to document such as the area around Broadway / Times Square – that was at the time synonymous with sleazy clubs and cinemas, and the epitome of New York’s image as a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah – are of course still there, but bear little resemblence now barring the basic building geography. There are a million photos of Times Square – I’ve taken many – but there seems little point including them here. Besides, other blogs elsewhere have done an admirable job of showing how little those areas now resemble their 1970s selves.

Those streets were not so much changed when I first visited the city in the summer of 1981; however, I was way too young then to ‘appreciate’ them fully! (But I can at least say I saw them.) Besides that particular den of iniquity, the other key location I wished I could see was the area around 57th & 12th where the parking garage was located, and where we first see Travis wandering in to look for a job. Alas, here not even the basic building shells remain; whole blocks of that area have long since been demolished. A fancy feat of modern architecture (a theatre) now sits where the garage once did, and the industrial buildings at the Hudson end of 57th beyond the (now) ‘Joe DiMaggio Hwy’ have been levelled.

So, having begun once again with a little lament for what once was but no longer is, let’s spend much less energy (as seems to be my way with these NYC posts!) on what’s still there.

First up, we have candidate Palantine’s campaign HQ at the SE corner of W63rd & Broadway, where Travis first encounters Betsy [in a white dress…]. Although I haven’t bothered with ‘general areas’ that are still there but look totally different, I feel this merits inclusion since it is a specific building location – even though the old building has been by the looks of things demolished and a new one built on its spot. (It’s a dull Bank of America branch at ground level, and a nondescript apartment block above, now.)

The other location ‘hit’ I have for Travis – this one far more obvious – is the Maine Monument at the very SW tip of Central Park, next to Columbus Circle; here Travis makes his failed attempt to assassinate Palantine.

As you can see, I made no attempt to get any ‘like for like’ angle shots here. That’s something I’ve only occasionally dabbled with, though – as with many things – I regret that I haven’t made more of an effort at times 🙂 (However, such errors and omissions simply give me a reason to keep revisiting places, no?)

Goodfellas

Just one location for this at present; it’s the exterior setting for the ‘Copa’ restaurant, where Henry takes Karen on a date and – in one of the most audatious and famous scenes in the movie – if not in cinema – we follow them all the way from the valet parking to their hastily arranged prime table in front of the stage in one continuous tracking shot. The building can be found at 10 E60th St. (on the South side of the street), and was handily just a stone’s throw from the hotel on 5th Ave where I spent my honeymoon.

As you can see, the building is unchanged in terms of the basic stonework, and the architectural features of windows, lintels, doorways etc. (as of September 2014, at any rate).

That’s it for my Scorcese hits, until at least the next time I manage to get back to NYC, that is.

Archives: New York, II – Ferrara

November 7, 2018October 23, 2023Posted in MoviesTagged Abel Ferrara, Angel Of Vengeance, King Of New York, New YorkLeave a comment

Mention New York filmmakers, and Scorcese is of course not far from the mind; however, if there’s any name that for me is synonymous with capturing the Apple’s rotten core, it’s that of Abel Ferrara. His grimy, scummy street-level view is New York – at least, the New York by which I first became captivated.

In terms of scouting his movies, the big one would always be ‘Driller Killer’; but alas, most of the locations for this still elude me at present. There are glimpses of general areas that are identifiable – the taxi ride along Central Park, broadly identifiable neighbourhoods – but nothing concrete. Even with some clue from interviews and snippets from the director’s commentary (when he’s not utterly slurring hilarious drunken nonsense), the grainy 16mm footage, shot mostly at night, affords few readily verifiable location hits. I’ve tried freeze framing and using Google Streetview around the general areas I think scenes might have been filmed, but of course gentrification and the big clean-up of the city make this undertaking extremely challenging.

So, one day some more concerted efforts may see me finally cracking some of the DK locations; in the meantime, here we are with a couple of locations from other movies of his that were somewhat easier to track down.

