58 Top: William Friedkin. the Night They Raided Minsky's, 1968. Frame
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Top: William Friedkin. The Night They Raided Minsky’s, 1968. Frame enlargement. Bottom: William Friedkin. The Night They Raided Minsky’s, 1968. Frame enlargement. 58 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 Imaginary Apparatus: Film Production and Urban Planning in New York City, 1966–1975 McLAIN CLUTTER “If you want to know why I am so happy doing this picture in New York,” offered Norman Lear, producer of the 1968 film The Night They Raided Minsky’s , “ask the Mayor.” 1 The primary location for Lear’s film was in Manhattan at East Twenty- sixth Street between First and Second Avenues. After beginning production, Lear and his company learned that their film location was slated for demolition while the movie was still being shot, part of a continuing wave of urban renewal that had indelibly altered New York throughout the preceding two decades. 2 The policy’s transformation of the city seemed unstoppable, much to the dismay of the Minsky’s production team. But this particular instance of urban renewal was delayed by an unusual development. With unprecedented political fiat, New York’s mayor, John Lindsay, came to the rescue of The Night They Raided Minsky’s— halting the urban renewal project and allowing Lear’s company to finish shooting their film. Thus, as bulldozers leveled the south side of the street, the north side was turned over to Lear’s art directors to create what one journalist called “Minskyland” —a re-creation of what the neighborhood might have looked like in 1925. 3 Evincing a nostalgic sentiment for a bygone Gotham of tenements and continental immigrants, the block soon became a popular tourist destination. John Lindsay soon earned a rep - utation as a mayor who was not afraid to engage two elements of policy more vigorously than any previous New York mayor: the physical design of the city and the policy governing theatric film productions set in New York. The Lindsay administration governed New York City from 1966 to 1973. During this period, the city created policy intended to alleviate the bureaucracy and cor - ruption that had made movie production financially prohibitive throughout the previous twenty years. Lindsay and his staff made every possible concession to the film industry in providing a comfortable and profitable environment. Also during Grey Room 35, Spring 2009, pp. 58–89. © 2009 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 59 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 Lindsay’s tenure, the city drafted a significantly greater amount of innovative plan - ning and urban design policy than the previous several mayoral administrations. The Lindsay administration’s heightened interest in urban design attracted some of the city’s most renowned architects to public service and won the admiration of architecture critics. 4 While the collection of planning documents produced under Lindsay is vast and diverse, one remarkable aspect common to many of them is a tendency to understand the city in ways that are cinematic, or proto-cinematic, in nature. Hence, Lindsay’s planning policy has a synergistic relationship to the con - temporaneous policy regarding film production in New York. Amplifying the significance of this blend of film production and planning policy was a develop - ing financial and interpersonnel symbiosis between the city and the film industry. During the Lindsay administration New York was inviting cinema production to its streets, while conceiving of those streets through various cinematic registers and yoking the financial interests of the city to those of the film industry. The conjuncture of policies and financial alliances under Lindsay provides a lens through which to reexamine the relationship between the filmic and material New York. 5 For at least the past ten years, the confluence of cinema and urbanism has emerged as a popular topic in scholarship. Most commonly, interest in the topic springs from interpretations of two themes found in early-twentieth-century writings about cinema: the syntactic commonality between cinema and urbanism, and the Marxist notion that film may awaken the viewing subject from an ideolog - ical misrecognition of urban reality. 6 This essay insists that Lindsay’s policies created a situation in which the specific relationship between New York and its cinematic representation is most accurately described discursively— as a fluid and iterative exchange between the financial stability of New York and the film indus - try, the methods of conceptualizing urbanism evident in the policies of Lindsay’s New York City Planning Commission, and the subjective affect of the cinema spec - tator and the New Yorker. Through a consideration of the discursive motion of Lindsay’s policies, their effects, and the complex set of institutional interests they involve, a historic relationship between New York, its cinematic representation, and the urban subject can be described. Lindsay’s Film Production Policy Upon his inauguration, Mayor Lindsay inherited a declining city plagued with cor - ruption, poor race relations, poverty, crumbling infrastructure, and a mounting environmental crisis. 7 Confounding any attempt by the mayor’s administration to deal with the city’s growing list of woes was a mounting budgetary dilemma. More 60 Grey Room 35 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 than a decade of middle-class white flight to the suburbs and a dwindling manu - facturing sector had taken its toll on the city’s tax base. 8 At the state level a policy of funds dispersion that favored rural and suburban areas ensured that New York City consistently sent more money to Albany than it received. 9 Nowhere was the bleak outlook more pronounced than in the urban environ - ment. The City Planning Commission’s 1969 Plan for New York City begins It is obvious enough that there is a great deal wrong. The air is polluted. The streets are dirty and choked with traffic. The subways are jammed. The waters of the rivers and bays are fouled. There is a severe shortage of hous - ing. The municipal plant is long past its prime. 10 Although the problems with the built environment were abundantly clear to the commission, less clear was how to acquire the funds needed to rectify those prob - lems. 11 By 1969 the planning commission estimated that in order to meet the cap - ital improvement, housing, and infrastructural needs of New York over the next decade, they would require $52 billion in funding above what could be provided by the city. 12 The commission looked toward the federal urban renewal and Model Cities programs for relief. 13 Meanwhile, the office of the mayor was left to find ways of promoting new industry in the city that could be taxed to fund the city’s struggling offices. In 1966, within this economic climate, Mayor Lindsay signed Executive Order Number 10, which created the New York City Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting. Although the American film industry was born in New York in the late-nine - teenth century, by 1932 the rise of the Hollywood studios largely spelled the end of location film production in New York. 14 The reasons were both technical and political: the sound, depth-of-field, and film-speed technologies that were required to make city shooting advantageous had yet to be developed; 15 and New York was a notoriously corrupt location for film production. Throughout the decades after 1932, solutions were developed to alleviate the technical detriments to shooting in the city, and Mayor Lindsay sought to alleviate the political detriments with Executive Order 10. 16 Prior to Lindsay’s executive order, filming in New York required as many as fifty different permits, and productions could face daily fines and police shakedowns of as much as $400 a day. 17 Meanwhile, union corruption made labor in the cin - ema arts in New York cost prohibitive as compared to Los Angeles. 18 The Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting streamlined film-production permitting to one standard document that would apply to all filming locations. 19 While Clutter | Imaginary Apparatus: Film Production and Urban Planning in New York City, 1966 –1975 61 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.58 by guest on 02 October 2021 mounting a national letter-writing campaign to attract film productions, the mayor and his staff made every effort to alleviate the obstacles to filming in the city. 20 Lindsay removed film censorship powers from municipal agencies, negotiated with the local industry labor unions to offer competitive rates, and even created a division in the police department composed of officers specially trained in the “cinema arts.” This special task force was trained to “reroute traffic, keep back onlookers, or persuade pedestrians to behave like believable New Yorkers in a street scene.” 21 Executive Order 10 made every possible concession in creating a comfortable and profitable environment for filming in New York. Despite these efforts toward a more streamlined bureaucracy around film pro - duction in New York, the city still lacked postproduction facilities—a problem that Lindsay had promised to rectify when running for office. With private assistance, by 1967 plans were underway to fulfill this promise. An enormous complex called Cinema Center, designed by architect Charles Luckman, was slated for construc - tion on the site of the old Madison Square Garden. The design was to occupy a full west-Midtown block, with two thirty-nine-story office towers bracketing the com - plex on the east and west sides and a seven-story structure that would span the middle of the block and house film studios, two live-action theaters, and four motion picture theaters.