On our recent trip to NYC my son and I drove my wife crazy scanning the sky by the Chrysler Building looking for any sign of Q the winged serpent. And since we've returned I've been amazed at how many cult/sci-fi/horror movie locations you can readily visit in the city. I had forgotten that Rosemary's Baby was made at the Dakota for instance. Is there some kind of book that details some places to check out that are beyond the obvious Kong on Empire State Building references? I'm sure the list must be enormous with the number of films produced there.

Well, the prominent locations used in GHOSTBUSTERS (1984) are all still there: Central Park, the apartment building on Central Park West where Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis lived, and the New York Public Library main branch at 42nd Street and 5th Ave.

When BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970) came out I was working after school as a messenger for a service based in Grand Central Station, so I had fun matching the shots from the film with the actual spots in Grand Central used as the models for the post-apocalyptic scenes set in Grand Central in the film. And I believe the first time I ever set foot in St. Patrick’s Cathedral was to see how closely the altar recreated in the film matched the one in the real cathedral.

I used to love to go down to the Wall Street area on weekends when it was nearly deserted, to try and recapture that end-of-the-world feel you see in the post-apocalyptic THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959), which filmed many scenes down there. It sure ain’t deserted on the weekends anymore.

PORTRAIT OF JENNIE (1948) is a fantasy romance with supernatural elements that had a lot of location scenes in a wintry New York. After seeing it on the big screen in 1991, I went around to the locations used in it, particularly in Central Park. The actors in the film actually skated on the pond in the Southeast corner of the park (59th Street and 5th Avenue) when it was frozen over. The lovers in the film meet for the first time at the Dairy, a structure near the Sheep Meadow that still looks close to how it looked in 1948. The statues seen in the film along Poets' Walk (not actually called that) are all still there. Other unchanged locations in the film: the Cloisters and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An important scene takes place at the old Rialto Theater, torn down in 1999.

Speaking of the frozen pond in Central Park, there’s a great scene in Peter Jackson’s KING KONG remake (2005), where Kong slides around on the ice of that pond. It wasn’t the first scene in the film to win me over, but it certainly clinched the deal.

The ruins of the South Bronx featured in WOLFEN (1981) and 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS (1983) have all been demolished and those areas redeveloped.

There are quite a few books that cover all this stuff. I don’t know how good any of them are, since I never felt a need to consult them, because…hey, man, I LIVED it!!! :D

You lucky dog, Brian! :lol:

That might confuse people a little bit, Brian. I know of NYCers who were frustrated guiding out-of-towners who insisted on seeing that gigantic matte painting building they saw in the movie. I'm sure you mean just the bottom part. :)

For sheer location-tagging, Woody Allen films including MANHATTAN (the title says it all) are fun to study and build tours around, although the cult and exploitation associations aren't abundant, and his version of the city is missing many important pieces. For a record of upwardly mobile folks' cult places, though, they're very useful, offering very knowing, localized references such as the Dalton School, where Woody picks up his teenage girlfriend Mariel Hemingway. This school for the privileged and precocious is cast just right for its cameo role, though only an insider to the scene would really get it. Doesn't matter. It feels right because it is right.

One much, much used educational place you'll have seen many times is the Columbia University campus on the upper west side. The central campus is especially familiar, but the interiors have been much used too. Just one for instance: the library in MARATHON MAN where long in the tooth student Dustin Hoffman flirts with Marthe Keller.

In the same neighborhood: Riverside park (still there), used for scenes in WOLFEN and THE WARRIORS. I remember wandering home along the promenade above the park late one night when -boom! a gaggle of face-painted weirdos with baseball uniforms and bats exploded into view just yards away from me, yelling at the top of their lungs. It was only when I heard a voice issuing from a megaphone and noticed arc lights in the park below me, that I realized this was a movie, and that these warriors were exiting a scene. I saw them the next night too as I left the Thalia rep. movie theater in the mid-nineties. This time they were dashing into the 96th street subway station leaping down the stairs (or maybe the other way around). The station's still there, but a whole new neighborhood grew up around it, one which had no use ultimately for the good old Thalia, which wasn't in the Walter Hill film anyhow...

On the latest DVD release of TAXI DRIVER there's a cool supplement that compares the locations used in the 1976 film with the same locations now.

TAXI DRIVER is so nostalgic...a real timepiece to a bygone place...over the past four years I've been fortunate enough to travel to NYC for biz - so I get a week in Times Square, which I love. But man, I wish I could've walked the same streets in 1977...

There's also some great shots of this area in THE EXTERMINATOR (that crazy Vietnam Vet flick starring Robert Ginty...)