Angel Of Vengeance (Ms. 45)

As with ‘Driller Killer’, much of the action takes place in a New York that only partly now exists; albeit, that some of the street scenes that are shot at daylight should be easier to pick out (I’ve not yet tried in any concerted form). But one of the film’s most balletic set piece scenes is easy enough to locate, taking place around the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park.

Here we pick up Zoe Tamerlis (heavily in shadow) heading round the Jackie Kennedy-Onassis Reservoir, along with a nighttime shot I took in 2009, when it was much safer for those besides Warriors and Avenging Angels to mix with the Park’s nighttime denizens:

Moving on, she descends the steps from Terrace Drive – I appear to not have taken any photos showing the staircase in full view, just one very close up shot of a decaying duck (!), so that’ll have to do:

Note: I’m fairly sure that the duck is actually on one of the two ‘grand’ staircases that come down onto the lower terrace; Thana descends the ‘lesser’ staircase that takes you under Terrace Drive. (But we’ll count it eh.) The lower passage gallery has been restored in latter years to its – quite dazzling – former glory; but in Abel’s New York, it was dirty and graffiti-ridden; probably not a place you’d want to be hanging out after dark:

From the terrace end of the gallery, you see the lower terrace with the Bethesda Fountain, topped by the famous ‘Angel of the Waters’:

And, finally we look down on the lower terrace from above. at the mosaic tiling floor where, in a strikingly Sergio Leone-esque sequence, Thana springs the trap she has set. would-be hunters becoming prey to her .45 calibre rampage:

So there we have it, a little walk in Thana’s footsteps through Central Park.

The King Of New York

Ah, what a movie this is; I really should watch it again and try to pin down more of the locations. (I’m sure there are some more obvious ones that I’ve already visited; I’ve just never watched the film with a ‘location scouting head on’, as such. If I ever do, I may come back and add them in here.) So far, I have only one that I happened to know of at a point where I was in NYC with time to wander. It can be found in the now-upscaled (of course) DUMBO area of Brooklyn, right in the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge, and formed the scene of one of the many bloodbath shootouts instigated by Frank White and his crew:

Here it is in daylight, in a time where the coffee costs more and the craft beer is plentiful (hey I’m not knocking it, I love both of those things too!):

The location is pretty easy to find, but what the hey – I’ll drop a pin for it anyway as it’s a little less on the ‘normal’ tourist trail for the typical NYC visitor. It’s at 45 Water Street in Brooklyn, and the building is actually “St. Anne’s Warehouse”, which now lists itself as an ‘Avant garde theater and concert venue’. How very. A quick jaunt there on Google Street View shows that, much as you would expect, it’s been completely refurbished since this shot which was taken in 2014. So there we are. As a little bonus, just up the street from here is an iconic view that appears in ‘Once Upon A Time In America’; I’ve got a photo of that, but this a Ferrara post so that’ll have to wait for another time.

Archives: New York, I

November 2, 2018October 23, 2023Posted in MoviesTagged Escape From New York, New York, Zombie Flesh Eaters1 Comment

From way back before I started up this blog site, I had accumulated a number of “hits” of movie locations during my varied travels. These are mostly now spread across a completely random jumble of DVDs, USB drives, Flikr albums and the like.

The exact ‘story’ details behind each visit may now be getting hazy, so rather than try to recreate proper per-movie posts for any of them, I thought I’d just work on putting up some archive-bucket type posts containing whatever snippets I come across. First up: New York.

Obviously, the Big Apple is one giant freaking film set. Even the very first time you visit (I think I’ve been on 6 separate occasions so far, spanning from 1981 to most recently in 2017) you cannot help but feel that massive swathes of the skyline and city are instantly familiar, so iconic are its views. I’d be willing to bet you can hardly turn in any given direction in central Manhattan, and not see a location that had appeared in something at some time or another. As a result, I’ve never tried to find “the movie for each location” when I’ve been there, or even to bother recording a lot of places that I know appear in one or more movies. Rather, I’ve just focused here on a select few locations-for-movies that fit into my particular Channel 83 aesthetic. (Not even all of my specific-visits and photographs are recorded here. I’ve seen the globe inside the Daily Planet offices from ‘Superman’; I’ve seen the table in Kat’z Deli where Sally faked out Harry; I’ve walked down the path where Nic Cage crashes into the boating lake in Central Park, watched by an amused Bridget Fonda in ‘It Could Happen To You’. All memorable, but not so on-point for this blog.)

