Born, raised, and living his entire life in NYC, Tony Roberts was the quintessential New York actor -- he did theater, TV and movies, his characters always bringing the city to life.
Tony made several movies with Woody Allen including two of his very best -- Annie Hall and Hannah & Her Sisters. And he made other classic NYC films like Serpico and The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3.
I also recall him being in an incredible episode of Law & Order back in the 1990s.
Most of all, Tony Roberts was a great Broadway actor, starring in over 20 shows over the decades. I saw him on Broadway twice -- in 1990 in Jerome Robbins' Broadway and in 2009 in The Royal Family which I reviewed here.
He was also a delight to see, a cool, calm, reassuring prescence, and he was always very funny. His best line in Annie Hall: "Where I used to live is now a pornographic equipment store."
In 1973 a movie called Serpico starring Al Pacino about the corruption whistler-blower NYPD cop Frank Serpico came out. To this day it remains a classic flick with one of Pacino's best early career performance (it came out between the first two Godfathers).
Then in 1976 a TV series called Serpico starring a guy named David Birney about an NYPD cop named Frank Serpico who busts other corrupt cops came out, ran for 15 episodes, got cancelled, and was promptly forgotten.
This being Mr NYC, I'm naturally interested in little forgotten cultural nuggets like this. And even though it wasn't a great show, it's certainly an interesting late 1970s slice-of-life. The show's pilot aired in April 1976 and then for half-a-season from September 1976 to January 1977.
Interestingly enough (for me) the show aired at the same time the recently deceased Jimmy Carter was elected and when yours truly was born. It also went off the air at the start of one of the most consequential years in NYC history.
If you have any interesting in watching this show, you can actually see the whole series here. And believe it or not, as of this writing, Frank Serpico is still alive at the age of 88!
This blog, and others like it, love to reminisce about the old days in NYC, when the city was cheaper and funkier -- yes, it was much more dirty and dangerous but at least it was more accessible and more vibrant.
So often it feels, when you look at old movies, TV shows, and documentaries about NYC in decades past, that it's like looking through a fun-house mirror at a place that's both near and distance, familiar and foreign, so close and yet so far. And the feeling you get, or at least that I get, is that that NYC, that period in the city's life, whatever it is, whenever it was, is well and truly over -- buried if not forgotten.
But what if the past isn't fully over, what if the ghosts of decades-old NYC are still haunting us?
Such is the case of a former NYPD cop named Bill Phillips who, in the early 1970s, testified for the Knapp Commission and helped to expose massive corruption in the department. Unlike his contemporary Frank Serpico, a truly honest cop who blew the whistle about his dirty colleagues, Phillips was as dirty as any of them -- but, when he got busted, he agreed to tell the commission everything he knew in exchange for immunity. Lots of corrupt cops got in trouble from his testimony -- and they got their revenge.
According to this fascinating article, a year after Phillips testified, he was charged with a double homicide. He was accused of bribing a hooker and her pimp who weren't, allegedly, paying him their shakedown money. He was convicted and went to prison for decades. But he has maintained his innocence and the evidence it making it clear that he was intentionally framed by his fellow cops. It's a heartbreaking story of an institution meant to protect us but that, like most, is only interested in protecting its own.
To this day, more than 50 years since the murders and more than 50 years since Phillips went to jail, he is fighting to clear to his name (he was released years ago but his conviction stands). He's a very old man now but he's adamant about fighting for his innocence. Even today, half-a-century later, the NYPD is resisting coming clean about this, delaying and denying him justice. Phillips may get exonerated eventually or not but it's reminder that some of the old problems of old NYC haven't gone away -- and that the present NYPD is still very much like the past NYPD.
And it's a reminder that the past in NYC is never fully gone.
On the face of it, the 1970s movies Serpico and The Turning Point couldn't be more different: the former is a real-life story about dirty cops, the latter is a fictional story about ballet.
But watching them makes you realize they share a lot in common: besides both movies being made in the 1970s in NYC, they are gritty, brutal, totally realistic deep-dives into high-pressure, competitive, all-consuming worlds that their denizens both love and revile, that reach into the very cores of their being, enthralling and warping them, and completing devouring their lives.
