Mad Men City

As some of you may know, this Sunday marks the return of easily the best show on television -- AMC's "Mad Men." This is a show of such superlative quality, such amazing writing and acting, such beauty and depth, that it almost feels like you're stealing something great by getting to watch it for free (okay, you have to pay for cable -- basic cable -- but it's not like it's on premium).

The show is set in a 1960s ad agency in New York City called Sterling Cooper, a place where the men run the office, the women live to serve them (in oh-so-many ways), people drink throughout the day in their offices, the sexism and racism are rampant, and the most important thing is how you appear, not how you treat others. The focus of the show is the ad whiz Don Draper who's only life is as artificial as anything he and his fellow mad men create. The greatness of this show is that for as much as we see and learn about each character, they are forever shrouded in mystery -- we know there's so much more to learn about them and desperately want to find out. And the central mystery of this show is who is Don Draper? What is he all about?

And who, in the end, are any of us?

"Mad Men" is also a great NYC, set in the city we all know and love but that is, in many ways, very different from today. Since this is "Mad Men" season four premiere week, the New York Times is running a week-long Mad Men City blog about what NYC was like in November, 1964 (when this new season begins). What was in the news? What movies were playing? What could you buy in the stores? What were the hot restaurants and clubs? What was going on in NYC back then? And yes, what was advertising like back in 1964?

If we were to time travel back to NYC at that time, I'm sure lots of it would be recognizable but other parts of it would make our fair city seem like an alien world. My mother was a young woman back then and she's told me stories of what NYC was like back in the early sixties -- and how true to life the sexism depicted in the show really is.

MAD MEN

Who is Don Draper?

That's the mystery at the heart of "Mad Men", the hottest show on TV right now. It was created by Matthew Weiner, one of the writers of "The Sopranos", and it just won the Emmy for Best Dramatic Series.

If you haven't seen "Mad Men", it's about an advertising agency called Sterling Cooper in early 1960s New York. Kennedy is President. Wagner is Mayor. Marilyn Monroe is about to OD. Beatlemania, the civil rights movement, and Vietnam are just around the corner. And New York is still an affordable place to live.

It was a simpler, more laid back time. In those days, men wore suspenders under double breasted suits and the women were encased in incredibly tight fitting skirts. Everyone drank and smoked all day and managed to do very little actual work. Most of the women in the office are secretaries looking to get married, all of the men are married but trying to sleep with the secretaries, homosexuals and black people live very much in the shadows, and a high paying salary is $100 a week.

In the middle of this lost America is a lost man named Donald Draper -- a high flying, unhappily married, perpetually adulterous ad exec. He's dying inside but we don't exactly know why. In fact, he's not actually Don Draper ... so who is he?

Obviously I'm much too young to know what 1960s NYC was like but I'd like to think it was like it is on "Mad Men." It may have been a more conformist, socially repressive time and it's probably good that a lot of the mores of that time have changed. But it also feels like it was a time where manners and respectability -- class -- was still important. And it's sad that we've lost that.

TV on the Movies

This is a must read: Vanity Fair culture critic James Wolcott makes a very convincing case that today, in the second decade of the 21st century, TV shows are better than movies. In terms of quality, originality, writing, acting, excitement -- Wolcott says TV is whipping the movies' tuchus.

And I agree. 

Very rarely these days do I get excited about a movie. I don't care for the big Twilight/Harry Potter/Hunger Game "event" movies. They're all noise and action without really interesting plots or characters. Plus, they're all skewed to teenage girls which, at last check, I'm not. I'm more interested in movies by really great directors with good stories and characters but, honestly, most of our great directors aren't making such great movies these days. 

To whit: with the exception of Midnight in Paris last year, Woody Allen hasn't made an exciting movie in a long time. Scorsese used to make exciting movies but they have become less so over time (Goodfellas? Exciting! Hugo? Uh....). Robert Altman is sadly dead. Spike Jonze and David Russell make very few films. I still get excited whenever Quentin Tarantino makes a movie but he seems only to make one every five or six years. And don't get me started on Cameron Crowe and James L. Brooks: Say Anything ..., Almost Famous, Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News are some of my favorites ever. But their most recent movies have been unwatchable. It's like watching great athletes who used to win every competition come in last. 

TV, however, has been an autre histoire. 

In the last ten years there have been some TV shows that have gotten me crazy excited: The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Rescue Me, The Wire, True Blood, Lost, 30 Rock, The Office, Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, Downton Abbey, Portlandia, Modern Family and lots of others -- really great shows with complex characters, interesting stories, brilliant film making, and amazing production values. And right now I salivate (well, almost) over Game of Thrones and Mad Men. The fact that they're on back to back on the same nights has sent me into geeky heaven. (Heck, even Saturday Night Live is funny again for the first time in 20 years.) 