Personally, my cinematic love-affair with the city grew mainly out of the old horror and exploitation movies of the 70s and early 80s; films such as Driller Killer, Zombie Flesh Eaters, The New York Ripper, Taxi Driver and so on evoke a nostalgic sense of a since-sanitised New York that was grimy and edgy, and felt as alive with danger as it did possibility. It’s probably a “much nicer place” to visit, these days (I always have a wonderful time there, and feel safer there than I do in many parts of London) – but it has undeniably lost some of what made it seem so vital and compelling.

Anyway – enough with the random waffle, let’s make with the random pictures.

Escape From New York

Go on then: I’ll include a picture of the Statue of Liberty – purely because John Carpenter used it as the location for the ‘Liberty Island Security Control’ centre in his 1981 masterpiece. You don’t really need me to drop a map pin for this one, eh.

(But just in case there’s any doubt, there it is in glorious 80s ‘computer graphics’. I have this on a t-shirt, from the excellent Last Exit To Nowhere.)

(From a visit in August 2014.)

Zombie Flesh Eaters

The closing scenes of Fulci’s tropical chomp-fest see his iconic, shambling dead crossing the Brookyln Bridge into Manhattan. I’m sure the people I’ve caught on camera during my several visits and strolls across were much nicer. Probably. Zombies have entered the building!

Again, I can’t see a map pin or location-finding details being necessary for this one. (The 2nd picture above is again from an August 2014 visit.)

Coming in the next NYC archive post(s): Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, and more.

Dr Saint Luc, It’s For You…

May 5, 2017October 23, 2023Posted in MoviesTagged Cronenberg, Montreal, ShiversLeave a comment

“So… You want to go and wave a half-eaten pickle at a building?”

“Yes.”

“… Ookay! …”

(A perfectly normal conversation, held in our Montreal hotel room of an evening.)

This, in movie location terms, was “The Big One”. To stand outside the fabled ‘Starliner Towers’ apartment building, setting for Cronenberg’s debut feature ‘Shivers’; a quest dreamt of for some 30 years, right back to the old days of holding the ‘Cans Festival’ – an event at which we’d line up 10 or so genre movies, starting around noon and finishing sometime on Sunday, and which Shivers would always “headline”. (‘Cans Festival’, because er – we’d buy lots of cans of beer for the duration.)

Over the course of those many decades, I’d become reasonably convinced that I’d never get to see the building in The Flesh; surely by now an old, cruddy looking tower block like that would be demolished and replaced with some modern, soulless behemoth? Of course, back then I was unaware that a) the building was designed by Mies Van der Rohe, an architect of some renown, and b) Montreal – unlike London – seems in a blissful lack of hurry to get rid of its brutally dated façades. Having the benefit of Google search, Google maps etc. proved that, yes – it was indeed still standing tall and proud by the banks of the St Laurence river; thus was the “post-Boston Marathon Shivers Quest” idea hatched.

This visit was, fittingly, on the last day of our Montreal trip; the headliner, if you will. A bright and sunny morning saw us up reasonably early, and headed out to Nun’s Island (‘Ile des Soeurs’) on the bus. Getting there is simplicity itself; grab the 168 bus South from downtown, get off at stop Ile des Sours / De Gaspe, cross the road – and there it is right in front of you:

Apart from the make and models of the cars in the ground-level parking (“…if friends have followed you home…“), there’s really very little to suggest that you haven’t just de-bussed straight back into 1975, and that Mr & Mrs [Sweden] Sviben aren’t about to pull in on an apartment-search:

Having come this far, I wasn’t about to settle for just standing outside and gazing up at the building; 200 Rue de Gaspe, like its counterpart opposite, no. 100 – which was not built at the time of the movie (at least, not in the early aerial shot of Nun’s Island, showing Starliner Towers stood almost utterly alone – though this may have been a production conceit aimed at increasing the sense of cut-off isolation) is still a reasonably sought-after residential location, and as such entry to the building proper is controlled by security pass. You can, however at least go into the entry vestibule:

In the movie, this is where the security guard first meets Kresimir and Benda (and where we first meet Ronald Merrick):

There were no security buzzers in the vestibule any more; just a rack of local ad papers (one of which I took as a souvenir, obviously).

