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Film in the Big Apple
By Katherine Oliver
We say that New York is a city of 8.1 million stories, and people around the world know New York from film and television. My office continually receives calls from visitors who want to know where they can visit Katz's deli, made famous on When Harry Met Sally..., or the hot spots frequented by Carrie Bradshaw. Native New Yorkers, too,
relish in visiting our City's locations made famous on film, whether it is Rice to Riches from the recent Will Smith movie Hitch or the pizzeria on Bleecker Street where Peter Parker works in Spider-Man 2. (If you dial the phone number on Tobey Maguire's helmet, you are actually connected to Joe's Pizza.) Beyond this excitement factor of the industry, our City has long been a gathering ground for a diverse group of artists who produce ground-breaking, socially relevant work, building upon not only our city's creative community but also its social and political consciousness. Recent examples have included Angels in America, which won 11 Emmys in 2004, Maria Full of Grace and Mad Hot Ballroom.New York City was the birthplace of filmmaking in the United States, and the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting was the first film commission in the country. Our local production industry employs 100,000 New Yorkers, contributes $5 billion to our economy on an annual basis, and, bringing the beauty and energy of New York City to audiences around the globe, feeds our city's tourism industry.
Yet, following the production heyday of the 1990s, factors that include technological advancements making productions more mobile eroded New York City's share
of this valuable sector. Extensive outreach to the industry led to implementing process changes, and this year we unveiled the "Made in NY" incentive program.
Mel Brooks's film The Producers, the movie musical based on the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, was the first to announce that it would take advantage of the "Made in NY" incentive program. Officially signed into law by Mayor Bloomberg in January 2005, the incentive program includes a ten percent state and five percent city tax credit for qualified film and television productions, free advertising for qualified productions on City assets such as bus shelters, NYC TV and NYC radio, and a discount card which has lowered the cost of production by offering discounts at more than 350 New York City businesses, from airlines, hotels and restaurants to props and post production. The "Made in NY" logo, a mark of distinction, runs in the end credits of
productions which do at least 75 percent of their shooting in New York.
The Producers' producer Jonathan Sanger recently told us, "I had a great experience when I worked on Vanilla Sky, when we were able to close Times Square [to accommodate the scene in which Tom Cruise walks through an empty Times Square]." Perhaps the most challenging shoot of The Producers involved a scene in which fifty elderly women in walkers break into dance right in the middle of Fifth Avenue. In addition to my office facilitating all aspects of the coordination of the shoot and diversion of traffic, the production also received cooperation from a series of co-op apartments into which the women dance in the scene. Following the dance sequence, the women entered Central Park, the location where the film did four of its sixteen location shooting days. Working with the Central Park Conservancy, the production was able to augment actual park flowers with silk ones and place additional water jets in Bethesda Fountain for a
scene in which Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane actually dance inside the fountain.
Perhaps one of the greatest New York stories about this New York story is the fact that many of the actors who starred in the film by day were crossover talent from theatre who went on to perform on Broadway at night.
Boston-set film The Departed, starring Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin, was also shot in New York City, and one of Executive Producer G. Mac Brown's favorite location finds was a grain elevator on the waterfront in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which offered the gritty look and feel needed for certain scenes of the production. "We shot the mundane things here," he says. "That's what's so unusual."
New York City's locations have been used to stand in for Louisiana in Dead Man Walking, Harvard and Princeton in A Beautiful Mind, Indiana in Kinsey and Ohio
in the upcoming film Fast Track. "Made in New York" strengthens the city's relationship with filmmakers so they can "make it in New York." |
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