Scenes from the City: Filmmaking in New York 1966-2006

Published on the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the New York City Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, Scenes from the City celebrates the extraordinary heritage of location filmmaking in America's largest and most cinematic city. From Annie Hall and Taxi Driver to Do the Right Thing and When Harry Met Sally ... to Law & Order and Sex and the City, many of the most iconic moments in movies and television over the last four decades have been created on the streets of New York - thanks in large part to the Mayor's Office, the first agency of its kind in the world, whose founding in 1966 sparked a dazzling explosion in film production around the five boroughs.
Scenes from the City traces this glittering cinematic parade decade by decade, recalling some of the best-remembered films, places, and moments of each period, while touching down in between to look at some of the famed New York neighborhoods and districts - from SoHo to Times Square, the East Village to the Upper West Side, Coney Island to Harlem - that have been unforgettably captured on celluloid. Opening with a survey of landmark location films from the late 1940s to the early '60s (from On the Town and On the Waterfront to Breakfast at Tiffany's and West Side Story) and closing with a round-up of memorable television scenes filmed on the city's streets (from David Letterman to Sesame Street, Cagney & Lacey to The Sopranos), this lavishly illustrated volume provides not only a vivid testament of the forces that have reshaped American film over the past four decades, but a starting portrait of the changes that have transformed the city itself in those same years.
Filled with more than 250 photographs, along with the words of the directors, actors, and other filmmakers themselves, Scenes from the City explores as never before the astonishing enterprise of bringing cameras, equipment, crew, and some of the world's most famous performers onto the streets of one of the busiest, most dynamic and most compelling urban "stages" in the world.

James Sanders, an architect, co-wrote the Emmy Award-winning PBS series New York: A Documentary Film and its companion volume, New York: An Illustrated History, as well as Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies. He has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair and Architectural Record. He has also participated in several important design projects in and around the city.