Remembering "Six Degrees" (2006-2007)

Twenty-years ago, before they'd be on Furious, Hope Davis and Campbell Scott appeared together on another show, the short-lived Six Degrees.

Based on the premise first introduced in Six Degrees of Seperation, it's about six different New Yorkers whose lives intersect in various odd ways. They are: Carlos, a public defender struggling with his job; Mae, a recent NYC-transplant with a mysterious past; Laura, an interior designer mourning her husband killed in Iraq (very 2006); Damien, a limo driver and ex-con, trying to live a straight-edge life; Whitney, a high-powered PR woman, Laura's best friend, and with a cheating finance; and Steven, a photographer who just came back to town and who is struggling to reestablish a relationship with his ex-wife and son.

If you're an NYC-junky, this show was for you. But with a premise like this, it needed to be great and it just ... wasn't. It was okay. The main problem is that for a show centered around six people, they needed to be more interesting and their problems needed to be more dramatic. They weren't. The premise was cool but sadly the show didn't really make it compelling. The characters and their storylines were rather boring.

So why am I remembering it?

Well, obviously, because it was a very intensely NYC-show and, naturally, it caught my interesting. Even though the show's drama was underwhelming, it was one of the few shows that really made you feel like you were in the city, and that was unusual (outside of the Law & Order franchise).

Also, it had a great cast: the aforementioned Campbell Scott, Hope Davis, along with Bridget Moynahan (someone also nice to look at) as well as Erika Christiansen (who had been really good in Traffic a few years earlier), and other. They'd all go on to do better stuff.

Another thing is a little more personal: first, one of the creators was a guy named Raven Metzner who I actually went to school with. I also remember one day, leaving my house and walking to work, when I walked by this show being shot on the street early one morning -- and I saw Hope Davis and Bridget drinking coffee and waiting to shoot between setups.

Finally, another reason I remember this odd, long-gone and forgotten show: besides the fact that this show came out preceisely 20 years go, but it was also on just before I started this blog and moved in with my girlfriend.

Six Degrees ran for a few episodes between September and November of 2006, then was pulled from ABC's schedule, then came back in March 2007 and was finally cancelled for good (in fact its last episode airs on March 30, 2007, three days after this blog began). So I remember it here not because it was a great show but because it was truly NYC show and that it was on during an inflection point in my life -- and this was a show all about that!

Sydney Poitier & Michael Lang RIP

Two titans of the 1960s have died, and their lives and careers are a reminder of an era that was both troubled and exciting, where the world was being reshaped, and the repercussions of which we are still living with today. 

Sydney Poitier was a not just a brilliant actor but also a great movie star. He was the first black man to win the Best Actor Oscar, and movies like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and In the Heat of the Night forced white America to see the power of the black voice and experience. Poitier was a boy when he escaped to NYC to start his life that would lead him to cinematic and cultural greatness. In fact, so potent was his reputation that a play called Six Degrees of Separation was written based on the bizarre cob job of a man named David Hampton who claimed to be his son (I blogged about it a while ago; Poitier doesn't appear in the play as a character because he doesn't need to -- his image was so powerful and famous that anyone who saw the play knew who he was and why someone would want to be his son). Poitier has died at the age of 94 and his legacy will on.  

Michael Lang was one of the co-creators of the 1969 Woodstock Festival that made history as one of the greatest and most important cultural events in American history. A kid from Brooklyn, in his early 20s Lang and his colleagues threw together the three (actually four) days of "peace, love, and music" that captured that imagination of the world and is still talked about endlessly to this day. Lang was involved in other musical festivals and music management, and oversaw the 1994 and ill-fated 1999 revivals of Woodstock. He had a reputation, and an affect, of someone for whom the 1960s never ended, who kept the "groovy man" spirit of that decade alive -- right up until the end. Lang has died at the age of 77. For all of Mr NYC's Woodstock coverage over the year's, go here. 

Remembering WQXR 96.3 FM

If you scan the NYC radio dial and hit 105.9 FM, you'll land on the city's only classical music station WQXR 105.9 FM. But for nearly 80 years its home was a little further down at 96.3 FM. Back in 2009, when this blog was about 2 1/2 years old, I chronicled the station's historic move up the dial due to its change in ownership.