I'm stunned at the quality of these shows and amazed at how much I'd rather stay at home and watch them (on TV or Netflix) instead of schlepping to the movies and plunk down ten bucks -- only to sit next to or behind douches who talk during the movie or have their cell phones go off. Increasingly, not only are the movies bad but the movie going experience has gotten expensive and annoying.

Plus, snobs who used to ignore TV seem to be ignoring the movies these days. 

Wolcott writes: "Even in cine-mad Manhattan, where the admonitory ghost of Susan Sontag haunts theaters by night, the new movie that everybody’s talking about is being talked about by a shrinking number of everybodies. It’s seldom the presiding topic of cocktail chat and intellectual quarrel, as it was when critic Pauline Kael led the wagon train. (Her successors at The New Yorker, David Denby and Anthony Lane, might as well be tinkling the piano in the hotel lobby for all the commotion they create.)" He also makes the point that it's pretty sad when a cliched, plodding movie like Bridesmaids is acclaimed as one of the best comedies of the year. 

I couldn't even get through it. It just wasn't that funny. 

Wolcott also says Reese Witherspoon is an example of what has happened not only to movies but movie stars: she used to give great performances in fun or excellent movies like Legally Blonde and Walk the Line. Now she's stuck in drivel like This Means War. When was the last time Tom Cruise had a good movie? He used to have one every year. Now everyone talks about Mad Men's Jon Hamm and Tom Cruise is better known for his weird Scientology worship these days. 

Wolcott even asks a great rhetorical question: "Does anyone think The Artist is better than Mad Men?"

Hear hear. 

We really do seem to be living in a golden age of TV and a dark ages of movies. Maybe this will change. But probably not for a while. Movies must respond to the demands of moviegoers -- who are increasingly kids and dopes who care more about spectacle than story. Meanwhile, as TV has gotten more niche driven and cable has found a business model to thrive, there are more outlets for original, daring stuff. Ultimately, like everything, it comes down to money: if the studios can only make money with big noisy junk and TV can make money producing quality -- guess what? That's what you're gonna see!

I'm a culture geek and I want movies and TV to be equally good and compelling. Hopefully, some day, a business model will emerge where great movies can be produced again. But as of now, the David of the small screen has conquered the Goliath of the big screen.  

"Girls" and "Mad Men": Where do they hang in NYC?

Are you a fan of these two great cable series? 

Yours truly is, and they are really are two great NYC shows. They couldn't be more different. 

"Mad Men" is a period piece, set in a glamorous Manhattan of a 1960s advertising agency. The characters hang out in beautiful apartments, swanky bars, and go have affairs in classy hotels. "Girls", on the other hand, is modern day show set in hipster Brooklyn. It involves a bunch of over educated, underemployed twenty-somethings suddenly discovering that they're not that special over all -- and they spend their time doing this while living in crappy apartments in Brooklyn, going to coffee bars, and warehouse parties. 

One city, two very different worlds.

So if you want to see the NYC worlds that the characters of "Mad Men" and "Girls" inhabit, go here and here for these two maps. And see the city yet again through some fictional but nonetheless fascinating eyes. 

"The Romanoffs" in NYC

I was huge fan of Mad Men, the great TV series about the world of advertising in 1960s NYC. I blogged about a lot over the years and it's one of my favorite shows ever. 

Now the creator of Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, has a new show on Amazon -- and it is weird. It's called The Romanoffs, a modern-day globe-spanning anthology series about various people who are (or believe they are) descended from the Romanov dynasty (the family that ruled the Russian Empire for three hundred years, from 1613-1918).

The individual plots for each episode are either boring or bizarre but the "Romanoff" factor gives it a certain je ne said quoi, another layer of psychological intrigue that makes this show wholly original -- and quite fascinating. Many of the reviews I've read either hate this show or don't know what to make of it -- which is usually proof of something groundbreaking.

There are (or will be) a total of 8 episodes, going from Paris, to Ohio, to a cruise ship, to Austria and, eventually, Mexico City (amongst other places). But the latest episode, called "Expectation", unfolds over one whole day here in NYC. So, obviously, this is one I can't wait to see. 

If you loved Mad Men, you'll like this show because it has the same cerebral storytelling and black humor. However, The Romanoffs is totally different and it dares to do something that few shows ever do -- it doesn't pander, it doesn't explain itself, it doesn't care if you like it, and leaves you thinking. It's just brilliant, unconventional storytelling. 