The underground parking garage – referenced by Merrick in the opening ‘promo’ voice-over, and from which the residents emerge in their cars right at the close of the movie – presumably, we are to intuit, to head off to downtown Montreal and spread the parasites to the wider population – is still there, sat between ‘Starliner’ and its twin:

And, perhaps almost as smile-inducing a discovery as the building itself; if you walk to the end of the garage (towards the St. Laurence River), there between the buildings is the underground swimming pool that features in a key closing scene, still surrounded by the landscaped banking up which Roger attempts to make his last, futile bid to escape:

I sat on the benches and just soaked in the location for a while; I didn’t, however attempt any photos of the pool itself. I could see through the glass that there were families and children having a morning swim, so pointing my camera at them seemed far from appropriate.

“Hey, how ’bout the pickle?… It’s used!”

Oh yes, the pickle. Well, during a meeting over lunch, Dr. Rollo Linski attempts to convince Dr. Roger St. Luc that their old teacher, Dr. Emil Hobbs, is up to strange and unnerving experiments at Starliner Towers. As Roger is departing, Rollo asks him – in the manner above – if he might be not wanting the pickle he had with his lunch? Roger tosses it over to him, and – on catching it and seeing a bite already taken out – Rollo mock-moans “it’s used!”

The Pickle thus became something of a cult reference whenever ‘Shivers’ was being discussed; I even named my YouTube channel “Used Pickle Productions”.

And yes, I really did take a half-eaten Pickle from Schwartz’s in a baggie, that I’d kept in the hotel minibar for 2 days, all the way to Starliner Towers. And I really did wave it at the building. (Or rather, hold it Liberty-torch aloft, in proud salute.)

Cruise the seasons, the sun and the stars, without ever leaving the great ship ‘Starliner’…

Martial Law Has Come To Montreal…

May 4, 2017October 23, 2023Posted in MoviesTagged Cronenberg, Montreal, RabidLeave a comment

Rabid. The title first burrowed its way into my psyche in the very early 80s when, not quite into my teens, I perused the densely printed “catalogue” (pamphlet, really) of Tadley Video Hire – a business that would deliver tapes from a car to your door during the nascent home-video boom, in the days even before rental stores were particularly established.

I had no idea at the time what the film was actually “about”, specifically – beyond its title; and I certainly had no inkling back then that it was directed by one David Cronenberg, who would later ascend to claim the very throne of my cinematic obsession-empire. I just knew it had to be almost unbearably terrifying; a film that I should – in all likelihood – never, ever watch.

You see, in those days, I was really only afraid of two things – that I can recall: nuclear holocaust, and Rabies.

The first of these was a shadowy, far-off spectre; it might or might not come, and if it did there was next to bugger all I could do about it, and roughly 4 minutes in which to do it. (According to the cheery information pamphlets – ahh, ‘Protect and Survive’… and public service films.)

Rabies, however, was a menacing threat poised at the very edge of Europe, just salivating at the jaws (I know, I know) to find its way across the Channel and set up home on our Island. Every summer holiday in France would start on board a ferry literally festooned with posters proclaiming “RABIES IS A KILLER”, and imploring us “DON’T SMUGGLE DEATH”. The first night on enemy soil we would usually not have made it to our ultimate destination further south, and would park the caravan up for the night in a layby – usually one bordered by woods and fields. Going out in the dark for the last nature-call before bedtime would be an exercise in fear; I was certain that from those shadowed depths I was being watched by crazed, yellowing eyes, and sized-up by foaming teeth.

That there was a film promising to bring my worst nightmares to excuciating life (so I thought – I imagined it to be like ‘The Mad Death’ crossed with ‘Friday 13th’) was too much to contemplate.

