Jason Bailey - Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies that Made It

Baileys book is a double anatomyone of a city, the other of its filmic depictions. His astonishing talents as a researcher yield historical ore that his astonishing critical acumen turns into film-lover gold. Even when you disagree with his conclusions, the connections he makes will send your own thinking into heretofore unconsidered dimensions.

Glenn Kenny, author of Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas

Fun City Cinema is a beautifully exhaustive, insightful, and engrossing study of New York City and the movies that reflected its political, economic, and cultural shifts over a century. Bailey writes eloquently not just about the importance and artistry of these films, but also how they helped shape our sense of the city in which they were set. This is a marvelous history of the Big Apple seen through the eyes of an incisive film critic who serves as a knowledgeable, ingratiating tour guide.

Tim Grierson, author of This Is How You Make a Movie

Fun City is an astonishing history of NYC told through the films that shot on the streets and the politics that shaped each era. From the glamor of early talkies to the grit of film noir to the dirty old New York of the 1970s. Page after page of fascinating behind the scenes tales of classics like Sweet Smell of Success, Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, and Uncut Gems. Its a book full of insightful prose and great photos that I found impossible to put down.

Larry Karaszewski, cowriter of Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flint, and Dolemite Is My Name

Fun City Cinema is my favorite sort of film book. Jason Bailey takes us on a tour through not just New York cinema, but the city that gave birth to it and the fantastic, absurd, glorious ways in which New Yorks history is, all on its own, stranger than fiction. New York owes much to the cinema, and the cinema owes much back, and Fun City Cinema is a wild and gorgeous ride through that brilliant relationship.

Alissa Wilkinson, film critic for Vox

An un-put-downable work of political, cultural, and cinema history. Youll walk away from it knowing so much more about New York, about America, and about how some of the greatest films ever made came to be. Youll also have a mountain of new movie recommendations to start making your way through.

Bilge Ebiri, film critic for New York magazine/Vulture

Fun City Cinema is an express train that makes local stops at long-forgotten stations, pausing long enough to conjure the ghosts out of their hiding places and up onto the streets where they stalk, strut, and drift through a city that is, on the surface always changing. Jason Baileys accomplishment is that he sees and feels his way through those changes to the citys tough irreducible core. He could have called this book The Lights Above, the Grit Below. Hes in touch with both.

Charles Taylor, author of Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American 70s

Still image from Stranger Than Paradise (1984), directed by Jim Jarmusch, photographed by Tom DiCillo

To Lucille and Alicemy two favorite New York productions.

by Matt Zoller Seitz

19201929:
The Gaudy Spree, Mass Media, and The Jazz Singer

19291939:
The Crash, the Depression, and King Kong

19401949:
The War, the Boom, and The Naked City

19501959:
The Power Brokers and Sweet Smell of Success

19601969:
Fun City, John Lindsay, and Midnight Cowboy

19701979:
Fear City, Blackouts, and Taxi Driver

19801989:
Two Cities, Ed Koch, and Wall Street

19902000:
City in Transition, the Indie Movie Boom, and Kids

20012010:
9/11, Recovery, and 25th Hour

20112020:
Wealth, Bohemia, and Frances Ha

Im sitting here beside you on a southbound B train, going from Columbus Circle to Atlantic Avenue, reading Jason Baileys Fun City Cinema. Its a lavishly illustrated coffee-table bookwhat Vanity Fair writer James Wolcott memorably termed a lap-crusherand thus not the kind of thing youd normally see a person reading on the train. You ask me why I brought it. Or maybe I just imagine that you asked me. This is New York, and in New York, people start talking to you on trains for no reason. This is what I tell you:

New York is not just a city. Its The City.

Los Angeles is the city of angels and the city of dreams, but it will never be The City.

New York knows it. Los Angeles knows it. And the entertainment industry knows it.

Thats why movies and TV shows are shot in New York despite the expense and hassle, or shot someplace else (Toronto, Cincinnati, Yonkers, downtown Los Angeles, a backlot in Culver City) and ask us to pretend theyre in New York. Whaddayagonnado, change the setting to Cleveland? Moviemaking as an industry began on the East Coast of the United States but migrated to Southern California, where the weather was nicer, the real estate cheaper, and where producers could re-create almost any environment. But mentally, spiritually, and often geographically, moviemaking always tends to drift back east, because New York City was always the greatest standing film set of them allbecause it was real. You could feel it, hear it, smell it... even when it was filmed to evoke dreams or nightmares. When the Avengers assembled, they didnt do it in Los Angeles. When Godzilla finally surfaced in the US, he didnt descend upon Houston. Like Holly Golightly and the Corleones, they went to New York.

How many cities have this many nicknames and fictional alter egos? New York is the Big Apple. But its also Metropolis: Fritz Langs and Supermans. And its Gotham City, even though Chicago keeps trying to muscle in and claim the name (Fughedaboudit, Chicago). New York is the place Snake Plissken escaped from. Eighteen years later, Snake escaped from LA and nobody gave a shit.

Every fictional city since the origin of mass-produced pictorial art starts to sketch its vision of urban density, glamour, and scale with New York as its muse, then adds or subtracts details. New York is realer than real, hard as hell, and its an Emerald City calling seven generations of Dorothys. Its the city of mean streets and the sweet smell of success, the place where gutters ran red in the summer of Sam, just five years after the real-life dog day afternoon. See the midnight cowboy and the taxi driver, the working girl and Tootsie, the Joker and the King of Comedy and the Black private dick whos the sex machine to all the chicks, all moving among the masses in Times Square. See the pickup on South Street and the verdict of 12 angry men and the torment of the 25th hour. See the sun rise over Brooklyn Heights as Loretta Castorini, buzzed on love and dressed to the nines, kicks a can down the street.