By the way, if you want to learn more about the fall of the Romanov dynasty, there are lots of great books about it -- or you could watch the 1971 movie Nicholas & Alexandra.

Review: "The Front Page"

It's hard to believe but there used to be very few outlets for people to get the news. No Internet. No blogs. No social media. No cable. Radio and television beamed news reports into people's homes and cars but, if you really wanted to know what was going on in the world, if you wanted to "deep-dive" into the complexities of the world you lived in, then you needed to read a newspaper. Yes, read. Read paper. With words on it. Carefully written words backed up by reporting and facts. Written by reporters. Professional reporters. Interesting concept, no?

The world of newspaper reporting is a romantic one -- think movies like His Girl Friday, All the President's Men, and last year's Oscar-winner Spotlight. Newspapers were places where hard-boiled types (usually men) wearing hats and ties quickly pounded out stories on a typewriter, trying to make that midnight deadline, stories that would speak truth to power and reveal all the rot beneath the surface of respectable society. Increasingly newspapers are disappearing as the economic foundation for them melts away. Back in the day, however, newspapers were powerful and profitable. They broke news and made news. And perhaps no play better captured the fevered world of newspapers than the 1928 play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. 

Currently playing in a popular revival on Broadway, The Front Page is one part a newspaper romance, another part a thriller. It's set in Chicago in 1928, the night before a Communist-sympathizer accused of killing a black cop is set to be executed. As the plot unfolds, a conspiracy involving politics and the miscarriage of justice is revealed along with the personality conflicts and divided loyalties of the reporters covering the story. Believe it or not, it's a comedy, a mystery, and a love letter to newspapers rolled into one. It's fun. I shan't go into great detail about the plot (it's complex) but, if you want to know more, go here. 

This production technically does not open until October 20th but I recently caught a preview of The Front Page. It has, in short, an amazing cast: Nathan Lane, John Slattery, John Goodman, Jefferson Mays, Sherie Renee Scott, the legendary Robert Morse, and many fine others. It's an orgy of talent and everyone in the cast plays their parts to the hilt. The play itself is quite amusing if not always laugh at loud funny but the characters are well-defined and compelling. The plot itself is basically an excuse to play out the wacky interactions of the different characters and it mostly works. However, given that what I saw was a preview and therefore an early rough draft of the production, the timing of the play felt somewhat off, somewhat forced. It was clear, to me at least, that the actors were getting used to playing their roles.

That said, when Nathan Lane finally arrives about half-way into the play, it becomes a different show. It becomes fast and funny. It becomes the kind of screwball comedy you were expecting. As the swaggering, outrageous owner of a Chicago tabloid, Lane goes full bore into his character, tearing up the stage with his big personality and perfect timing. The rest of the cast does its best. John Slattery, better known as Roger from Mad Men, is wonderful and John Goodman is lovable even though he's playing a bad guy. I love the actor Jefferson Mays who plays a snooty reporter (I've seen him in I Am My Own Wife and Journey's End) and I just wish that he had a bigger part but he's always fascinating to watch on stage. I'm also glad to have finally seen Sherie Renee Scott on stage but, like Mays, I wish she had more to do. However, it really is a great cast and worth seeing.

So I recommend The Front Page if you love comedy, newspapers, the 1920s, and Nathan Lane. It's a paeab to a lost world.

The TWA Hotel Lands at JFK

The 1950s and '60s are romanticized as the Mad Men era -- the "great America" that so many people want to somehow, spiritually and socio-economically return to; a time when people knew their place i.e. white men in power, blacks at the back of the bus, gays in the closet, and women either in the kitchen or only working as secretaries, nurses, and teachers.

'Dose were da' days!

It was a time when it was great to be a "mad man" -- oh yes, you could have three martini lunches, smoke everywhere, and bang your secretaries with abandon (no annoying sexual harassment laws or HR rules or hashtags to kill the fun).

It was white male nirvana.

Then there was the architecture. Lots of gorgeous but decaying buildings were being torn down at this time and replaced by boring Bauhaus inspired-monstrosities. Function, not beauty, dictated architectural style. And brand new diners (remember those?) and airport terminals were opening and they looked weird -- lots of curves and arched ceilings and warped roofs -- like spaceships out of Forbidden Planet.

One such prime NYC example was the TWA Terminal at JFK airport that opened in 1962.

It was a huge, hulking sweep of curves and open spaces, blindingly white, and it feels very 1960s post-modernesque. It was a functioning terminal for decades until TWA went out of business and the terminal closed in the early 2000s. It sat empty, ready to be bulldozed, until some developers bought and decided to turn it into a hotel.

