Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies - Hardcover

Sanders, James

4.16

62 ratings by Goodreads

9780747559795: Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747559791 ISBN 13: 9780747559795

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2002

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This is a tale of two cities, both called 'New York'. The first is a real city, an urban agglomeration of millions. The second is a mythic city, so rich in memory and association and sense of place that to people everywhere it has come to seem real: the New York of films such as "42nd Street", "Rear Window", "King Kong", "Dead End", "The Naked City", "Ghostbusters", "Annie Hall", "Taxi Driver", and "Do the Right Thing". The dream city of the movies - created by more than a century of films, since the very dawn of the medium itself - may hold the secret to the glamour of its real counterpart. Here are the cocktail parties and power lunches, the subway chases and opening nights, the playground rumbles and observation-deck romances. Here is an invented Gotham, a place designed specifically for action, drama, and adventure, a city of bright avenues and mysterious sidestreets, of soaring towers and intimate corners, where remarkable people do exciting, amusing, romantic, scary things. Sanders takes the reader from the tenement to the penthouse, from New York to Hollywood and back again, from 1896 to the present, all the while showing how the real and mythic cities reflected, changed, and taught each other.

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Review:

"It is a marvellous account by a practising architect with an encylopaedic knowledge of the movies" -- Phillip French, The Observer, Sunday September 1st 2002

"for those keen to understand New York's place in Western (or even global) consciousness, Sanders is this reader's guide of choice." -- Time Out, 25th September 2002

"one of the most important, and enjoyable, books about the effect of Hollywood on our perception of reality,
in particular, the reality of New York City." -- The Evening Standard, October 11th 2002

About the Author:

James Sanders, an architect, is the co-writer with Ric Burns of the 7-part Emmy-award-winning TV series New York: A Documentary Film and co-author of the companion volume, New York: An Illustrated History. He has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair and Interiors, and has produced exhibitions on New York architecture.

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