Street Smart : The New York of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee.

Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue -- A View from the Footbridge -- A View from the Movies -- Cinema City: All Around the Town -- The Phantom City -- A Parisian Spaceship -- Film: Painting or Window? -- Where Is New York, Really? -- Establishing Shot through a Wide-Angle Lens -- From Documentary to Cartoon -- A Nation in Transition -- New York, California -- East Side, West Side -- Home Sweet (and Sour) Home -- Lower East Side: Sidney Lumet -- Jewish New York -- Small Screen, Big Opportunities -- New York Forever -- A Minority Opinion -- 12 Angry Men (1957) -- The Pawnbroker -- Dog Day Afternoon (1975) -- Serpico (1974) and Prince of the City (1981) -- Q &amp -- A (1990) -- Night Falls on Manhattan (1997) -- The Verdict (1982) -- Other Examples -- Conclusion -- Flatbush: Woody Allen -- The Death of Brooklyn -- Crossing the East River -- A Comedy of Displacement -- Two Early Comedies -- Beachhead in Manhattan -- The Cultural Anthropologist -- You Can Go Home Again -- No Business Like Show Business -- A Gray Line Bus Tour of Allentown -- Little Italy: Martin Scorsese -- The Sicilian Factor -- Neighboring Villages -- The Village Church -- The Wider Horizon -- Close to Home -- Mean Streets of Home -- Mean Streets of Brooklyn and Queens -- Still Mean in Las Vegas -- Back to Manhattan -- Other Mean Streets in Manhattan -- Comic Turns -- Still Other Avenues -- On the Other Side of the World -- Fort Greene: Spike Lee -- The Other Side of Downtown -- Moving On -- Traces of Fort Greene -- The Others -- An Odd Kind of Conservative -- A Capitalism of Social Responsibility -- Gotta Have Bank -- Back to Atlanta -- Bed-Stuy: The Town Next Door -- Back to Fort Greene -- From Strivers Row to Benson hurst -- The Journey of Malcolm X -- Back in Time to Brooklyn -- Another View of Brooklyn -- Keeping Up the Beat.

Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

New York has appeared in more movies than Michael Caine, and as a result of overfamiliarity, the City poses a problem for critics and casual moviegoers alike. Audiences mistake the New York image of skyscrapers and glitter for the real thing, but in fact the City is a network of small villages, each with its unique personality. Street Smart offers a novel approach to understanding the cultural influences of New York's neighborhoods on the work of four quintessentially New York filmmakers: Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee. The city's diverse economic and ethnic enclaves, where people live, work, shop, worship, bank, and go to school, often have little relationship to the concept of New York City created by the movies. Their New York, however, is as real as the smell of fried onions in the stairwell of an apartment building, and it is this New York, not the movie New York, that has left its impression on their films. Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee's imaginations have been shaped by their neighborhoods, not the New York of the movies. In turn, these directors have used their own life experiences to shape their films. Richard A. Blake examines their home villages--from Flatbush and Fort Green in Brooklyn to the Lower East Side of Manhattan--to enrich our critical understanding of the films of four of America's most accomplished contemporary filmmakers.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.