And now the hottest new hotel in town is far from midtown Manhattan -- it's in southeast Queens!

Today the new TWA Hotel opens to much fanfare. It's obviously a massive, expensive undertaking ($300+ million) with a myriad of rooms starting at $250 a night. There are expensive restaurant (Jean-Georges has one there) plus luxury retail stores, and a 150 person bar inside an airplane tethered to the hotel. Everything is luxury and luxuriously kitschy -- taking something that was once plebian and turning it into something grand. Apparently the owners of this new hotel have huge ambitions for it, they think it'll have nonstop full capacity, and that travellers to and from JFK will want to pony up that much money to spend the night before either flying out or after having landed. 

Either the new TWA hotel will be a huge success or a colossal failure. I'll be watching its fate with keen interest.

Sidenote: I almost exclusively flew on TWA to and from college back in the 1990s. As I mentioned yesterday, I just passed the 20th anniversary of my college graduation so this nostalgia-themed hotel opening today is somehow -- le sigh -- appropriate.

It's just reminder that the present becomes the past quickly, today's ordinary stuff becomes tomorrow's cherished relics, today's noise becomes tomorrow's history, today's frustrations becomes tomorrow's nostalgia.

It was ever thus and forever shall be. 

Coney Island & Fifth Avenue Immortal

There are no two worlds in NYC as different from each other as Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and Coney Island out in Brooklyn. And yet they reflect and compliment each other in great ways. 

One is the epicenter of business, advertising, glamour, elegance, and wealth. The other is the epicenter of wildness and fun. People go to Fifth Avenue to work and revel in the elegance of NYC. People go to Coney Island to let loose in the craziness of NYC.

That's why I loved seeing these two articles about 5th Avenue and Coney Island past. One is an article about a new collection of pictures of 5th Avenue from the 1960s -- one where the men and women are dressed very formally in Mad Men-esque attire. The other is an article from the 1970s about a gang member in Coney Island who's trying to go straight, living in the shadow and danger of the Boardwalk, a world unto itself. 

Then, of course, there are the famous events that takes place in both locales each year -- the Easter Parade on 5th Avenue and its famous bonnets and Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest on the 4th of July. Two great, totally different, NYC experiences.

Heck, 5th Avenue and Coney Island are so iconic that there are even great songs about them! Lou Reed's classic "Coney Island Steeplechase" and Irving Berlin's Easter Parade. 

NYC is forever complimenting itself, a ying and yang all its own.

Remembering "My Two Dads"

If you ever saw the movie The Player, you learn how movies get made -- a writer or director or producer or someone goes to a studio executive and "pitches," saying something like, "So here's the idea: we team a daredevil cop who doesn't play by the rules with a rookie or a babe or a chimp" (okay, so I stole this line from a Sonic TV commercial but you get the idea).

Much is the same for TV shows: "Okay, so six friends in New York who hang out in an apartment and a coffee shop and joke about their love lives" -- such pitches are what make TV history.

At some point in the mid-1980s, a writer named Michael Jacobs pitched a show to NBC called My Two Dads and I'd love to imagine he told Brandon Tartikoff and Warren Littlefield (the guys who ran NBC at the time), "Okay, so two guys who live in New York banged the same chick back in the 1970s, find out that she died and that she has a teenage daughter and that either of them might be the father, so -- work with me here! -- they decide to raise her together because, you know, that's believable."

But that's exactly the premise for this late '80 sitcom that starred a post-Diner, pre-Mad About You Paul Reiser, some guy named Greg Evigan, and a girl named Staci Keanan who went onto greatness in the 1990s sitcom Step By Step. Each episode presented the two VERY NOT GAY men living together in a stylish NYC loft with lots of neon lights on the wall as they negotiate taking care of this wonderful young lady who has completed disrupted their previously swinging single lives -- and learning important life lessons about along the way. 

Much like Friends, My Two Dads existed in an NYC fantasy land of huge apartments and jobs requiring little work. Unlike other NYC series, the city existed in the background, making it an almost generic setting. But I remember when I occasionally saw this show as a kid  that it was the rare show (besides Kate & Allie, about two other VERY NOT GAY people, in that case women living together) set in NYC. 

What makes watching this show interesting is that, while it's painfully dated, it's a perfect time capsule from the 1980s: a sitcom about how great family is, even when that family consists of two men as parents but of course they are VERY NOT GAY (hard to believe but this show ran nearly 30 years before gay marriage was legalized and the idea of two non-straight men raising a family was unthinkable) plus lots of neon, pastels, and music with saxaphones. 

