The Oscars were last night and two prominent NYC natives won big awards -- Manhattan's own Lady Gaga for her song from A Star is Born and Brooklynite Spike Lee for his screenplay for BlackkKlansman.
Always nice to see Gotham make its gritty presence known at the ultimate West Coast confab.
New Yorkers, in fact, have a long history of migrating to -- and ultimately conquering -- Hollywood. My favorite movie in this genre is the 1991 Coen Brothers' classic Barton Fink. Inspired by the life of Clifford Odets, it's about a socialist playwright moving to Hollywood and entering a hallucinatory nightmare in his hotel room. The best part of the movie is, early on, when Barton meets with the eccentric head of the studio that's just hired him. He declares, "I mean I'm from New York myself, well, Minsk, if you want to go all the way back." Brilliant line.
One hotel that many New York travellers Hollywood stayed back in the day was the Garden of Allah where folks like Humphrey Bogart and Robert Benchley lived and partied. It's long gone but had a storied history, and New Yorkers found a little bit of gritty bohemia in La La Land.
And talking about grity and NYC and the movies, there's perhaps no NYC movie grittier than the 1979 cult classic The Warriors. A violent, crazy dystopian nightmare of NYC in the 1970s, it's now 40 years old and seems like a it was made less in a different time than on another planet. This chronicle about the making of the movie is fascinating to read.
Hollywood would be boring if it didn't have a little bit of NYC grit.
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