Between 1944 and 2009 WQXR was owned by The New York Times as a commercial entity. Not only did the station play classical music but it was, as you might imagine, heavy with news. In between the sonatas and interludes, symphonies and overtures, concertos and chamber music -- the whole array of the classical music cannon -- there would be news delivered directly by Times reporters. The station was a high-class, uber-sophisticate mixture of beautiful music and substantive infotainment. 

My dad used to listen to this station all the time, and I was introduced to all sorts of great music that a kid my age might otherwise not be exposed to. The hosts were amazing as well: amongst them, Robert Sherman, June LaBelle, and the afternoon guy, a very funny man called Lloyd Moss stood out (he used to joke, during traffic reports, how there was always some overturned tractor trailer in the report that someone must be moving it around the city). There were also lots of special music programs like "First Hearing" (where original recordings of classical music would be played) or "Woody's Children" (which Sherman hosted and that played folk music) or live broadcasts from Symphony Space and the Metropolitan Operas on Saturday afternoons.  

As a commercial station, WQXR played ads but they were ads made especially for WQXR. They were very well-produced, and I remember ads for champagne like Veuve Cliquot or B. Smith's or Broadways shows like "Six Degrees of Seperation" or "On Borrowed Time" or high-class restaurants like the long-gone Le 1900. 

Then there was the news.

I remember that every morning before I went to school, my dad would be listening to the news on WQXR and there was a special segment called "The Washington Report", a phoned-in segment by R.W. Apple Jr., the Times' long-serving Washington correspondent. (I remember right after the 1992 election, Apple talking about how the Republicans now had "re-find" themselves after their defeat, much like the Democrats in the 1980s.) At 6 PM every night there was a 45-minute news show called "New York At 6" where there would be a 10 minute national report, a 10 minute "metropolitan report" (i.e. local report), and then various Times' critics would do reports on things like theater (Frank Rich), restaurants (Brian Miller), movies (Janet Maslin) and others. My mom would usually be making dinner during "New York At 6" so I'll always associate this program with the smells of cooking. I also remember that each program would start with the announcer stating very proudly, "THIS ... IS ... NEW YORK ... AT SIX!" followed by swelling and soaring music. At 9 PM each night a reporter would then read the headlines from the front page of the next day's Times, a few hours before the paper would hit the streets. Remember, this was before the Internet or social media so broadcasting the next's days headlines was actually a big deal. 

WQXR also had an AM station. During the week WQXR AM would split off and broadcast a cooking show, a story hour, and a odd comedy show form the BBC called "My Music." You can hear all about that here: 

 

The station was a real jewel.

But then, in 2009, as the financial crises and vagaries of the newspaper business bore down on the Times, the "paper of record" decided to sell WQXR. The powerhouse public radio station WNYC decided to buy it and then turned it into the non-commercial entity it is today, moving it up the dial to 105.9 FM. So the good news is that WQXR still exists and NYC has a thriving classical music station. But the old WQXR 96.3, the WQXR of my childhood that was so great, is long-gone. Here you can listen to its sign-off and remind yourself that, in NYC, everything always changes eventually.  

Review: "Six Degrees of Separation" and Its Legacy

In 1981 a deeply disturbed black seventeen year-old named David Hampton ran away from Buffalo to NYC to start a career as a con man. He had nothing, knew no one, and was lost in the big city. But he was determined, in his own scary way, to "make it there."

He did -- sort of. 

A decade later his bizarre story resulted in a hit play, a movie, and the popularization of the "six degrees of separation" concept into American culture.

In 1983 David Hampton showed up at the home of a wealthy Upper East Side couple, claiming that he had just been mugged in Central Park. He said that he was friends with their children at an Ivy League college and that he was also the son of Sidney Poitier. David "Poitier" was extremely charming, funny, insightful, and he won over the couple instantly. They allowed him to stay the night at their apartment -- only to wake up the next morning to find him in bed with a gay hustler.  David vanished before the police arrived and soon the couple found out that David was a con man who had infilitrated their lives. The playright John Guare knew the couple and, after learning their story, wrote a great play about it -- Six Degrees of Separation -- that eventually became a so-so movie.

The fictional drama expands upon the real story. In the play, David's name is Paul and, after he escapes, the couple try to help the police to find him -- meanwhile he continues to seduce men and con them and others out of money (Paul/David had found this couple in the first place after he had, earlier, randomly seduced a troubled rich kid who really did know this couple's children). But Paul's interuption of this wealthy couple's life makes them realize how fragile, how fake, and how empty their existence truly is. They realize that Paul has, in a strange way, made them examine their lives, their marriage, their relationships with their children, and the whole world that surrounds them -- a world that people like David covet without truly understanding, a world that this couple comes to realize doesn't give them any real happiness. The couple comes to understand the pain that motivates Paul and the pain that they feel but can't acknowledge to themselves -- until Paul forces them to. They come to realize that everybody in the world feels pain, and that randomness, that chance meetings between people, plays a huge role in everyone's lives, and changes their fates. The climax of the play is a monologue that the wife gives. It concludes with:

"I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everybody else on this planet. The president of the United States. A gondolier in Venice. Fill in the names. I find that A) tremendously comforting that we're so close and B) like Chinese water torture that we're so close. Because you have to find the right six people to make the connection. It's not just big names. It's anyone. A native in a rain forest. A Tierra del Fuegan. An Eskimo. I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. It's a profound thought. How Paul found us. How to find the man whose son he pretends to be. Or perhaps is his son, although I doubt it. How every person is a new door, opening up into other worlds. Six degrees of separation between me and everyone else on this planet. But to find the right six people."

Heavy.

The play takes the always uncomfortable issues of race, class, privilege, socioeconomic advantage and envy, and puts them front and center. It makes people look at themselves, think about themselves, in ways that are both uncomfortable and illuminating. And thirty years ago, this was an even bolder thing to do than now -- John Guare was ahead of his time. 

I remember as a kid when this play was being staged at Lincoln Center. I was going to school near there and remember seeing the enormous banner for it on the street every day. I also heard ads for it on WQXR -- "See ... Six Degrees of Separation" -- and on TV. It ran from the fall of 1990 to early 1992 -- and a straight play that runs for more than a year is a big hit. The movie came out in 1993 and wasn't a big hit -- but the legacy of Six Degrees of Separation is immense. 

The success of the play caused David Hampton to threaten John Guare with violence, try to get a cut of the play's profits, and eventually sue the playright (unsuccessfully) for $100 million. And Hampton continued his con man life well after the play and movie were produced, using his newfound celebrity as well as new identities to con people. Eventually he migrated, at least for a time, to Seattle but wound up back East, dying in New Jersey in 2003 from AIDS. His life was tragic, obviously, and ironic -- the most legitimate and successful thing he was ever a part of was something he didn't create, wasn't actually involved in, and didn't get to enjoy the money from. He was like the gangster Henry Hill -- a truly bad guy who's life inspired a truly great work of drama. 

The original 1990-1992 NYC run also inspired a lot of careers from actors I love and who found great success afterwards. The most famous person in the cast at the time was Stockard Channing who had already done Grease and would later be on The West Wing. She was one of the only people from the play to do the movie -- and got an Oscar nomination for it. Courtney B. Vance originated Paul, and others in the cast included Anthony Rapp (Rent), John Cameron Mitchell (a huge actor and playright), Evan Handler (Sex and the City, Californication), David Eigenberg (Sex and the City), and Robert Duncan McNeill (Star Trek: Voyager). Later on Kelly Bishop (pre-Gilmore Girls) replaced Stockard Channing, James McDaniel (pre-NYPD Blue) became Paul, and a very young and totally unknown actress named Laura Linney also joined the cast. Another replacement actress was Deidre Lovejoy would later be on The Wire. In the movie, a young actor nameed JJ Abrams had a small part -- and now he's one of the biggest directors in the world. 

But the legacy of Six Degrees of Separation goes beyond the life of this man and the real and fictional drama he inspired: the concept of "six degrees" became popularized, it became conversation fodder, it became an idea, a meme, part of the popular lexicon -- that we're all seperated in this world, in this life, by only six people. It gripped the public imagination. So much so that a popular game called "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" was created (finding actors who worked with him or worked with other actors who worked with him) that has saved many an awkward conversation. There was even a bad TV show called "Six Degrees" several years ago (that had nothing to do with the play).

Before social media and COVID-19, Six Degress of Separation reminded us that we're all connected to each other, directly and indirectly, one way or another.

I'm pretty sure David Hampton didn't realize, in 1983, that so many great careers would be spawned, and American culture altered, by his one-night con. 

The world truly is a random place. 

Postscript: I never saw the play when it ran in NYC but I saw it a couple of years later in Washington, DC with Marlo Thomas in the lead role. She was great but sadly I don't remember much else about the production.

You can read all of the various articles The New York Times wrote about Six Degrees of Separation here. 

The Best Outer Borough Movies

My previous post on Working Girl got me thinking about movies set in the boroughs outside of Manhattan. There are a number of films -- some old, some more recent, some great, some not -- set in places where the vast majority of New Yorkers actually live. Here are a few of the most memorable. Please let me know if I'm missing any really great ones. I'm sure there are some I missed that'll make me smack my head and shout "D'OH!"

The Bronx

Marty (1955): A beautiful movie about a lonely butcher looking for love. Ernest Borgnine creates one of the greatest characters ever etched on film. It swept the 1955 Oscars, including Best Picture, Actor, Director and Original Screenplay.

A Bronx Tale (1993): Robert De Niro's directorial debut about a boy in the Bronx trying to live honestly in a world of crime.

Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981): Cops in a war zone, led by Paul Newman. Very controversial at the time.

Awakenings (1991): One of De Niro's best performances about catatonic patients brought back (briefly) to life. Based on the story of Dr. Oliver Sacks.

Finding Forrester (2000): Not a great movie by any means but it does have Sean Connery saying "You're the man now dog!"

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990): Awful movie based on a great book. One of the great bombs of all times. It does, however, give you a very good idea of what the Bronx was like the late 1980s -- namely, scary.

Brooklyn

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944): A Cary Grant classic about old ladies in Brooklyn Heights who murder people. Ronald Reagan was actually considered for the Cary Grant part at one time.

The Squid and the Whale (2005): Very funny, very sad movie about a miserable family in Park Slope. The best performance Jeff Daniels has ever given.

Moonstruck (1987): Cher's Oscar (Olympia Dukakis got one to). A beautiful film about Italians, baking, opera, and the insanity of love. Classic lines: "Where are you taking me?" "To da' bed!"

Radio Days (1987): Perhaps Woody Allen's sweetest movie. A tribute to childhood in the 1940s, classic radio, and growing up Jewish.

Saturday Night Fever (1977): Gave us John Travolta, the Bee Gees, and polyester. Best line: "You know I work on my hair 'long time and he hits it ... he hits my hair!"

She's Gotta Have It (1986): Spike Lee's first movie.

Do The Right Thing (1989): Spike Lee's best movie.

Smoke/Blue in the Face (1995): Dual movies about the lives of people who frequent a smoke shop. Harvey Keitel was never so sweet.

Dog Day Afternoon (1975): "Attica! Attica! Attica!" Al Pacino's greatest performance ever. Based on a real bank robbery gone very wrong.

Queens

Goodfellas (1990): The life of Henry Hill, a great movie about a very bad man. The best mob movie ever, Scorsese's masterpiece, and the immortal lines, "Funny? Funny how? Like I'm a clown, I amuse you, I make you laugh?"

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006): Strange but touching little movie about life in lower-class Astoria in the 1980s. Robert Downey Jr. gives a lovely performance.

Queens Logic (1991): Never saw it, no one did apparently, but it's an ensemble piece about Queens and it should really help you with that "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game.

Coming to America (1988): Eddie Murphy's funniest movies about an African prince looking for a wife in, well ... Queens! His best comic performance ever.

The Wrong Man (1956): True story about an innocent man accused of murder. Alfred Hitchcock and Henry Fonda -- need I say more?

Staten Island

Working Girl (1988): A "goil" named Tess with big dreams who gets it all.

Sisters (1973): One of Brian De Palma's pre-Carrie movies. Before she was Lois Lane, Margot Kidder starred in this psychological thriller.

School of Rock (2003): Jack Black comedy about teaching kids how to rock. It was completely filmed in this borough.

Summary

It looks like Brooklyn's got most of the best movies made about it, followed by Queens, followed by The Bronx, followed by Staten Island. But who really cares about pecking order. These movies show that some of the most interesting New York characters in movie history were from the outer boroughs.

Next up -- the best outer borough novels and TV shows.