In the 1960s, some young writers like Tom Wolfe, Pete Hamill, Gay Talese and others began a movement called the "New Jouralism" -- a kind of rock'n'roll writing that was funny, nasty, entertaining, high voltage, and told from a personal perspective but that still skewed to the riguers of the journalistic craft.
They wrote for all the big magazines like Esquire, The New Yorker, New York, and others, and also published big best-selling books.
Most of the New Journalist writers are gone now but Gay Talese, at age 93, is still around. In fact, he's just published a new book about NYC called A Town Without Time, a collection of his writings about the city. I can't wait to read it -- a book about the greatest city by one of its greatest writers.
An NYC legend.
If you want to know more about Gay Talese excellent work, you should read his 1969 about The New York Times called The Kingdom and the Power, his famous 1966 essay "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold"(regarded as one of the greatest single pieces of journalism ever written), and his 1980 about the rise of swinging and sexual liberation called Thy Neighbor's Wife. We'll probably never see his likes again.
Fifty years ago today, one of the most famous headlines in NYC history ran in the Daily News:
The city was on the cusp of bankruptcy and needed a bailout from the Feds. President Ford said no -- until a deal was later reached, a plan for fiscal stability created, and bankruptcy was avoided.
It wasn't the first, or the last time, when NYC seemed doomed -- and all the naysayers in the media were trashing the city, saying it sucked, and destined to go the way of Imperial Rome. But, as always, it recovered -- just as it did later from the crack epidemic of the late 1980s/early 1990s, 9/11/2001, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
People keep betting against NYC, and losing. You weren't dead fifty years ago and we aren't today.
For all of Mr NYC's coverage about the prematurely called "death of NYC" go here. And also read this insightful article into how NYC has changed in the last half-century.
The news that Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman is getting her second divorce made my mind race back to the early 2000s when she divorced movie star Tom Cruise.
In the 1990s "Tom and Nic" were the biggest celebrity couple in the world. Great actors, huge stars, they made lots of big hit movies (A Few Good Men, Jerry McGuire, To Die For, and many others), and they also made three together, including their last and most notable one, Eyes Wide Shut in 1999.
I remember when news of this movie was announced. It was a big deal -- the biggest movie star couple in the world making a movie with one of the greatest directors of his time, the Bronx-born Stanley Kubrick. They were making a weird movie, in secret, in England, and no one knew anything about it. The entertainment media of the day was fascinating by what this movie would be -- and the secrecy of its making and content became its currency.
There was also a lot of other drama surrounding Eyes Wide Shut.
A noted perfectionist, Stanley Kubrick spent almost two full years shooting the movie -- keeping these two huge stars off screens and out of other movies, much to the industry's consternation. Various actors kept getting hired, then fired, or replaced because the open-ended schedule made their continued participation impossible. The movie was supposed to be released in late 1998 -- then was bumped to the summer of 1999 where it would compete with the big action movies.
Then, the biggest dramatic moment of all -- in the Spring of 1999, just a few months before the movie's release, Stanley Kubrick died. Suddenly. So this secret movie with the two biggest starts in the world would be the last movie from the directors of Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket. Wow!
Then, in July 1999, after all the hype, after reams and reams, hours and hours of coverage, the movie comes out and ... no one cares. It dies quickly. And more than 25 years later it's forgotten -- except for being the last hurrah for Tom and Nic. There divorce two years later would be its coda.
So what's Eye's Wide Shut about? I still don't know.
It takes place in Manhattan during Christmas time. Cruise is a wealthy, successful doctor, with a gorgeous, very bored housewife played by Nic. One night they go to a party, flirt with other people, then go home where Nic confesses her fantasies about sleeping with other men. Tom is horrified -- so he goes out walking the strees of wintertime NYC. He meets a friend of his who works in a piano bar and he tells Tom about a masked orgy out of Long Island where the friend plays the piano during all the nooky. Tom decides to go out to Long Island, puts on a Venetian mask, and witnesses all the nooky -- before he's found out, humiliated, ejected from the orgy, and made to fear for his life.
And there's something about hookers in the meantime too.
I love, love, love Stanley Kubrick's films but this one was boring, and his weakest effort. There's really no story, and you're not made to care about any of the characters. It's visually amazingly and it's more like an early-sound European movie than a modern organic film.
When this movie was being made, and stories about it kept appearing, I was in college, and remember being super excited to see it. Then I graduated, came home, saw the movie that summer ... and left totally underwhelmed. Looking at the movie decades later, it's still lifeless -- and even more depressing considering the horrors we've learned about sexual abuse by rich people in the wake of Jeffrey Epstein.
Still, Eyes Wide Shut is an interesting look at a filmmaker at the end of his life, making his oddest movie ever, in a make-believe NYC at night, with two huge movie stars whose marriage would soon end -- and would gone on to other great movies, as well as more divorces.
The Republican candidate for mayor and founder of the vigilante group Guardian Angels Curtis Sliwa has only ever had one real job in his life -- radio talk show host on WABC 770 AM. I've blogged a lot about this only in NYC figure and you should read my archive on him.
Anyway, now he's running for mayor a second time and he's being bullied to drop out on the belief that this will transfer his support to former Governor Andrew Cuomo and get him elected instead of the scary brown Muslim Socialist.
Sliwa was on the air the other day and wasn't taking the ball breaking lightly so he declared that he has formally quite WABC and will never be heard on its air again.
Well, it'll be interesting to see if he makes this pledge -- the assumption is he'll lose the mayor's race and I'm sure he'll need a job but I'll give him a little bit more respect if he actually keeps his word.
On the edge of NYC -- the gateway, the doorstep of America -- the deck, the plants, the railing, the river, the cliffs and lights and landscape of the mainland, the rest of the America rolling out beyond them, vanishing into the night and the future.
On this night at the end of 1972, just months after The Godfather and Play It Again, Sam had been released, and The Tonight Show had moved to the West Coast, a very young, very nervous, very funny Diane Keaton spoke with Johnny Carson.
They talked about a lot of things, including living in NYC. What a golden moment!
In the legend of the American West and cowboy culture, few people loom larger than Wyatt Earp. A lawman who roamed in 19th century America, his legend was enshirined at the Shout Out at the Ok Corrall, portrayed in many movies, a key moment in the wild history of the American story.
And his third wife, Josephine, had an amazing life too.
She was the daughter of a baker -- and was Jewish! Raised mostly in San Francisco, she ran away at age 14 and headed to Arizona. Allegedly she worked as a prostitute under the name of Sadie, got married, and eventually moved to the notorious Tombstone. Eventually she got rid of her husband and hooked up the frontier marshall Wyatt Earp -- they married in 1892 and stayed together until his death in 1929. After the infamous shootout, the couple moved around from Colorado, Nevada, even Alaska, prospecting for gold, until settling in Los Angeles. She died in 1944.
Josephine's life story is somewhat mysterious and controversial. In 1967 her supposed autobiography was published called I Married Wyatt Earp -- and it turns out most of it was made up. Also, Josephine was cagey about much of her past, mostly about the hooker part, so she remains something of a fascinating mystery.
That said, one thing is certain -- this legendary lady of the wild American West, this icon of the frontier was native New Yorker. Josephine was born in NYC in 1861 before her Polish immigrant baker father took the family west. Her life is a example of how NYC is not only the great American city but it's the great American entry point, the mother city, the seed from which the rest of the nation grows.