Believe it or not, as absurd as the premise for this show was, it actually ran for three seasons (from 1987-1990) during NBC's 1980s glory days of Cheers, The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Night Court, and LA Law. It was one of those shows that was a minor hit and, after it was cancelled, completely and totally forgotten about (until now). Today if you pitched a show like this you'd get laughed out of the room but it was perfectly in tunes with its conservative times. 

A few years ago I heard Paul Reiser on a podcast talking about how he came to be on My Two Dads. In the 1980s, Reiser had a big stand-up comedy career and was also acting in big movies like Beverly Hills Cop and Aliens. His agent told him that NBC wanted him to do this pilot but that it was so silly that it would never get picked up and he'd get a quick and easy pay day. Instead ... he found himself stuck on a show he didn't really like for three years but, he said, it made him realize that he'd like to create his own show and that eventually became Mad About You (a vastly superior and much beloved 1990s classic). 

If you're interested in this very odd piece of 1980's TV and NYC nostalgia, you can find a lot of full episodes on YouTube or watch the pilot here:

Remember -- VERY NOT GAY

Michael Cimino, RIP

When did you last get excited by a movie? When was the last time a movie came out that made you want to see it - again and again and again?

I remember in the 1990s when Pulp Fiction hit theaters - it was so exciting, such daring filmmaking, such thrilling storytelling, that I went to see it four times in the theaters. Back then, movies seem to matter to people, personally, and they seemed to be important cultural touchstones as well. Movies were, dare I say it, important. They mattered. They lived.

Today? Movies suck - or mostly suck. These days, TV shows have the cultural edge that movies once enjoyed. For the most part, movies now are either one of two things: huge, cynical, money-hungry enterprises (think of the proliferation of "franchises" and the unending number of sequels) or calculated "Oscar-bait", movies designed to win awards and make some money but are otherwise forgettable. Movies don't excite anymore. They don't live inside us or the culture. The artistry of film making isn't moving forward, taking strides. It's stuck. And that's sad.

So how did we get here? It took a long time. While movies were burning up the culture in the 1970s through the 1990s, the seeds of their downfall were being planting at the same time, namely the era of blockbusters and sequels, along with the upwards spiral of production costs. But most of all came the huge costs of failure. When movies fail, they not only lose money but can destroy careers.

In 1978, a director named Michael Cimino made a movie called The Deer Hunter, about working class men and women who's lives are shattered by the Vietnam war. The movie was a huge success - it made lots of money and won several Oscars, including Best Picture. Two years later, Cimino produced his follow-up, Heaven's Gate, about 19th century land wars in the American West. This movie failed catastrophically, so much so that the studio that financed it went under. 

It was the first time that a movie's failure actually did something so devastating. Needless to say, the studios reacted accordingly. In the decades that followed, movies became increasingly "safer" so as not to offend audiences and critics. That's not to say, in the ensuing decades, that there still haven't been other huge failures as well as other exciting movies (like Pulp Fiction). But over time, safeness won over daring. The deary cinematic landscape we live in today is largely due to the failure of Heaven's Gate -- a movie that tried every bit to be as good as The Deer Hunter but wasn't.

Michael Cimino died last week, and his professional trajectory tells us a lot about the culture we live in today. After his once promising career was derailed, Cimino only directed a small number of movies, most of which critics and audiences ignored. This was, and is, a shame. A daring director was largely sidelined because of this (certainly huge) failure and the art of film, I think, suffered as a result.

Movies matter less now because directors are increasingly not the voices of their own films. When was the last time you saw a movie and really felt like you saw art being created? Yes, such film "auteurs" like Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, and the Coen Brothers are still making movies - but for how much longer? And when they're gone, who will replace them? I have no idea. There seem to be no young auteurs on the horizon.

When you watch both The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate, putting aside both movies' virtues and flaws, what strikes you about them is that these are stories being told by a great directorial voice; that you are watching someone's singular vision spring to life; that these are movies that do what only movies can do best: tell a story through moving images, the director as storyteller. Like a painter using paints and brushes, like a writer using words and a pen, like a sculptor using stones and chisel, this is a director using camera and film to tell a story and imprint an artistic style on your consciousness. Cimino didn't need special effects, he didn't need clever dialogue, he didn't need fancy editing, he didn't need any visual or storytelling tricks - he was amazingly confident in the way that he simply pointed and moved the camera, coreographing his scenes with such skill, that his vision came across so strongly that you were left with an impression that lasted long after these movies were over. 

