“Filmed in Brooklyn" by Margo Donohue; Arcadia Publishing (176 pages, $23.99)
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Lights! Camera! Brooklyn!
Movies take us us to different worlds, and they’ve found plenty in Kings County, New York.
Bedford-Stuyvesant was spotlighted in “Do the Right Thing,” Brooklyn Heights in “Moonstruck,” and Park Slope in “Marriage Story.” Given Brooklyn’s diversity and how each film bring viewers into a time and place, moviemakers have long been exploring the borough. Margo Donohue takes readers on a trip through dozens of neighborhoods in “Filmed in Brooklyn.”
It’s an exhaustively well-packed guide, but, as Donohue points out, Brooklyn has always contained multitudes. Plenty of history, too, serving as “the birthplace of Mack Trucks, Brillo cleaning pads, Bazooka gum, Twizzlers and possibly the most significant contribution to comfort in the twentieth century – air-conditioning.”
It also gave America one of its first movie studios.
Built in 1905, the Vitagraph complex in Midwood “had space for gunfights, train derailments, bank robberies and romantic settings,” Donohue writes. “Helen Hayes, Norma Talmadge and the first ‘Vitagraph Girl,’ Florence Turner, graced the screens and gained fans worldwide. A young Rudolph Valentino applied to be in the set creation department and quickly rose to lead actor on his way to international superstardom.”
The company’s star power was brief, though. Gritty Brooklyn backlots couldn’t compete with sunny Hollywood. Vitagraph sold its soundstages in 1925.
Naturally, Brooklyn still showed up in movies. But now, typically, it was reduced to stock footage of the Brooklyn Bridge and anonymous city streets. The 1945 classic “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” may have depicted poor Irish Americans in turn-of-the-century Williamsburg, but it was filmed on a California backlot.
After World War II, however, studios began going on location, and a new generation of indie filmmakers began shooting wherever they could. The MGM musical “On the Town” docked briefly at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1949. “The Little Fugitive” (1953) was set on Coney Island. Stanley Kubrick shot some of “Killer’s Kiss” (1955) in DUMBO.
The borough landed a co-starring role in 1971′s “The French Connection.” In it, Gene Hackman’s “Popeye” Doyle – based on a real NYPD detective – “starts chasing an assassin through Brooklyn on an elevated train heading to Manhattan,” Donohue writes. Roughly commandeering a civilian’s car, Popeye “follows the train from Stillwell Avenue/86th Street to just north of the 62nd Street Station,” driving at breakneck speed.
That scene has been thrilling fans for years. However, as its reputation has grown, Donohue notes, so have some of director William Friedkin’s stories. Although he often claimed he shot without permits or planning, allowing his stunt drivers to race through Bay Ridge, the sequences had been highly choreographed, Donohue says. Off-duty cops were always there to keep people safe, away from the careening 1971 Pontiac LeMans.
The Oscar-winning picture was followed by plenty of other cops-and-robbers movies, many portraying Brooklyn as crammed full of Mafiosi.
The Corleone’s soldiers in “The Godfather” were particularly steadfast Kings County residents. When he wasn’t dutifully running errands – buying cannoli, killing a snitch – Peter Clemenza lived in a modest house at 1999 E. 5th St in Gravesend. And the reason Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes is that he went to that fatal meeting at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn Heights.
In “Goodfellas,” Henry Hill could only dream of becoming a made man like them, as he wasn’t 100% Italian. His friend Tommy DeVito seemed to have been tapped to join the gang, but things went wrong; the last thing Tommy saw was the inside of a house on 80th St.in Bay Ridge. Hill probably had happier memories of Bensonhurst, where he got married at the now-gone Oriental Manor at 1818 86th St.
While both are terrific movies, they hardly provide a full picture of Italian-American life in the borough. “Saturday Night Fever,” which showed young Tony Manero torn between loyalty to the neighborhood and dreams of Manhattan, was probably closer to most bridge-and-tunnel kids’ experiences. Although touched by tragedy, the movie brims with a cocky joy beginning with the opening scene of John Travolta strutting through Bensonhurst as the king of disco.
Sadly, Tony’s beloved 2001 Odyssey Disco, once at 802 64th St., is long gone, Donohue writes. But “Lenny’s Pizza Parlor still exists at 1909 86th St., and you can still attempt to eat it the Tony Manero way (a tight disco pants-busting two slices at once),” she notes, “In Bay Ridge, the Manero family home is still standing at 221 79th St.”
Fewer locales are left from “Moonstruck,” which was mostly shot on soundstages. However, the house where Cher battled relatives and navigated a complicated romantic life remains at 19 Cranberry St. in Brooklyn Heights. And if you stop by to film yourself recreating her dreamy walk home, you won’t be the first.
Still, few Brooklyn spots are as movie-ready as Coney Island, though, “as big of a symbol of New York City as it is about America itself,” Donohue writes.
“It is a place where the best and worst of our culture are celebrated with our love of the beach, amusement parks, thrilling roller coasters and hot dogs mixed with a grimy, barely under the surface malevolence,” she writes. “It’s a place to relax and yet also be on your guard… To feel at ease and yet slightly at edge.”
Is it any wonder that movies shot there range from the romantic comedy “Annie Hall” to the surreal thriller “The Warriors”? Films arrived almost as soon as the amusement park did, spotlighted in the 1917 Fatty Arbuckle slapstick picture “Coney Island.” Since Coney Island’s landmarks have appeared in so many movies, Donohue divides the chapter into separate sections. There’s a part on the Cyclone (“The Wiz,” “Annie Hall”), the Wonder Wheel (“Remo Williams; The Adventure Begins,” “Spider-Man: Homecoming”), and Nathan’s (“He Got Game,” “The Other Guys”).
If Coney Island is for everyone, other directors define Brooklyn’s diversity and divisions.
Spike Lee’s borough is one of established Black neighborhoods, secure in their traditions but facing pressure and prejudice. His debut feature, “She’s Gotta Have It,” followed the sexual adventures of a young woman in Fort Greene, where Lee grew up. In his classic “Do the Right Thing,” he moves to Bedford-Stuyvesant, where Blacks and Italian-Americans work together under a fragile truce. In many of Lee’s other films — “Crooklyn,” and “Red Hook Summer” — Brooklyn is so present it becomes another character.
Noah Baumbach’s borough is one of white professionals, often new to the area. They’re comfortable in their Park Slope brownstones as they deal with upper-middle-class angst. “The Squid and the Whale,” starring Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney, primarily takes place on 6th Ave., “a street that I walked as a kid,” Baumbach says. “Marriage Story” is set nearby on 7th Ave., where in-between trips to the neighborhood’s real-life stores, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson watch their marriage fall apart.
So which is the real Brooklyn? Is it the Irish immigrant haven of “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” or the proud Italian enclave of “Saturday Night Fever”? The working-class Brooklyn of Lee’s films, or the more privileged one of Baumbach’s? Or the hipster hub of Williamsburg being explored by new indie filmmakers like Radha Blank’s “The Forty-Year-Old Version”?
Yes, it is all that. And, being Brooklyn, probably something else too, very soon.
