Astoria-native Melanie Safka is one of those under-the-radar singer-songwriters whose name you don't readily remember but whose songs you know -- especially her 1972 hit "Brand New Key."
Yet three years before that big success, Melanie played Woodstock, one of only three female solo acts to perform (the others were Janie Joplin and Joan Baez -- great company).
Melanie didn't die young like Joplin or have quite as colorful a life as Baez -- she just wrote and performed great songs, and continues to do so to this day.
"Brand New Key" appeared in a VERY MEMORABLE NSFW scene in the 1997 movie Boogie Nights -- and the song is even sexier than the scene, truly, the the most sexy song of all time.
New York City is, fundamentally, a city of workers. We're not the richest and most powerful city in the country because we're a bunch of lazybones. There are numerous socioeconomic classes in NYC but combined they are all part of one big class -- the working class, the hard working class.
If you listen to the media, you'd be forgiven for believing that the "working class" is mostly elsewhere in "middle America" (coal miners in West Virginia that voted for Trump, for example). But the real working class, the biggest and most diverse working class in America, is right here in the buildings and streets of the five boroughs.
In fact, there's been a plethora of movies and TV shows over the decades of working class lives in NYC. Here are some of my favorites that are worth checking out:
The Nanny, the 1990s sitcom about a woman from Flushing who becomes not only the nanny but also the de facto mother for some rich Manhattinites (it stars the amazing Queens-native and current comeback Queen Fran Drescher).
Marty, the big Oscar-winning 1955 movie about a lovelorn butcher from the Bronx, starring Ernest Borgine.
Working Girl, the 1988 classic about a Staten Island secretary who takes on and beats corporate America. Melanie Griffith is amazing as the never-to-be-underestimated Tess!
And, if you want to look at the dark side of the NYC working class, there's no better movie than 1975's Dog Day Afternoon about a 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery gone very wrong. It features probably Al Pacino's best performance and is a look at what happens when working class New Yorkers run out of dreams and hopes.
All great movies and TV shows about hard workers New Yorkers (for better or worse) from all five boroughs!
If you love trashy gossip -- and there's nothing trashier and more gossip-prone than the vile man currently "serving" as POTUS -- then you must read this exhaustive profile on his wife, Melania.
It's a perfect example of how getting what you want can sometimes backfire -- horribly.
The Slovenian-born former model married her husband in 2005, thinking that she had signed up for a life of luxury and ease. She got the luxury but ease is a little hard to attain when married to a world-famous narcissist. However, when that world-famous narcissist becomes president, the ease vanishes -- and now Melania is living a life she hates with a husband she hates as an against-her-will First Lady.
It's gotta suck. She traded one gilded cage (Trump Tower) for another (The White House). But at least the former one was located in NYC and not DC and she had her privacy (apparently there's always a Secret Service agent located outside whatever room she's in. That must get stifling).
I worked in DC one summer many years ago and have visited many times and, let me tell you, it's like living in a post office. It's a bland, boring city that revolves around its one industry. As a kid I found DC fascinating -- the nation's capital -- but three months there cured me of that fascination.
Apparently the POTUS and FLOTUS live separate lives and a divorce has been rumored. I'm quite sure, out a sense of propriety, Melanie won't file as long as Donald is president. But as soon as he loses his office (the sooner than better!) I won't be shocked if he then quickly loses her.
This is a bad movie -- a legendarily bad one. I've blogged about it incidently over the years.
But the story behind its creation is fascinating. There's even an entire behind-the-scenes book about it called The Devil's Candy which is way better than the movie.
"Bonfire" is based on Tom Wolfe's massive 1987 novel of the same name about how greed and, obviously, vanity corrupt not only people but an entire city. A high-living Wall Street trader named Sherman McCoy and his mistress get into a hit-and-run accident with a young black man in the Bronx -- and his life becomes a media storm that inflames the entire city's media, judicial, and political worlds. Because the book was so successful, a movie version seemed inevitable. And then every decision the producers made was wrong. Who do you get to play the to-the-manor-born, aristocratic Sherman? Why Mr. Middle America himself, Tom Hanks! Who do you get to play Peter Farrow, the emaciated British tabloid reporter who turns the hit-and-run into a media sensation? Why Mr. Die Hard action movie hero himself, Bruce Willis! Who do you get to play the 21-year old Maria, a Southerner, Sherman's mistress? Why thirty-something year old Melanie Griffith! Who do you get to direct this social satire? Why horror/gangster movie director Brian De Palma! What do you with material that's been highly acclaimed for its smart humor and biting wit? Why you turn it into a raunchy, gross, Animal House-like romp. As one reviewer said at the time, "You've got to be a genius to make a movie this bad." The movie really is a mess. It's not funny, not insightful, and doesn't work. But, as an NYC movie, it actually works strangely well. De Palma is a great visual stylist. The movie starts with a stop-motion view from the Chrysler Building, to making JFK Airport look positively cinematic, to making the South Bronx look truly menacing, to making Park Avenue and Wall Street look both properly gorgeous and monstrous at the same time, to all sorts of weird camera angles, it's worth see just for its imagery if for nothing else. I remember when this movie came out late in 1990. This is a now legendary movie season where lots of big movies with big stars, like "Bonfire", came out and bombed at the box office. Havana with Robert Redford, The Russia House with Sean Connery, and others just all tanked. The Godfather Part III came out and got a decidely mixed reception. No, the winners at the box office that winter were a snotty unknown ten-year old in a silly family comedy called Home Alone and an unknown theater actress named Kathy Bates in a horror movie called Misery (that got her an Oscar). Ah, memories ...