Back in the 1970s Hollywood used to make movies like these, movies where not everyone and everything was beautiful, where the world was reflected back to us in all of its deformed glory, where we saw and heard people who were in pain, and where things didn't always end happily. These movies were overshadowed by many othe great classics from that time (The French Connection, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, Rocky, Star Wars, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, you name 'em), but these two slice-of-life movies of believable realism cut just as deep emotionally as any of those other great '70s flicks.
Serpico stars Al Pacino as real-life cop Frank Serpico who "blew the whistle" on massive, entranched corruption within the NYPD, leading to the Knapp Commission and major reforms. Serpico (who's still alive!) was an odd fit with the NYPD, more of a hippy than a tough guy, someone who didn't believe violence and brute force necessarily meant good policing, and someone who didn't think corruption should ever be "business as usual". He took his life into his hands to expose the corruption and, afterwards, quit the NYPD and left the country. Directed by Sidney Lumet at the height of his career, the movie was made just a year after the main events in the film so it was an almost real-time retelling of how and why Serpico changed the NYPD -- and the whole city -- forever. Pacino was just then becoming a star -- the first Godfather movie had just come out and he was just about to start work on the second one -- but this film showed his incredible range, his ability to transform into complicated people, the depth of a soul that is both revealing and mysterious. The film is also a very realistic look at what NYC was like back in the early 1970s and, watching it now, you see how much the city has changed while also realizing that problems with policing are, well, perennial.
The Turning Point is much different but no less intense: as someone who had experience in the world of professional ballet, I can tell you that it's a tough, insular, and unforgiving world. People in ballet LOVE balletto an irrational level, it completely dominates their minds and bodies, they speak and think and do nothing else. They sacrifice their lives and physical, mental, and emotional well-being in pursuit of career in it. There is no divide between their personal and professional lives. This film asks but doesn't attempt to answer this question: at what price glory? Shirley McClaine stars as DeeDee, a woman who relinquished a ballet career to move with her former dancer husband Wayne (Tom Skerritt) to Oklahoma City and raise a family and live a quiet life. Events ensue bringing DeeDee and her daughter Emilia to NYC where Emilia shines with the company, and where DeeDee enounters her frenemy Emma (the always glorious Anne Bancroft) who started with the company at the same time as DeeDee, stayed, and become a big ballet star. There are affairs, fights, and great performances throughout the film that show, in raw and gorgeous ways, the constant fight between ambition and personal happiness, between career and family, about understanding your real values, and the sacrfifices and sadness that go with both. The film offers no easy answers and does what all great movies do -- it shows and doesn't tell (including showing lots of great ballet dancing). It's a film that moves you and makes you think about own life and values.
So if you want to see two old NYC movies that feel just as relevant today as they were more than 40 years ago, I can't suggest Serpico and The Turning Point enough.
Al Pacino is one of the greatest actors in history and still going strong -- he has a new movie where he plays Joe Paterno premiering on HBO in April, and he's making his third movie with Robert De Niro -- also his first with Martin Scorsese -- due out in the next year or so. But he has made so many great movies over the last almost 50 years that the time has come for "retrospectives."
And there's going to be a huge one in NYC starting next week!
If you love movies, love Pacino's acting, then you must go the Quad Cinema from March 14 to 30 where over 30 of his films -- from his 1970s classics to much more recent ones -- will be playing. All the greats, and some of the not so greats, are playing in it, and what's so cool is that Pacino himself was involved in putting this together!
All the movies you love him from are in this: The Godfathers, Scarface, Dog Day Afternoon, and Heat, among many, many others. Even better, a new movie and -- a documentary about the movie -- called Salome and Wilde Salome are premiering on March 30 to conclude this event.
Needless to say, many of Pacino's best movies are set in NYC (again, The Godfathers, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Panic in Needle Park, Sea of Love, The Devil's Advocate, and Carlito's Way). But the Boy from the Bronx also made other cities look cool, bringing his tremendous talent and New York attitude to Los Angeles in Heat, to Baltimore in ... And Justice for All, Miami in Scarface and Any Given Sunday, and Alaska in Insomnia. The man just oozes this city.