Roll forward some years, and of course I found the film – as with several others in that heady tome of rentable nightmares – to be nothing like I’d imagined. In fact it is a far more nuanced and interesting work, one central to Cronenberg’s early “Body Horror” oeuvre. As such, it had been on my hit-list for location visits for many years, but this part of Canada had always managed to elude my travels. However, I finally rectified that this past April when – via running the 2017 Boston Marathon and then a brief overnighter in NYC, we took the Adirondack route Amtrak from Penn Station and, some 11hrs later, rolled into Montreal.

Most of an incredibly grey and wet Friday morning was spent walking between various points of interest – including two Rabid locations. The first of these was the ‘adult’ cinema that Rose visits to snag another victim. The original Eve Cinema was largely destroyed by fire years ago, but its reincarnation can be found on Boulevard St. Laurent, near the junction with Sainte-Catherine:

It now resides under the name ‘Club Soda’, and is a venue for live music and theatre, but the frontage still looks very similar to how did in the 70s:

As an interesting side-note: in the main image to this page, Rose is stood next to a poster for Brian De Palma’s ‘Carrie’, the star of which – Sissy Spacek – was Cronenberg’s original choice to play the Rose role in Rabid.

An interlude followed in the Rabid-rambling; in the spirit of holiday-equity, we walked a distance North to find a yarn shop that my wife wanted to investigate. (It was by her account excellent, and she spent many happy minutes looking at all its wares.) Fortuitously, it was also not hugely far as the crow flies – or indeed as the cinephile walks – from another Rabid landmark, Hôpital Notre-Dame – the hospital in which Rose’s first victim is treated, and from which his self-discharge initiates the main outbreak in Montreal. The hospital can be found at 1560 Rue Sherbrooke E, and – as with much we saw in the city – it retains its 70s grimness rather well. (Seriously – Montreal is quite the treat for fans of concrete and brutalist style architecture.)

After the Hospital, we made our way back to St. Laurent and up to Schwartz’s Deli for lunch, where I sampled the much-renowned “smoked meat” sandwiches (delicious). Great place, think Katz’s Deli reduced to the size of a greasy spoon and without so much faff. I mention the lunch stop specifically, because on request they gave me a plastic bag to keep a half-eaten pickle in. More of which in another post…

The following morning, whilst my wife went off to run a 5K over on Ile St. Helene / Notre Dame, I went off in search of the final Rabid-landmark for the visit, the tower block where Rose stays at her friend’s apartment. This can be easily found at 2121 Rue St. Mathieu, just a short walk from the Guy-Concordia metro stop:

As can be seen from the movie-still above, and the photo I took below – very little has changed. It’s still 70s concrete-a-go-go, and even the light fixtures look pretty much identical.

That wrapped it up for Rabid on this visit; there are a couple of other landmarks – amongst them Cavendish Mall – that were just a bit too out of the way to include in my itinerary. Similarly, there are a couple of locations from ‘Scanners’ that will have to wait for another visit, one day.

Remember to keep your windows up and your doors locked once you get into the city. Maybe the bug can’t get you now, but that… that won’t protect you from the crazies.

There’s Something In The Fog…

June 10, 2016October 23, 2023Posted in MoviesTagged Carpenter, The FogLeave a comment

Ahoy, mateys… Stevie Wayne’s mellifluous tones broadcast out from “KAB, Antonio Bay” to keep listeners company through the witching hours in John Carpenter’s classic ghost chiller, The Fog. The small radio station is set in a lighthouse on a steep rocky outcrop that looks like it’s perched at the edge of the world; nothing beyond but sea, sky – and whatever lurks between them…

It must have been some time in the late 90s, or very early 2,000s that I learned (whilst listening to the commentary track on the special edition laserdisc of the film) that the lighthouse in question was situated at Point Reyes peninsula, in the national seashore park north of San Francisco. In 2002, I got to see it for myself; I won’t say that I traveled to San Francisco just to see the lighthouse – there were other things (including a desire to scope out locations from Kerouac novels, an open air show by Dream Theater at Concord pavilion – and just the desire to get away from my office to some fresh air and seaside whilst still enjoying what a major city has to offer) that led me there. However, it was certainly a distinct selling point that helped seal the deal.