But there is a great book called CELLULOID SKYLINE: NEW YORK AND THE MOVIES, written by James Sanders. It was the basis for an art installation at Grand Central Terminal last Spring, which included photos, films, set pieces from films shot in NYC.

CELLULOID SKYLINE

NYC location-spotting is always one of my favorite parts of late '70s/early '80s Italian horror/exploitation flicks, especially the theater marquees and the gawking NYC pedestrians.

For another great snapshot of NYC, only circa 1960-61, check out Criterion's just-released BLAST OF SILENCE, which is almost a time capsule travelogue in spots. Great stuff.

Richard Alleman's NEW YORK: THE ULTIMATE MOVIE LOVER'S GUIDE is a great, if mainstream-ish, resource.

You can see my old neighborhood (Upper East Side) in Fulci's MANHATTAN BABY. DEATH WISH was Riverside Park, too, no?

:o

Wow! Priceless...

I will second the plug for Celluloid Skyline. There's a new one from Sanders released in conjunction with the Mayor's Office for TV/Film, Scenes From the City.

Also, Sanders appears on the recent Criterion disc for The Naked City.

Anyone know how much of the original CAT PEOPLE was actually shot in Manhattan? The scenes in Central Park (the zoo, and especially the nocturnal stalk-walk, which has been 'recreated' very closely in a number of movies) are among the most 'New York' in feel ever, but were they really shot there?

Nope, all of it was shot at the RKO studio. I'd have to look at it again, but I don't even recall any stock shots of the city being used in the film.

In Don Miller's "B Movies," he recounts the audience reaction to the Central Park scene at a Rialto (Times Square) showing of CAT PEOPLE in its initial release and how the screeching of the bus brakes sent a wave of near hysterical reaction throughout the theater. It's a great passage and I typed it in here once for a Lewton thread, but I don't have the book handy right now.

Brian's Cat People story is here.

HERCULES IN NEW YORK is great for its New York locations, circa 1969. I always get a kick out of the chariot chase at the end because the editing is a mishmash -- one second they're in Times Square, the next they're 8 blocks away by Radio City, the next they're back in Central Park!

A similar mishmahs occurs in HORROR AT PARTY BEACH, when our hero drives into New York to buy sodium. Great shots of Manhattan as he drives around, but his route is absolutely senseless.

The beginning of THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST is a cool glimpse of the garment center, circa 1967. A friend of mine used to work there not long after, pushing those racks of clothes around the same streets. You rarely see that anymore today.

And for what it's worth, the cable series RESCUE ME shot a scene in my bedroom 3 years ago (they're big on using real locations all over the 5 boroughs).

RE: HORROR AT PARTY BEACH - they had a field day with that on MST3K. I remember marveling at the Embassy marquee (46 St. & B'way) displaying Fellini's 8½.

RE: Shooting in one's bedroom. An independent film produced by a friend of mine once shot in my then-basement apartment...and in my family's house...and in a friend's apartment. Never again.
Watching the film a year or two later on VHS, I was stunned to see the villain rifling my desk drawers and all the contents made visible! Granted, there was nothing incriminating or embarrassing but...what if? And in my family's house, where this lowlife criminal is supposed to live and has got the money from a robbery stashed, the "production designer" made no attempt to hide shelves full of old books, including an ancient set of giant encyclopedias from the turn of the 20th century, that would not, I dare say, be of much use to a petty hood. The same in a scene where the criminal goes into a bedroom and all my brother's political slogans and bumper stickers are visible everywhere. "Stop Global Hegemony!"

Brian --

Actually, MST is where I was introduced to PARTY BEACH and I liked it so much it's on my list to acquire uncut one of these days! (That's happened with a number of movies -- thanks to MST (or should I say I blame them?), I now own the complete works of Arch Hall, Jr., several of Ray Dennis Steckler's finest, and most proudly, Diabolik! (I remember when Diabolik! aired as the last-ever MST episode I sat there thinking, why are they doing this movie? This is a great movie!!))

As far as letting a TV show shoot in our apartment, they completely redressed the room before they shot and put it back ALMOST the way it was before they left, so we had very few complaints, especially considering the fee involved. We would have welcomed them back, but it seems that, after using our building for locations for at least 2 seasons, they went looking for someplace cheaper. Ah well, at least we got in on it once!

Yipes, James! That was me! I reminisce about a youth misspent, here......I met someone years later who lived by the park, who told me that the noise from screeching teenagers that emanating from the set kept the neighborhood awake for more than a week!