New York and the Movies

Woody Allen epitomized NYC for many years.

Hollywood has turned everyone into honorary New Yorkers. Thanks to the magic of the movies, nearly everyone in the world is familiar with parts of this amazing city. From small town America to the Far East, images of the capital of the world have been imbedded into the world’s consciousness.

This relationship of New York and the movies is one with a long history. Although others had dabbled with different forms of projectors, it was inventor Thomas Edison who began the movie industry in his West Orange, New Jersey laboratory, just a few miles from New York . The invention, which he patented in 1888, was called the Kinetoscope. It was essentially just a peepshow device that allowed one person to peer into it and watch short films, but it was a start.

Over the next twenty years or so, as the technology improved, many rivals to Edison appeared and soon there were dozens of small film studios, most of them based in New York and many of them the ancestors of the modern film studios we still know today.

Most of the films from this time period were known as Actuality Films, which were sort of the film industry’s version of a still life painting. The cameraman would point his camera at a crowd or a busy sidewalk and just let it run for a few minutes. Many of these films were shot on the streets of New York and some have been preserved. They can be viewed today, for free at the American Film: New York Page.

For the beginning of the 20th Century, New York was what Hollywood is today. All the stars of the time made films in the city. Valentino, Gloria Swanson, The Marx Brothers, the Gish sisters and many others all shot movies here. It was New York’s heyday as the movie capital.

Eventually though, the city lost its position when Hollywood rose to prominence with its promise of good weather all year round and its then cheap property and open spaces; three things that crowded, expensive and variably weathered New York was not. Another influence on the move was the advent of sound. With Silent movies, it didn’t matter that New York was one of the noisiest places in the world, but once Talkies began, the noise level became impossible to avoid and the technology of the time wasn’t up to the task of eliminating it.

Although movies stopped being shot here, that didn’t stop Hollywood from setting them here. Every backlot of every studio had to have a New York street set. It was in 1933 for instance -- after Hollywood had long eclipsed New York -- that one of the most famous New York movie moments occurred when a Giant Ape climbed the Empire State Building to battle it out with airplanes, in King Kong. And, like the new version being filmed today by Peter Jackson, none of the movie was actually shot in New York.

Throughout the 1930s and 40s, New York continued to be a popular setting for movies, although it was increasingly rare for a movie to actually be filmed on location. Gradually, though, starting with 1949’s On the Town, which opened with a musical montage shot all over the city, location shooting began to regain popularity. Advances in technology now made it possible to film on location without picking up every bit of ambient sound in the area.

By the 1970s, filming on the streets of Manhattan was a daily occurrence. In fact, from 1969 to 1979, 6 out of the 10 Best Picture winners were filmed on location here. (Midnight Cowboy, The French Connection, The Godfather, The Godfather II, Annie Hall, Kramer vs. Kramer).

It was also during this decade that Woody Allen began his tradition of shooting one movie per year, with most of them being shot almost completely on location in Manhattan. His love affair with the city is perhaps best epitomized with 1979’s Manhattan.

While the trend of shooting in New York, continued into the 1980s and 90s, another trend almost forced another filmmaker exodus from the city as the cost and the amount of paperwork required to shoot in the city, kept growing. More and more often Toronto was luring movie studios to use their city as a stand-in for the Big Apple.

Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks meet atop the Empire State Building in Sleepless in Seattle.

One television show bucked the Toronto trend in a big way, when Sex and the City premiered on HBO. The risqué show featured equal parts sex and city as its four female leads appeared all over Manhattan dealing with men, fashion, their jobs, and more men. And not just the locations shots were filmed in New York, those scenes in the studio were shot in Silvercup Studios in Queens.

The industry never completely left the city during those years though, because no matter how cheap Toronto is, it can never convey the true feeling of being in New York. There is no stand-in for this city. And so, helped by recent incentives from the city government, filming is once again an everyday occurrence in Manhattan.

Although New York will never take back the title of movie making capital of the world from Los Angeles, its relationship with the movies will never die. And after all, that’s all L.A. has, that one industry. New York is the capital of Finance, Fashion, Broadway and just about every other industry in the world. It’s because of this diversity that New York is such a fascinating place to set a movie.