Having seen both films, I remember them - the storytelling is unconventional, the performances are bold, the camera work is thrilling and confident, a master clearly at work. Ask yourself this: when was the last time you saw movie where you felt like this? Probably a long time.

And as good as television is these days, it will never have the cinematic visual power of the movies. Television is still mostly a writer's medium with the director serving as the writer's handmaiden. That's fine! But movies are first and last a director's medium, and they are at their most powerful when the director's voice rings loudly.

In many ways, Cimino both exemplified everything that used to be great about movie making and was also indirectly responsible for its decline. His ego, apparently, got in the way of his work. But now that he has passed on, it's important to remember that filmmakers like him used to reign supreme in our culture and that hopefully, one day, movies will live again.

PS. You must read Final Cut by Steven Bach, generally considered the best book ever written about the movie business, which chronicles the turbulent history of Heaven's Gate. It paints Cimino in a very unflattering light but, after reading it, you'll understand how movies are what they are today. You can find the documentary based on the book at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyeOmPMHRYg.

PPS. Cimino was a New Yorker, originally from Long Island, but he got his start working in advertising in NYC in the Mad Men era of the 1960s.

Review: "Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, and the Price of a Vision" by Charles Elton

Over the years I've blogged about one of the most mercurial movie directors of all time -- Michael Cimino -- who had one of the most spectacular rises and falls in all of Hollywood history.

Originally from New York, Cimino directed brilliant TV commercials in the 1960s (the Mad Men era) before going out to Hollywood in the 1970s. He achieved major success in the movies, directing the 1974 Clint Eastwood hit Thunderbolt and Lightfoot followed by The Deer Hunter in 1978 -- a big hit that won Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director for Cimino.

Then it all came crashing down. 

His 1980 movie Heaven's Gate was one of the biggest flops ever -- and it triggered the sale of its studio, United Artists, effectively ending the company's existence. Until 1996, Cimino only directed four more movies -- including the great NYC crime thriller The Year of the Dragon in 1985 -- and then nothing at all until his death in 2016.

Cimino's life and career has always fascinating me. How could someone so talented, who had such major success, let it all slip away? How could he make a movie as great as The Deer Hunter followed by one as disastrous as Heaven's Gate? And what happened to him in those last twenty years of his life?

These questions about this unique cinematic figure also fascinated British author Charles Elton whose new book about Cimino is the first real biography of the director. Elton attempts -- and does -- answer some of these questions while leaving others frustratingly (for him and us) open.

One problem with writing about Cimino is that he lied -- a lot -- about himself: he embroidered his birthdate, his education, his family life, even his supposed military service to people. It's not clear if all this dishonesty was pathological or some kind of game he enjoyed playing with the press and public. And in a business of exhibitionists he was mostly reclusive, not courting publicity or attention. The people around him also mostly practiced this omerta, with few speaking publicly about him.

When Cimino died in 2016, the tributes and retrospectives of his life and career were few and far between -- this Oscar winning director seemed mostly forgotten except for a few like yours truly. So this new biography is a much appreciated -- and much needed -- evaluation of the life and career of a singular, controversial and important cinematic icon. I strongly recommend it. 

Memo from NYC

Tonight on PBS is the season finale of the British show "Downton Abbey." If you've never seen it, it's a costume drama about the complex lives and loves of a British noble family in early 20th century England -- and the lives and loves of their servants. It has a great cast, gorgeous production values, and is a lot of fun. The show was a big hit in the UK and is now a big hit here. Mr NYC is, for one, a big fan.

It's fast becoming the water cooler show of the Yuppie set -- think "Sopranos", think "Sex and the City", think "Mad Men."

But as good as "Downton Abbey" is, haven't we seen this show before?

Well, yes. It was called "Upstairs, Downstairs" and it ran for five seasons in the early 1970s. At the time, it was as huge a show as there has ever been. It was about a wealthy British political family in -- guess -- early 20th century Britain, and their servants. It was a high class soap opera but so much more. "Upstairs, Downstairs" was the first show to ever reach more than a billion viewers worldwide (the second show to do this was "Baywatch" in the '90s) and it won lots of Emmys.

Last year the wife and I watched the whole series on Netflix, right after seeing the first seasons of "Downton Abbey." And while "Downton Abbey" is good, "Upstairs, Downstairs" is truly great TV. 

What makes it great? Because it was a stark, unsentimental, visceral look at the English class system, and how it warped and distorted and corrupted the lives of both masters and servants. They all seemed trapped by this system that was bigger than all of them, and they were all quietly dying inside. Also, the performances in "Upstairs, Downstairs" were so powerful, you truly believed that the masters had been rich and privileged all their lives and the servants came from poverty. The sexual, familial, and social tension in every scene of the show was almost unbearable. That's great drama.