Thus it was that early on a bright, sunny morning in August 2002, I found myself with the top down on a convertible, heading through the A/C like chill hanging over the Golden Gate bridge and on out to Point Reyes National Seashore Park. I stopped a little while at the visitors’ center, but only for a quick browse; by that point, the lighthouse was beckoning me.

The drive out to the lighthouse takes you through fairly archetypal coastal scenery – hardy grasses on rolling ground, dotted here and there with animals; there are some establishing shots in the film of Stevie Wayne driving out to the station, but none that I could identify the locations of precisely enough to stop and view. There are other notable visuals – such as a big, leaning cypress tree that is also there to be found – but at the time I didn’t think to look for it.

The last approach to the lighthouse leads you to a smallish car park; from there it’s a short walk up over a rise – with the target only then finally hoving into view.

Obviously the first thing you really see, as well as the lighthouse itself perched down below you, is the long flight of steps descending down:

(At this point, I’m going to interject the fact that actually, I’ve been to the lighthouse twice now – the first time in ’02, and then again in ’07. On my first visit, the day was clear and sunny, and you could immediately see the lighthouse as you approached. The second time, however, I encountered – what else – fog; and since that feels much more appropriate, the pics here are from the ’07 visit.)

There are rest points on the way down/up the steps, if you require them; I have stopped in them, but only really to take photos – and to take in the fact that I was here; that KAB was right in front of me. (This was quite an early strike in my movie location scouting; and because it is both from a genre film, and quite off the normal beaten tourist track – i.e. it’s not like seeing the Ghostbusters building in NYC, which millions of people do every year, whether they know it or not – it felt quite surreal to be there.)

Another instantly noticeable thing was the fog horn sounding out across the sea; the same mournful tone that drifts in across the bay and into town during the film. It looks as though the one that’s there now is of a more recent vintage – compare the roof of the building below with the header image to this post showing the building as it appeared in the film:

Nonetheless, the sound alone drifting through the fog was massively evocative; I closed my eyes and just listened, imagining Blake and his cohorts drawing ever closer…

Once you reach it, the lighthouse itself is somewhat smaller than you imagined it to be; clever film making (and Carpenter’s early works are an absolute masterclass in sliding between an establishing shot and a soundstage set whilst maintaining absolute willing suspension of disbelief) has you imagine the roomy radio studio still perched on top, whereas in reality what you find is more compact and functional, but no less lovely for it.

So there you had it: KAB, the fabulous 1340. It was a long while before I could tear myself away from it and back up the steps; and I did so with a warm glow of accomplishment and happiness.

Suddenly, out of the night, the fog rolled in. For a moment, they could see nothing; not a foot ahead of them.

Der Todesking; Montag

June 10, 2016October 23, 2023Posted in MoviesTagged Berlin, Buttgereit, Der TodeskingLeave a comment

We traveled to Berlin in September 2015, to run the BMW Berlin Marathon; it was just a long weekend trip, and the focus was all about the race and my attempts to run a Boston Marathon qualifying time. (Why yes, thank you – I did. 3:22:20 if you’re bothered.) However, on the Monday ‘recovery’ day, I still found time to check off a Jorg Buttgereit movie location; this one from the Montag segment of Der Todesking.

I’m not even going to begin to try to explain this film to you; if you’ve heard of it, you’ll know; if you haven’t, you probably don’t want to.

Here’s a corresponding still from the film:

12032234_10153699494525844_3201686967521788287_n

This is an exterior wall of the Berlin Zoo; inside the zoo are a number of locations that Mark and Monika wander round during one of their ‘dates’ in Nekromantik 2. However, it was difficult to get specific like-for-like shots of any of those – just a general sense of area.

If I ever go back to Berlin, I’m hoping to scope out the cinema that features (and where a lot of Jorg’s films were originally screened) – and also find the bridge from the Todesking Donnerstag segment.

Das ist der Todesking; er macht das die Menschen nicht mehr leben wollen.