Brooklyn’s rich cinematic history detailed in new book
Camera! Brooklyn!
Movies take us us to different worlds, and they’ve found plenty in Kings County, New York.
Bedford-Stuyvesant was spotlighted in “Do the
Right Thing,” Brooklyn Heights in “Moonstruck,” and Park Slope in “Marriage Story.” Given Brooklyn’s diversity and how each film bring viewers into a time and place, moviemakers have long been exploring the borough. Margo Donohue takes readers on a trip through dozens of neighborhoods in “Filmed in Brooklyn.”
It’s an exhaustively well-packed guide, but, as Donohue points out, Brooklyn has always contained multitudes. Plenty of history, too, serving as “the birthplace of Mack Trucks, Brillo cleaning pads, Bazooka gum, Twizzlers and possibly the most significant contribution to comfort in the twentieth century – airconditioning.”
It also gave America one of its first movie studios.
Built in 1905, the Viing tagraph complex in Midwood “had space for gunfights, train derailments, bank robberies and romantic settings,” Donohue writes. “Helen Hayes, Norma Talmadge and the first ‘Vitagraph Girl,’ Florence Turner, graced the screens and gained fans worldwide. A young Rudolph Valentino applied to be in the set creation department and quickly rose to lead actor on his way to international superstardom.”
The company’s star power was brief, though. Gritty Brooklyn backlots couldn’t compete with sunny Hollywood. Vitagraph sold its soundstages in 1925.
Naturally, Brooklyn still showed up in movies. But now, typically, it was reduced to stock footage of the Brooklyn Bridge and anonymous city streets. The 1945 classic “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” may have depicted poor Irish Americans in turn-of-thecentury Williamsburg, but it was filmed on a California backlot.
After World War II, however, studios began going on location, and a new generation of indie filmmakers began shootLights!
wherever they could. The MGM musical “On the Town” docked briefly at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1949. “The Little Fugitive” (1953) was set on Coney Island. Stanley Kubrick shot some of “Killer’s Kiss” (1955) in DUMBO.
The borough landed a co-starring role in 1971’s “The French Connection.” In it, Gene Hackman’s “Popeye” Doyle – based on a real NYPD detective – “starts chasing an assassin through Brooklyn on an elevated train heading to Manhattan,” Donohue writes. Roughly commandeering a civilian’s car, Popeye “follows the train from Stillwell Avenue/86th Street to just north of the 62nd Street Station,” driving at breakneck speed.
That scene has been thrilling fans for years. However, as its reputation has grown, Donohue notes, so have some of director William Friedkin’s stories. Although he often claimed he shot without permits or planning, allowing his stunt drivers to race through Bay Ridge, the sequences had been highly choreographed, Donohue says. Off-duty cops were always there to keep people safe, away from the careening 1971 Pontiac LeMans.
The Oscar-winning picture was followed by plenty of other cops-androbbers movies, many portraying Brooklyn as crammed full of Mafiosi.
The Corleone’s soldiers in “The Godfather” were particularly steadfast Kings County residents. When he wasn’t dutifully running errands – buying cannoli, killing a snitch – Peter Clemenza lived in a modest house at 1999 E. 5th St. in Gravesend. And the reason Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes is that he went to that fatal meeting at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn Heights.
In “Goodfellas,” Henry Hill could only dream of becoming a made man like them, as he wasn’t 100% Italian. His friend Tommy DeVito seemed to have been tapped to join the gang, but things went wrong; the last thing Tommy saw was the inside of a house on 80th St. in Bay Ridge. Hill probably had happier memories of Bensonhurst, where he got married at the now-gone Oriental Manor at 1818 86th St.