Bystander Effect

While Hollywood may have dominated the Golden Age, New York was simply waiting in the wings.

by Shaun Brady

[ movies ]

Every film history book tells the same story: American cinema was born in Thomas Edison's workshop and thrived on the East Coast until D.W. Griffith packed up the industry and headed west to make The Birth of a Nation. For the next several decades, the New York film industry laid dormant until the post-WWII collapse of Hollywood's Golden Age, when a series of landmark movies — from On the Waterfront to Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather to Annie Hall — suddenly heralded an Eastern renaissance beginning in the late '60s.

That story makes for a neat, linear narrative — just right for Hollywood — but, according to film historian and Rutgers professor Richard Koszarski, the truth is, in true New York fashion, much more complicated and untidy. Koszarski calls the history of the NY film industry between the wars a "black hole," and in his book Hollywood on the Hudson: Film and Television in New York from Griffith to Sarnoff, newly released in paperback, he reveals himself as its Stephen Hawking.

"The book finds the answer to where something like On the Waterfront or Midnight Cowboy comes from," Koszarski says. "In fact, there was an unbroken filmmaking tradition in the city, but it had gone off the radar because it tended toward things like documentary film, ethnic and minority filmmaking, short movies, television production. Let's face it, if people ask for the 10 best movies, you're going to come up with 10 dramatic feature-length films. You're not going to throw in a short or a great newsreel or a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler. And if your notion of cinema is feature-length dramatic movies, that was the part of the industry that moved to Hollywood. There's nothing wrong with emphasizing that, but you're going to have a gap in your understanding of what the American cinema has been about."

In his exhaustive history, Koszarski posits that decades of continuing production on the margins of mainstream filmmaking kept studio buildings and trained technicians afloat, maintaining an infrastructure that was primed to resume producing feature films when the "Dream Factory" era crumbled. In the meantime, the metropolis kept busy churning out educational and industrial films, niche movies for black or Yiddish-speaking audiences, newsreels, animation and the occasional stab at independence — such as the four films made by screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, undermined by their preference for playing backgammon rather than directing their actors.

Hollywood on the Hudson is the result of 30 years' worth of research and begun as an oral history project during Koszarski's two-decade stint as head of collections and exhibitions at New York's Museum of the Moving Image. "I thought the story would draw a straight line connecting The Great Train Robbery with Spike Lee," he says. "I never got to those popular and accessible points because this black hole in the middle proved to be what was really important."

The site of the museum itself plays a key part in Koszarski's narrative. The building once housed Astoria Studio, built in 1920 and intended to supplement the Paramount Pictures' Hollywood facilities. (It was later taken over by the Army Signal Corps for nearly 30 years.)

"Paramount didn't get it," Koszarski shrugs. "They thought they could have what [Paramount co-founder] Jesse Lasky called 'a miniature Hollywood' in Astoria. Well, if you're talking about the film industry as a factory system, there's no such thing as a miniature factory. What you have then is a workshop, a boutique operation, and that's what survived in New York."

In a program sponsored by Secret Cinema, the author will present one example of that industry, the rarely seen 1950 noir Guilty Bystander, which follows an alcoholic detective (played by Zachary Scott) tracking down his kidnapped son. The film was made after the period covered by Koszarski's book but marks the transition to a new period, which he plans to cover in his follow-up volume.

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"Guilty Bystander in 1950 is pointing to the way movies [were] going to be made in the year 2000," Koszarski says. "Hollywood was making films in 1950 the way they were making films in 1920."

Though lacking in depictions of Manhattan icons — no Empire State Building or Times Square here — Guilty Bystander is full of what Koszarski calls "local identifiers," from the blacklisted cast and crew members to the gritty depiction of the city itself — and its subsequent obscurity.

"It's made in New York, but you won't find a single picture-postcard view of the Manhattan skyline — it's all done in very rundown industrial sections of Manhattan and Brooklyn. He doesn't track wealthy criminals down to their fashionable apartments," says Koszarski. "This really is the underside, a physical manifestation of this completely dark, grubbier aspect of his own soul. Hollywood would have been too smart to do that."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Secret Cinema presents Hollywood on the Hudson Fri., April 30, 8 p.m., $7, Moore College of Art & Design, 1916 Race St., 215-965-4099, thesecretcinema.com