The Dying City by Brian L. Tochterman

Author:Brian L. Tochterman [Tochterman, Brian L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, United States, State & Local, Middle Atlantic (DC; DE; MD; NJ; NY; PA), Social Science, Sociology, Urban
ISBN: 9781469633077
Google: w4DPDgAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2017-05-08T22:15:26+00:00

Part IV Detour to Fun City

Cultural Responses to the Death of New York, 1967–1985

7 Fear City on Film

In 1966, very early in his first term, Mayor John Lindsay asserted that New York was “still a fun city.” From the day he took office, Lindsay faced a variety of challenges, including a crippling transit strike that left commuters stranded in the cold. Fearing disorder in such situations, he took to the streets and the airwaves preaching calm, civility, and patience. In reaction to Lindsay’s narrative of “Fun City,” however, Herald Tribune columnist Dick Schaap mocked the mayor for his “wonderful sense of humor,” while at the same time suggesting that the transit strike might provide relief from the lonely crimes on the city’s subways and buses. Although it disturbed the purveyors of Necropolis like Schaap, portraying New York as Fun City was a conscious project for Lindsay.1 During his first year in office, he established the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater, and Broadcasting to encourage film production on the streets of New York, creating jobs and revenue for the city, with the added intent of informally advertising Lindsay’s fun cosmopolitan vision.2

The most successful of the over three hundred productions filmed in New York City during Lindsay’s tenure, however, failed to portray Fun City. Postwar films set in New York prior to 1966 imagined the kind of white-collar glamour Lindsay represented, but these images mostly emanated from Hollywood soundstages.3 As biographer Vincent Cannato points out, “the tone of New York movies changed by the late 1960s and early 1970s. It became darker.… The city was a near-immovable obstacle to the happiness of men and women determined to live there … [and] crime—a seedy kind of crime—became the center of many New York movies of the time.” In fact, the message of these films seemed to validate the fears propagated by concurrent commentators. In the words of Cannato, “with these portrayals, the image of New York City as a place of danger, decay, and division became solidified in the nation’s mind.”4

The image was so powerful that the Council for Public Safety, in its struggle with Lindsay, distributed leaflets declaring “Welcome to Fear City” and detailing the perils of New York to tourists and visitors at the city’s transportation hubs. The film industry projected a similar greeting. In Hollywood, a new ratings system classified feature films by age-appropriate categories, which allowed for greater verisimilitude in depictions of violence, sex, and speech. Structural changes within the industry ushered in a new wave of filmmaking that transferred the means of production from the old studio system to young, bold filmmakers who grew up within the confines of Cold War conformity, digested film theory and the European new wave, attended film school, and sought to utterly transform American cinema. This group centered itself in Los Angeles, but many, including native Martin Scorsese, used New York as a backdrop for their groundbreaking works.5 With Lindsay’s incentives for location shooting, filmmakers could now represent cities like New York with added realism.

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