No actor I can think of has ever uttered so many memorable lines in film. Among them:
"I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!"
"Attica! Attica! Attica!"
"You're out of order!"
"Say hello to ma' lil' friend!"
"Who-ahhh!" "You want big time? You gonna die big time!"
"'Cause she's got a greeeattttttt ass!"
And many more. Pacino is an interesting cat, always discovering himself in the characters he plays. You gotta read this interview he gave about this retrospective -- he really is Wild Pacino.
If I didn't have two little kids to raise, I would probably be spending every night this month at Film Forum. Until July 27, you can see some of the greatest movies made in NYC during the 1970s in a series called Ford to City: Drop Dead (inspired by the infamous 1975 Daily News headline).
NYC in the 1970s has become an almost mythical place: a cauldron of crime and sleaze and deterioration but also a wellspring of excitement and creative activity, especially when it came to movies. The movies made in that decade and in this town are extraordinary: Panic in Needle Park, Serpico, The French Connection, Klute, Saturday Night Fever, Dog Day Afternoon, Where's Poppa?, Shaft, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Three Days of the Condor, Marathon Man, Annie Hall, Manhattan, The Warriors, Super Fly -- and that's just some of them!
Almost all these movies are playing in this retrospective and it's truly a New York and movie junky's dream. Go see it and be immersed.
Here's an article about the real life August, 1972 bank robbery that inspired the 1975 movie Dog Day Afternoon and the infamous line "Attica! Attica! Attica!"
In the early 1970s, the NYPD had become a notorious, brazenly corrupt institution that everyone in the city feared.
Politicians, the public, even honest cops themselves, dared not speak truth to power to expose the maggots that was eating away at the world's greatest law enforcement organization.
Until some people did.
You may have heard of Frank Serpico who blew the whistle on police corruption and was rewarded with a great 1973 movie starring Al Pacino called ... Serpico.
But he didn't act alone.
David Durk helped him and together the two braved exposing the corruption that led to the formation of the Knapp Commission. In many ways, he was even more responsible for it than Serpico.
Together, they saved the city.
David Durk died last week and the city should take a moment to remember and everything he did for it.
During my hiatus, the great movie director Sidney Lumet died at the age of 86. His career spanned decades and decades, and he made many classic movies, several set in NYC: 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Prince of the City, The Verdict (and many many more). A number of the actors and actresses in his movies were nominated for and won Oscars and actors like Henry Fonda, Al Pacino, Sean Connery, and Paul Newman gave some of their greatest performances in his films. He was a real New York great, a legend, and he made the cultural tapestry of this city all the richer.
And that's one of the great things about NYC: not only do we have amazing buildings and institutions in this town, we also have amazing people -- characters -- who go on to become what you might call "the greats." Boss Tweed, Fiorello LaGuardia, Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, heck even that nutjob Donald Trump -- people whose personalities and work give this city its edge. The id and ego of this town.
The New York Press this week has two articles about two New York greats that you might not know much about but they definitely rank as greats.
One was George "Ginky" SanSouci who died last month and who many revere as one of the best pool players this city has ever had. I don't know much about the game of pool but apparently he was a dynamo -- think Tom Cruise in The Color of Money only real.
Another is Candy Darling, one of the first transgendered New York personalities whose was a part of Andy Warhol's Factory back in the 1960s. Candy was a flamboyant, outrageous figure in the downtown art scene -- the kind of person who knew everybody, went everywhere, did everything (and everyone) and did a whole lot of living in her short life. Candy is the subject of a new documentary and she has become a gay icon over the last several decades. Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground dedicated a song to her called "Candy Says" and she's an important character in the 1996 movie I Shot Andy Warhol. Candy was a real New York great whose spirit still lives on and forms our city today.
I almost called this post The Face of NYC, but I think Extreme Makeover NYC gets more to the point (besides shamelessly riffing off the popular reality show).