With "Downton," on the other hand, you get the sense that the masters and servants are all great pals and that this English class system is actually quite a great thing. And the masters and the servants seem, for the most part, indistinguishable from each other. 

As the author of this article says about "Downton Abbey"

Edward Gorey, that beloved and prolific purveyor of doomed Edwardians, once told an interviewer that his mission in life was to make everybody as uneasy as possible, because, he said, “that’s what the world is like.” What “Downton Abbey” offers, by contrast, is a utopian version of the past that’s custom made for the present sociopolitical morass. It presents a system so perfect that it can weather any upheaval, smooth out any wrinkle, absorb any shock. It refers incessantly to the coming collapse of the social order and then sets up its conflicts like bowling pins to be swiftly knocked down and neatly swept away.

And drama, like life, is never neat. So while we can all enjoy "Downton Abbey", I would urge all Mr NYC readers to get "Upstairs, Downstairs" on Netflix now. 

Review: "Speed-The-Plow"

Twenty years ago Broadway saw the premiere of David Mamet's three-person play "Speed-the-Plow", a vicious expose of Hollywood and, by extension, the nature of American capitalism. I remember when it opened in 1988 (oh yes, I remember it well) because Madonna was making her Broadway debut. It also starred Joe Mantegna as hot shot movie producer Bobby Gould and Ron Silver as his uberloyal assistant Charlie Fox and has been revived many times since.

The most recent rival opened on Broadway last week and stars Jeremy Piven from Entourage as Bobby, Raul Esparza (Pushing Daisies and last year's Broadway revival of "Company") as Charlie, and Elisabeth Moss from Mad Men as Betsy (can you imagine playing a part originated by Madonna? The pressure!). The plot revolves around a can't miss movie project that Charlie brings to Bobby that they know will make them both very rich. In the meantime they make a bet for $500 that Bobby can sleep with his new secretary Betsy. Bobby lures Betsy to his house by asking her to read and report on a silly book that will never get made into a movie. But then ...

Needless to say, the clashing of sex and ambition leads to the story's not-terribly surprising ending. The moral of this story: doing what is right is unimportant if it gets in the way of making money. Making the movie that means something and has a positive message is irrelevant if it doesn't put people in the seats. A conscience is the enemy of ambition. Money conquers all.

This new production may be the most Mametesque of Mamet plays: a fast moving, bleak morality tale with super-stylized dialogue and a minimalist set. Piven is hypnotic as Bobby Gould, and while his performance reminds you a great deal of his character on Entourage, he crafts a man who wants to do the right thing but can't put his ambition aside. Elisabeth Moss does a decent job as Betsy but, to be fair to her, her part is a little underwritten (Mamet has never created a great female character in all honesty). The real star, the real blazing talent in this show, is Raul Esparza. He is a Broadway star if there ever was one and his Charlie Fox -- a totally heartless, self-centered narcissist -- is searing. I saw him in "Company" last year where he created a lovable Bobby but his talent is such that he does a completely convincing 180 to become the devil incarnate. His performance alone is worth the "price of admission."

So see "Speed-the-Plow" if you can. In these brutal economic times, it's a good reminder of how the almighty dollar controls us all.

Manhattan End-to-End via #1

Let's take a little trip. Let's travel from one end of Manhattan to the other.

Let's traverse this narrow thirteen-mile island that fascinates and captures the imaginations of peoples around the world.

And let's do it via the #1 subway line, noting the most signficant stops along the way, subway stations that are more than just various gateways into Manhttan -- they are portals into American culture, history, and power. 

Now there's something important to remember: Manhattan technically extends beyond Manhattan Island. There is a small neighborhood just north of the island called Marble Hill that is legally part of the Borough of Manhattan. So as we look north from the bottom of Marble Hill, we can look north towards the Bronx.

Then we turn around and see  the northern tip of Manhattan island as well as the bridge with the crosswalk and subway tracks that will take us into it.

Now we'll go upstairs to the Marble Hill 225th Street station and take a look at the subway route on the #1 that we'll be following (as well as map of the geographic route we'll be crossing).

Now the train has rattled into the station, we get on and sit down, and we're off!

After a few stops we hit 181th street street. This is where we'll find the George Washington Bridge. Dubbed "the world's busiest bridge," this northern-most expanse connects the city to the rest of America, with cars flowing in and out of NYC and the rest of the continent. It's also, apparently, a popular place for some lost souls to end their lives -- sometimes to dark, comic effect. 

Few more stops and we hit 137th street and City College. 

