Fun Challenge: Movies/TV shows about NYC

Law & Order is obvi teh awesome

Scorsese's After Hours

if we're including TV shows, then Sex and the City........part of the fun of watching that was to see if you could recognize the places where they filmed

Do the Right Thing strikes me as very NY as well

Paris Is Burning

Stranger Than Paradise

Torch Song Trilogy
High Art
(Patricia Clarkson is AMAZING in this)
and that cheesey early 80s thing with Madonna and Aiden Quinn

and
omigod
Sweet Smell of Success

Party Monster (cheeeesey fun, Macaulay Culkin as real life club kid and psychokiller Michael Alig)


And two teen girl punk films...
Times Square (suuuper cheesey, with Tim Curry as mr late night dj)
All Over Me (super sweet east village love story, girls and guitars)

and
continuing the theme of indie features...

Variety, dir. by Bette Gordon, written by Kathy Acker, featuring what might have been Luis Guzman 1st screen appearance

Working Girls (dir. Lizzie Borden) (no, not the one with Melanie Griffith)

I Like It Like That (dir. Darnell Martin) with Lauren Velez
which I totally hope is available on Netflix because I remember loving it

I had to look it up on IMDB. They have little bits of dialogue:

Lisette Linares: You know what your problem is? You never think about the other person.
Chino Linares: Good night, other person.
Lisette Linares: It's morning, Chino.
Chino Linares: Good morning.

Here's my short Other Cities list
cause I saw Talk To Me a couple weeks ago and it was really good

DC: Talk To Me
LA: Killer of Sheep, Rush Hour, Rebel Without A Cause, and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
Detroit: Gridlocked

and the great John Sayles'
Brother From Another Planet
Joe Morton plays "a mute alien, chased by outer-space bounty hunters through the streets of Harlem in this thought-provoking cult classic."

(I split my last post to bump this thread since someone bumped a bunch of old stuff over night...)

Black Caesar is a classic, set in Harlem in the early 70s. I have it on VHS if you want to borrow it sometime.

MUCH love for The Warriors, yay!

I wish that someone would put out a map with locations of well-known movie/t.v. scenes so that you could do your own walking tours -- or even a book -- and I'm kind of surprised nobody's done that yet. If anyone knows of such a thing, let me know!

A little more specificity to the above mention of Dog Day Afternoon (one of my favorite movies EVER): The exterior bank scenes were on Prospect Park West between 17th and 18th. You can see a lot of the surrounding buildings in some of the shots from the awesome "Attica" scene:



Some additional stuff: The real location of the robbery the movie was based on was a Chase Manhattan bank on the corner of East Third Street and Avenue P in Gravesend. It has been torn down since then.

John Wojtowicz, on whom the character of Sonny was based, lived in Brooklyn after he was paroled until he died of cancer in January of '06:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wojtowicz

In 2005 a documentary called Based on a True Story came out about the robbery. I don't think it's out on DVD yet, but there are several video clips on the film's official website -- the "Opening Film" clip has several shots from that day as well as what the block looks like now:
http://www.basedonatruestory.nl/

Elizabeth Eden, Wojtowicz's girlfriend, ended up getting her sex change operation with money Wojtowicz gave her after getting paid for his story to be used in the film. She died in 1987 at 41 of AIDS. And in 1977 a law was passed to prevent criminals from receiving profits from selling their stories, so the rest of Wojtowicz's money went to some of the former hostages.