Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies That Made It

Film critic and historian Jason Bailey presents a visual history of 100 years of filmmaking in New York City, featuring exclusive interviews with NYC filmmakers.

Foreword by Matt Zoller Seitz

Fun City Cinema gives readers an in-depth look at how the rise, fall, and resurrection of New York City was captured and chronicled in 10 iconic Gotham films across 10 decades: The Jazz Singer (1927), King Kong (1933), The Naked City (1948), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Taxi Driver (1976), Wall Street (1987), Kids (1995), 25th Hour (2002), and Frances Ha (2012). A visual history of a great American city in flux, Fun City Cinema reveals how these classic films and legendary filmmakers took their inspiration from New York City's grittiness and splendor, creating what we can now view as "accidental documentaries" of the city's modes and moods.

In addition to the extensively researched and reported text, the book includes both historical photographs and production materials, as well as still-frames, behind-the-scenes photos, posters, and original interviews with Noah Baumbach, Larry Clark, Greta Gerwig, Walter Hill, Jerry Schatzberg, Martin Scorsese, Susan Seidelman, Oliver Stone, and Jennifer Westfeldt. Extensive "Now Playing" sidebars spotlight a handful of each decade's additional films of note.

"Jason Bailey takes us on a tour through not just New York cinema, but the city that gave birth to it and the fantastic, absurd, glorious ways in which New York's history is, all on its own, stranger than fiction. New York owes much to the cinema, and the cinema owes much back, and Fun City Cinema is a wild and gorgeous ride through that brilliant relationship." --Vox

Author: Jason Bailey
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Published: 10/26/2021
Pages: 352
Weight: 3.85lbs
Size: 11.02h x 9.37w x 1.18d
ISBN: 9781419747816


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 10/01/2021 pg. 82
Publishers Weekly 10/11/2021

About the Author
Jason Bailey is a film critic and historian. A graduate of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and the former film editor of Flavorwire, his work has appeared in the New York Times, Vulture, Slate, VICE, the Atlantic, Salon, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, The Playlist, The Dissolve, and Crooked Marquee. He lives in the Bronx with his wife and two daughters. Fun City Cinema is his fifth book.

Matt Zoller Seitz is an editor at large for RogerEbert.com; the TV critic for New York magazine; the author of The Wes Anderson Collection, The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Oliver Stone Experience, and Mad Men Carousel; and the coauthor of The Sopranos Sessions. He is based in Cleveland, Ohio, and New York City.