As many of you know, plastic surgery has skyrocketed in popularity over the last couple of decades. People now shell out large chunks of their life savings in order to change their appearances and make themselves look younger. Wrinkles, moles, blemishes, bumps and odds and ends can be vanquished by the surgeons scalpel. Indeed, entire decades can be removed from the visages of those willing enough to pay the price and risk the consequences.
Here in NYC, however, it's not that simple. Plastic surgery is an industry but, like so many things these days, it's a niche one. Standards of beauty differ from culture to culture, and people from different cultural backgrounds who want plastic surgery want different kinds of operations. Asians, Russians, Latinos, in particular, have become big customers of plastic surgery but want very different kinds of augmentations. This fascinating article gives you an insight about the plastic surgery business in NYC and how, in order to survive in this competitive market in this competitive town, plastic surgeons better understand what kinds of enhancements their customers are going to want based on their ethnic backgrounds.
But it's not just the literal face of our citizens that are undergoing big changes. The face of this city has changed dramatically in the last forty years. Currently at Film Forum there is a retrospective of Al Pacino movies from the 1970s. Obviously The Godfather movies are his most famous but he made some other classics like The Panic in Needle Park (1971), Serpico (1973) and Dog DayAfternoon (1975) all set in NYC. As this article points out, the city we see in these movies is a very different place than it is today. The face of NYC from the early 1970s to the early 2010s has changed dramatically. Instead of trash and junkies, we have bike lanes and yuppies. Instead of run down rent-controlled buildings, we have glass condos. Watching any movies set in NYC in the 1970s is like peering through the looking glass, seeing a place that is at once totally familiar but also completely alien.
By the way, not all movies set in NYC in the 1970s were scary ones. 2011 marks the fortieth year since Woody Allen released his second movie, and his first real big hit, Bananas. Watching this very funny trailer below from 1971, you see that they don't make movies -- or trailers -- like this anymore.
When I started this blog almost three years ago, it was never meant to be a nostalgia blog, a "those were the days" kinda thing. It was meant to be a dynamic forum capturing life in the world's most dynamic city. I still think it serves that purpose but, increasingly, it's turned more and more into a nostalgia blog.
Perhaps it was inevitable. And I'm the first one to dismiss people who carp about the old days being better than the present. But recent events make it seem like the city has accelerated in a direction that I don't recognize. And as a life-long New Yorker, I'm scared.
Last week I wrote multiple entries about how Old New York Charm (the closings of Tavern on the Green and Cafe des Artists, the ruination of the Plaza Hotel) and Old New York Grit (the cleaning out of Canal Street, Frank Serpico) are disappearing. Then this past week, JD Salinger died (a great NYC writer) and the sale of Stuy-Town officially became a debacle. Also, the great New York movie studio Miramaxclosed last week, now basically a studio in name only but not practice (remember the Miramax hey-dey of the 1990s? The Crying Game, The Piano, Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, Chicago. Gone now.).
I feel like I'm looking out the back window of a car gaining speed as the city I once knew and loved is shrinking and disappearing into invisibility.
And what are we heading to? A city of soulless wealth, boring glass buildings, bad Yuppie taste, super-expensive real estate prices, and pockets of poverty and despair. At this rate, in twenty years, New York will be like Cleveland. Egads.
"It's all falling indelibly into the past." Don Dellilo wrote this as the last sentence of the opening chapter of his 1997 book Underworld. Indelibly -- not easily moved or erased. But increasingly the past is being erased and replaced with a new scary future. Instead of "indelibly" I would say it's inevitable. It's all falling inevitably into the past. Where do we go from here?
Talking about NYC in the past, there's some new books about the city during WW2. They sound interesting.
While gritty old NYC certainly has its charms, it also many downsides -- like massive police corruption. In the early 1970s, honest cop Frank Serpico became world famous for blowing the whistle and exposing the NYPD as basically being a criminal enterprise. His story and what he did became justly famous, leading to the Knapp Commission and reforming the city's police department. It also lead to the great 1973 movie Serpico starring Al Pacino, hot off The Godfather, in one of his greatest roles. The New York Times has a wonderful article about him today. Serpico is still alive, living in the woods upstate. Our city was lucky to have him and owes him an eternal debt.