New York City has produced many unique independent film makers -- famous ones like Woody Allen and Spike Lee, mid-level famous ones like Jim Jarmusch and Abel Ferrara, and then more obscure ones like Hal Hartley and Henry Jaglom.
Jaglom is an interesting case. Born in England, his family fled the Nazis and came to NYC in the 1940s. Jaglom was part of the New Hollywood of the 1960s and '70s (he was an editor on Easy Rider in 1969), then became a director himself, but he never achieved the heights of some of his contemporaries. Instead, he's made a large number of very small, very intimate films, usually about people in show business, usually starring his friends and family members. They're almost like well-made home movies -- personal, naturalistic, short on story but big on characters, and highly improvised.
One of them is New Year's Day from 1989.
It's about a middle-aged New Yorker, played by Jaglom, moving back to the city after a failed marriage in Los Angeles. He arrives at the apartment he's just rented, on the first day of the year, to discover that the three women who are moving out are in fact still there for one more day. At first he tries to find a hotel but everything's booked. So the women invite him to stay and, over the course of the day, more and more people show up, an odd assortment of characters, and an impromtu party begins. Jaglom's character, Drew, begins to flirt and fall for one of the women named Lucy (played by a pre-Friends Maggie Wheeler) who is herself moving to LA to escape a bad relationship and recharge her career (her sleazy ex-boyfriend is a very young, pre-fame David Duchovny). The other two women are struggling themselves -- one of them, played by the late Gwen Welles, is depressed and behaves badly because her friends are moving away, and the other one, played by an actress named Melanie Winter, strongly wants a child -- and is looking for the right father. Over the course of the day, and many, many, many, many conversations (the movie is all conversations, no action), these lives touch and bounce off of each other (in some ways good, in some ways bad) as a new year and new lives begin.
The entire movie takes place inside this NYC apartment on this particular New Year's Day and there's really no plot to speak of -- just lots of talking and philosophizing. But the acting is very good, totally believable, and it's a rare movie where people speak like actual human beings. It's worth seeing and you can find it on Amazon Prime. New Year's Day is the only movie I've seen set on the always strange, weird first day of the year -- where everything seems and feels possible until you realize that the past is never gone and the future is never certain.
Recently I saw a movie on TCM that I'd never seen before. However, after watching it and reading more about it online, I discovered that it was a landmark of early independent New York cinema, Girlfriends from 1978.
This is the kind of movie Lena Dunham would have made back then. Instead, it was made by someone named Claudia Weill and it features an great cast and many touching scenes. The story is very simply but compelling: a young shluby woman named Susan lives with her gorgeous best friend Anne while trying to make it as a freelance photographer. They are both young and full of hope for the future. Then reality intrudes. Anne gets married and moves out, Susan struggles for a while in her career, and her relationships with men are fraught. Susan has a one-night stand that eventually turns into a strained relationship with a guy named Eric, plus she has a short weird relationship with a rabbi. She became alienated from Anne, whose new life and husband make her feel unwelcome. But, after many starts and stop, Susan's career takes off, Eric falls in love with her, and she and Anne evolve their friendship into a new understanding.
It's a deeply affecting film about love, friendship, and the vicissitudes of life. And it was way, way, way ahead of its time.
Susan is played by Melanie Mayron who had a big acting career in the 1980s, winning Emmys for her role on thirtysomething before she went on to become a successful director in her own right. The boyfriend, Eric, is played by Christopher Guest, years before he'd strike comic gold with movies like Spinal Tap and Best in Show. A very bearded Bob Balaban plays Anne's miserable husband and Eli Wallach, the great actor, plays the rabbi, making an otherwise creepy guy very likable.
This a movie that does what all movies should do -- show, and not tell. It's definately worth seeing if you can.
