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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, July 31st, 2006 - 2 Comments »
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Willmore's New York State of Mind Not Quite New York-ish Enough For GreenCine Readers


The gloves are off over at GreenCine Daily, where editor David Hudson offered a few of his favorite film bloggers/commentators the floor while he goofs about on some kind of vacation (lazy-ass). Hudson’s basic idea was to throw a new question each day at a range of guest contributors, which seemed to be going just fine until he asked The IFC Blog‘s Alison Willmore: “What movie puts you in a New York state of mind?”
Willmore’s reply was intriguing (to say the least), and I think context requires its full reprinting here:

The cinematic mash note to New York is almost a genre to itself – and one hell of a genre. Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Sidney Lumet and countless others have illuminated distinct and vivid celluloid visions of the city that seem almost impossible to reconcile. New York may be the irresistible backdrop of a thousand stories, but it’s also a subject that eludes even the widest-angle lens – it’s better caught in small pieces, sidelong glances and the occasional dazzling cityscape.

What I love about The Royal Tenenbaums is that it summons the New York of the eventual transplant. Wes Anderson depicts New York the way Kafka envisioned an America he’d never seen, but valiantly divined from travel brochures and visitors’ anecdotes. For Anderson, his bible is The New Yorker, and what he extracts from it is a somewhat fuzzy, quietly fantastical version of the Upper East Side – one with a 375th Street Y, omnipresent and semi-official gypsy cabs, empty and windswept streets, and a slightly shabby academic aristocracy in which everyone seems to have a book deal. It’s a naïve and unaccountably melancholy portrait, an wistful daydream of the city that’s stayed with me long after I saw the real thing.

Putting aside my utter devastation at being left out of Hudson’s New York loop, and putting aside the inarguable fact that the word “cityscape” is not now and has never been permissible in good company, Willmore’s qualifications make sense even if her selection does not: On one hand, she seems to have anticipated a backlash, yet by choosing an admittedly false New York, she invalidates the whole purpose of her response.
But whatever–we can agree to disagree, right? Evidently not, if the feedback to Willmore’s item is any indication:

Alison Willmore sounds like a real scholar. Out of all the thousands of movies that have taken place in NYC she picks Tenenbaums. Does she live in NYC? … Alison Willmore works for IFC? Does her father or husband own it? …

Your answer is like the answer to a Rorschach Test and it sounds, to put it bluntly, like you haven’t quite experienced NYC fully, or, in other words, with more juvenile conviction, it sounds like you have no cred, like you haven’t paid your dues. It sounds like you’ve experienced 10% of what NYC has to offer. I get all of this from your choice of film. Wes Anderson is a tourist. It sounds like you still have the mindset of a tourist, too. …

To give Wes Anderson the honor of representing the answer to this question is to deny other directors who have absorbed the city fully the honor of their perserverance. …

Yikes! At any rate, The Reeler knows at least one person who is just fine with Willmore’s pick, but for me, at least, the whole thing has proven more thought-provoking than anything else. Sweet Smell of Success is easily the greatest New York film ever made, but “New York state of mind”? Does it emerge from J.J. Hunsecker’s proclamation, “I love this filthy city?” Or from Ray Milland crashing at the Yorkville clock in The Lost Weekend? Or from the bulging-eyed street drummer in Taxi Driver? The vicious teen beatings in Dead End and Kids? Ahmad’s grueling work routine in Man Push Cart? The mournful light captured by Chris Terrio and Jim Denault in Heights? Woody Allen chasing Mia Farrow to the Carnegie Deli on Thanksgiving in Broadway Danny Rose? Popeye Doyle chasing Charnier through Brooklyn in The French Connection? Jules Dassin reclaiming location New York in The Naked City? Al Pacino’s Sonny dictating his last will and testament to the bank teller in Dog Day Afternoon? Tony Manero’s strut down Fourth Avenue in Saturday Night Fever? Loretta and Ronny’s Lincoln Center date in Moonstruck? Taggers spray-painting subway cars as old women look on in The Warriors? Wren watching her clothes fall to the street in the Lower East Side war zone of Smithereens? Or God knows what hundreds of moments we can cull from the work of (in totally random order, as fast as I can type) Philip Hartman, Amos Poe, Jennie Livingston, Lodge Kerrigan, Abel Ferrara, Spike Lee, Jonas Mekas, Don Siegel, Merian C. Cooper, Peter Jackson, Dito Montiel, James Toback, Paul Mazursky, Stanley Donen, Billy Wilder, Peter Sollett, Nicole Holofcener, Ryan Fleck, Joe Mankiewicz, Bennett Miller, Ed Burns, Mel Brooks, Julien Duvivier, Mike Nichols, John Schlesinger, Roman Polanski or Alfred Hitchcock? Or–gasp!–Wes Anderson?
Man. Tough call–and probably a thankless question–right there.

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2 Comments »

2 Responses to “Willmore's New York State of Mind Not Quite New York-ish Enough For GreenCine Readers”

  1. Craig P says:
    July 31, 2006 at 10:55 pm

    Tough call, indeed, thankless question, indeed (as poor Alison found out) and definitely a lot of fun to debate regardless. Thanks for taking up the right spirit of the discussion here. Lots of good films to think about.
    Btw, the worst of those “responses” on the Daily’s comments turned out to be trolls from the same IP address and were summarily booted, deleted and blocked. All from the same person trying to get our goats. So please don’t take those too seriously, but the other comments left there were good, appropriate and thoughtful, so stop on by! (Unless you’re a troll.)
    Best,
    Craig

  2. David Hudson says:
    August 3, 2006 at 5:56 pm

    I’m not sure, but I think the first review I ever wrote (for the U of Texas paper, the Daily Texan) was an undoubtedly naive take on Smithereens… At any rate, I’m kicking myself – very hard – for not having thrown some question or other your way in those last, panicked moments before taking off. It all happened so quickly…

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon