Classic Mr NYC

In the summer of 2020, during the depths of COVID, one of the few bright spots of that dark time was interviewing Jean-Pierre Dorleac, a legendary Hollywood costumer designer. He worked on numerous movies and TV shows over the decades but easily one of the highlights of his career was as the costumer for the early 1990s TV show Quantum Leap.

Even though there are now a billion shows on TV and streaming, Quantum Leap remains one of my favorite shows ever. The story of Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula), a brilliant scientist who "leaps" into the lives of other people throughout his own lifetime (roughly 1953-1995), making right where once went wrong, was one of the most imaginative, best written, funny, and emotionally wrenching shows ever on TV. (He was accompanied on his journey by Al, a holographic sidekick appearing from the Imaging Chamber back in the future). Each week Sam leaped into the a new time and place, on a new mission -- and Jean-Pierre Dorleac was the costume design genius who had to dress the characters from different times and places each week, along with designing Al's funky 1990s costumes.

It was a wild, fascinating interview, and I'm grateful to this day that Jean-Pierre agreed to do this interview.

Well, whaddya know? Quantum Leap is back! A reboot pilot has been greenlit for NBC and show "leap" to our screens sometime later this year or next. I'm cautiously excited -- these reboots can be wonderful or a disaster. But it's exciting to know that Quantum Leap remains beloved almost 30 years since it left the air and that the interest exists to re-imagine it and bring it back. I hope it's great. Sadly, Dean Stockwell, who brilliantly played the sidekick Al, won't be a part of it because he passed away late last year. 

Anyway, I hope you'll read my interview with Jean-Pierre and also sign the Change.org petition to bring him back as the costume designer for the reboot. His costumes on that show stood out and it would be great to see him apply his genius to the next generation of this show. You should also read the beautiful tribute that Jean-Pierre wrote about Dean Stockwell last year after his death. 

"Mayor Eric Adams" on Saturday Night Live

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. 

Grant's Tomb at Twilight -- January 11th, 5:20 PM

Sad Day in the Bronx

Peter Bogdanovich RIP

No one in the history of Hollywood had a more Hollywood-like life and career than Peter Bogdanovich.

He has died at age 82. 

A child of immigrants, a bookish kid who loved movies that he started writing about them before making them, Peter was one of the brightest lights in the New Hollywood. He started in the late 1960s with a Roger Corman movie called Targets before hitting it big -- really big -- in the early 1970s with The Last Picture Show, What's Up, Doc? and Paper Moon. His directing career was up and down -- mostly down -- after that initial flush of success but he made some interesting movies in the years and decades afterwards including Mask. His last movie was in 2014, a small comedy called She's Funny That Way (one of the few he made in NYC).

Peter also acted occasionally, including as Dr. Melfi's shrink on The Sopranos. He also made a big documentary about the late Tom Petty and oversaw the restoration in 2015 of never-before-seen Orson Welles movie The Other Side of the Wind. 

Infamously, he turned down the chance to direct Chinatown, something he said was the biggest mistake of his career. 

Peter's love life was crazy -- he got married young, dumped his first wife for a very hot Cybill Shephard, dated lots of other gorgeous ladies, then infamously dated a Playboy Playmate named Dorothy Stratton who was then murdered horribly by her ex-husband (it became the story for the controversial Bob Fosse movie Star 80). Peter then married Dorothy's sister. To paraphrase something Howard Stern once said to Warren Beatty, "We could talk about the movies, but the broads get in the way." In later life, Peter resumed his extensive writing about movies and also became something of a protector of Orson Welles' legacy, his Boswell.

Peter was a man of many talents and travails. 

Most of all, Peter was a New York City kid who grew up on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. The boy from NYC struck out West to fulfill his manifest destiny. Many of his movies are set in the West (most notably The Last Picture Show), a Jewish-immigrant NYC kid's refracted vision of Americana. No wonder he was considered a genius.

RIP Peter. Say "Hi" to Orson for us. 

Classic Mr NYC

In late 2020 I blogged about my memories of WNYC TV, the long defunct public television station that was owned by the city and was the sister broadcaster of WNYC radio.

The programming, as I indicated, was a weird cross between PBS and public access, with lots of international programming along with local shows. In the evening they would mostly show half-hour comedy and drama shows from the UK, much of it very offbeat stuff.

One exception to the British stuff on WNYC TV (although still quite "offbeat") were repeats of a late 1980s series called Trying Times. This was, unusually, an American show and it was actually created for PBS. Today we would call it an "anthology show" -- every episode was a stand-alone story with a totally different cast and characters. It could also be described as a "dramedy" -- the stories had a comic tone but there was a serious current underneath all of them. The episodes weren't laugh-out loud funny but there certainly weren't intensely dramatic. They were, well, weird.

Each episode chronicled painfully ordinary Americans (almost all white, let's face it, it was the '80) as they dealt with the trials and tribulations of life. A young lady goes home with her boyfriend to meet his family and it ends up with the father getting his hand caught in a food disposal in the sink. A woman gets divorced and experiences a miserable moving day. A guy who's been writing his thesis for 10 years has to get a job. I remember one odd episode where woman breaks into the house of a man to sleep with him because she's setting him up for a mob hit -- only to discover later that he's the wrong target.

And on and on. In many ways it was Seinfeld right before Seinfeld -- normal people who get into odd situations that escalate beyond anyone's control. 

There were only about 12 episodes of Trying Times broadcast in 1987 and 1989. It's mostly (okay, completely) forgotten today but it was, in retrospect, way ahead of its time -- a single camera comedy/drama anthology series about wacky people. But what is memorable are the actors and talents who appeared on this show: Rosanna Arquette, Gina Davis, Candice Bergen, Carrie Fisher, Stockard Channing, Griffin Dunne, Robert Klein, Jean Stapleton, Steven Wright -- even Corey Feldman! Many were at the heights of their careers at the time these episodes were made. Some of the directors, also flying high at the time, were Buck Henry, Michael Lindsay-Hogg (currently getting some attention in the epic Beatles documentary), Christopher Guest, and even Jonathan Demme. There was a murderers row of talent in this series -- and one of the producers was, of all people, David Byrne.

You can find episodes of Trying Times on YouTube and watch the Golden Age of Television in its nascent form since you can't time-travel 30+ years and watch it on WNYC TV.

NYC From Space

Strong & Unique

As 2022 unfurls -- and COVID rages on -- here are some reminders that the endurance and uniqueness of New York City is forever.

First, after slumping in the dark first COVID year of 2020, the NYC real estate market rebounded in 2021. People started buy lots more property, boosting the prices and numbers of sales dramatically -- even as the pandemic continues with no real end in sight. This comes as an addendum to the news over the summer that the population of NYC boomed during the last decade by more than 600,000 people making this city, by far, the largest in the country along with the highest growth rate. The strength of the NYC property market, and the continued growth of the population, truly proves that betting against this town, its people, and its future, is just a loser's bet. It's a stark contrast to the wailing you hear in the media, and on social media, with "Oh, New York City is over", "People are leaving in droves", "It's scary there," blah blah blah. The fearmongering, the negativity, the predictions of doom-- all lies! This town is stronger than ever before!

Second, another reminder that NYC is truly a city of islands, a beautiful archipelago, a unique place -- there's a guy who's job is clearing the NYC shorelines of abandoned boats. He works for the Parks Department and is head of "water and marine operations" and makes sure that any "derelict" or discarded vessels are removed -- he and his teams are basically trash collectors of the city's waterways. It's the kind of thing you never thought about before -- what happens in a city of islands like NYC when boats are orphaned and who takes care of them? -- but you then realize it makes total sense. How many other city's have a job like this? Again, one of the great, special things about NYC.   

Mayor Eric Adams