This public college in the heart of Harlem is one of the great institutions for American learning. For over a century, poor kids from all over NYC could go to City College and pursue the American dream. The students and graduates of City are extraordinary: ten Nobel Prize winners, mayors, Supreme Court justices, US Senators and Secretaries of State, Oscar-winners, Emmy-winners, Pulitzer Prize-winners, astronauts and founders of big companies, and so many more! Heck, even fictional people have gone to City College: Gordon Gekko from Wall Street and Don Draper from Mad Men most notably.

Also, it's where both of my parents worked for almost 40 years, met, fell in love, and produced Mr NYC.

One more stop and we're in Harlem, above ground, at 125th Street.

What else can I say about Harlem, the capital of the black American experience, where great black artists and pioneers lived and worked. Also, it's also one of the hearts of American culture with Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club.

One more stop and we're at 116th street and Columbia University.

One of the seven Ivy League Universities, this institution of higher learning pre-dates the United States itself, originally chartered in 1754 by King George II (hence the original name King's College). Besides being a great and famous university, Columbia has been a site for brilliance and controversy, where great minds have flowered and fought over decades. 

Now we chug down past several stops on the Upper West Side to 66th street and Lincoln Center. 

Home to ballet, opera, symphonies, musicals and plays, Lincoln Center is the multi-theater complex that, along with Broadway, defines NYC as the cultural capital of America. While encompassing only a few small blocks, its impact across America is massive -- including the many performances that are broadcast from there. I have personal recollections of performing at Lincoln Center and have blogged about it a lot -- including my own experience in partaking in a live broadcast. 

One more stop and we're all 59th Street and Columbus Circle.

The site of the big memorial to Christopher Columbus, it is one of the crossroads of Manhattan, with different avenues intersecting and hugging the lower southwest portion of Central Park. It is also, to my knowledge, the only traffic circle in all over NYC. And these days it is now home to the massive Time Warner building that looms over it.

Two more stops and we're in the most square in all the world -- Times Square. 

Dubbed the "Crossroads of the World" it is the very center of American culture, bedecked with electronic billboards, Broadway theaters, massive chain restaurants -- for many it is New York City, the heart of the heart of it all. And, obviously, it's where the world celebrates New Year's every year.

A quick one-stop and we're at Penn Station on 34th street -- or Pennsylvania Station as it's officlally known.

If the George Washington Bridge is the city's businest car-route into America, Penn is the easily the busiest railway route. Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Railroad all go through it, a central hub that connects the outer-edges of Long Island to the West Coast of the United States.

Penn Station also has a tortured history -- the once gorgeous station was torn down in the 1960s and replaced by a dingy undeground hovel. In the last twenty-years it has been dramatically rebuilt and re-imagined, a vast improvement of what it was but a sad reminder of what we could have had if we had only preserved the original. Hey, at least the new Penn Station now has a Dunkin' Donuts!

Now we go down several stops and hit Christopher Street -- Stonewall Station. 

Christopher Street is actually a quiet, beautiful area of Greenwich Village but it is now of the iconic birth place of American gay rights movement. On June 28th, 1969, right after the death of gay icon Judy Garland, the Stonewall Inn was raided by cops -- and for the first time, gay people fought back. It took decades for gay rights to be enshrined into American culture and law but it has triumphed mightly. And it all started on this small block of Manhattan.

Our journey is almost over but we have one more stop until the end -- the World Trade Center.

Of course it used to be the World Trade Centers -- until September 11, 2001 when it became Ground Zero, then, after an extensive rebuilding, One World Trade Center. 

The story of this patch of Lower Manhattan is one of great triumph and tragedy in American history, where George Washington celebrated his victory in the American Revolution and where American was also brutally attacked two centuries later. It's the symbol of American financial power and dominance. Its where Manhattan and NYC began and where it grew out from. It is the complicated heart and soul of the world's greatest nation and its greatest city.

 

And now we come of the end of our journey. We reach the South Ferry-Whitehall Station aka. the Battery, and we pop up out of our seat and go upstairs into the very southern edge of Manhattan. 

We're right across the street from the entraces to the Governor's Island and Staten Island Ferrys, and we can see (and smell) the vastness of New York Harbor, the watery gateway to city and the force that unites the five boroughs. 

And then we walk down a few blocks, turning to look uptown to see where we came from ...

... and then we look down to the southern tip of Manhattan with the rest of NYC and America beyond it.

I hope you've enjoyed this trip along the #1 subway line, seeing the amazing stops and spots of Americana along the way. You can do it yourself in just under and hour. And I hope, maybe, that you learned something!