"Keep 'Em In The East" by Richard Koszarski (chapter 6)

“keep ’em in the east” kazan, kubrick, and the postwar new york film renaissance

richard koszarski

CHAPTER 1

NOT JUST ANOTHER LOCATION

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iorello La Guardia was the first New York mayor to realize the full significance of the motion picture industry to the city’s economic well-being. The few hundred jobs directly at stake in the late 1930s were not unimportant, but ever since the turn of the century, the movies— along with broadcasting and publishing—had also been doing something else for New Yorkers. Where the twentieth century had begun with a range of great American cities competing for world and national attention, it was now clear that modern America was no longer so flat a landscape. Now there was New York—and all those other places. Pittsburgh, Chicago, and San Francisco were all great cities, but New York was the city. It was large and it was wealthy, but its importance in banking or shipping or manufacturing was not enough to explain so dramatic a shift in the popular imagination.

This perception of New York—a New York of the imagination that featured in everything from Hart Crane’s poetry to William Randolph Hearst’s newsreels—was a useful ideal, an illusion. On stage and screen, on the printed page and over the air, the world had been told that this was our city of opportunity—not just the heart of America’s modern economy but its undisputed cultural and artistic capital. By midcentury, “New York” had come to enjoy its status as a modern myth and accepted the benefits that came with the title as if they had been bestowed by right. It had taken years for the media to create this image, and the movies were only a part of the equation. But cultivating an image requires attention, and controlling that image is not a responsibility best

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left to others (even if the Hollywood studios were only factories operating at the behest of a handful of corporate bosses, all of them based in New York).

La Guardia had had other concerns when he first arrived at City Hall in 1934. True, the once-healthy local film industry was in rapid decline, but so were many other industries with greater claims on the mayor’s attention. The movies, hardly a priority, were even seen by some locals as tainted goods. The playboy mayor “Broadway” Jimmy Walker, who had defeated La Guardia in the 1932 election, had been attacked (by Patrick Cardinal Hayes, for one) for the immorality of his showbiz lifestyle, which included a very public affair with Ziegfeld showgirl Betty Compton. Trying to position himself as far as possible from Walker, La Guardia closed New York’s burlesque houses and personally smashed its slot machines. So it was not until his second term that he suddenly made the revival of New York’s local film industry a municipal priority.

La Guardia traveled to Los Angeles in September 1938 for an American Legion event and avoided all invitations to visit the major studios. But he did spend a considerable amount of time with Walter Wanger, a personal friend from World War I days when they had both flown with the Army Air Corps on the Italian front. At a luncheon with Wanger, La Guardia, as expected, criticized the “cheap thrillers” from Hollywood that were poisoning young audiences back home. “That’s the kind of picture we want to keep out of our neighborhood houses,” he told local reporters.1 Their wartime experiences may have brought them together in Hollywood, but La Guardia soon found an even stronger bond connecting him to his one friend in the motion picture business: both men had a deep distrust of bankers. The mayor had long seen the banks as selfish and obstructionist, standing in the way of New Deal policies promoted by the Roosevelt administration. Wanger, an independent producer struggling at the edges of the system, was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to A. H. Giannini’s Bank of America and regaled his old friend with the injustice of it all. If La Guardia wanted to know what was really wrong with Hollywood, a few hours with Wanger would have given him the answer: not the objectionable content of its films but the objectionable behavior of its bankers. As soon as La Guardia returned to New York he began to listen, for the first time, to the complaints of the local filmmaking community, who he now began to feel had been battling his old enemies all along.

Over the next two years the mayor tried everything he could think of to lure motion picture production back to New York. He created a Department of Commerce and ordered its first director, Clendenin J. Ryan, to make this movie business a top priority. He considered creating a municipal “Cinema City,” a film industry version of the public markets he had constructed around the city. He negotiated with unions and talked up the city to visiting producers, calculating that New York deserved to be the home of at least 10 percent of domestic motion picture production.2 He dangled the power of the purse,

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insisting that “there will be no taxation difficulties here, because New York is not a hick town,” a not-so-subtle reference to the threat of a new film-related tax in California.3 And if that didn’t work, his office leaked plans for “starting a motion picture company to compete with Hollywood” a scheme identified by one source as “the Mayor’s own idea and . . .his ‘pet baby.’ ”4 “There’s no reason for a monopoly of the motion picture industry in any one city,” La Guardia told one reporter: As a matter of fact I think it would be a healthy thing right now to break the monotony of isolation in which the film business has been steeped too long.

How can the powers of such an industry assimilate new ideas when they are not subject to any, huddled as they are all in one spot. A shift at this time would create a rivalry of standards. That’s always good.

And why shouldn’t the shift be to New York? This city is the greatest market in the world for the movie product, is it not? Then why shouldn’t it have a hand in the making, too? We have every conceivable advantage. What do movie producers want?5

But for every step forward the project fell two steps back. The outbreak of war in Europe shut off key foreign markets and made Hollywood producers wary of any change in production procedures. Government restrictions put in place after Pearl Harbor favored studios with large back lots and scenic warehouses stuffed with interchangeable set elements—Hollywood studios, not the kind they had in New York. Distracted by his new position as national head of the Office of Civilian Defense, La Guardia was only too happy when the largest and finest studio in the city was sold to the federal government for use as a training film facility. Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky had opened their Astoria studio in 1920, and while activity ebbed and flowed over the years it had remained the center of New York’s production activity for the past two decades. Even when Paramount stopped making its own films in Astoria, the studio remained active as an independent rental facility under Western Electric’s auspices.

Reporters, military brass, and a few local celebrities gathered there to celebrate the formal dedication of the Signal Corps Photographic Center (SCPC) on September 22, 1942. “I’ve been trying to get motion pictures back in this shack for a long time now,” the mayor told the radio audience listening in on the festivities.6 Of course, these wouldn’t be the kind of motion pictures he had been thinking about, but there would certainly be enough work to keep up local production skills for the duration. After the mayor left the microphone, SCPC staff screened a clip reel featuring Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Claudette Colbert, Noel Coward, and other “Hollywood” stars who had once graced the stages. They followed this with a recent Army training film, in color.

The juxtaposition was intended to highlight the gulf separating the two distinct

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realms of filmmaking: fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and reality, entertainment and instruction. No one at the event that day could have predicted it, but the Astoria stages wouldn’t see another Hollywood-style feature picture until 1975.

No matter how many individual shooting days might be involved, La Guardia had not simply been trying to sell New York to Hollywood producers as just another attractive location site. While those streetscapes were part of his argument, what he was really interested in was a wholesale revival of the local motion picture industry, meaning an increased production of films that would draw on New York’s own writers, actors, directors, and designers. “This is the art center of the world,” he announced while enumerating local advantages, envisioning filmmaking as an integral part of New York’s cultural landscape.7 So he would have found the fate of Beyond Tomorrow especially galling. In September 1939, producer Lee Garmes announced that he would soon begin shooting the film at Eastern Service Studios in Astoria (the old Paramount studio), the start of a three-picture deal he had negotiated with RKO. Then the financing he had arranged with a local bank suddenly collapsed, due either to “concern over the war’s effect on the market” or the bank’s general inexperience with film underwriting. RKO stepped in with financing from a California bank, but only “on condition the film be made on the West Coast.” To rub salt in the wound, the Hollywood-based American Cinematographer later ran a shot of Garmes and his crew on the cover of their February 1940 issue. Standing before a painted backdrop of the Manhattan skyline, ankle deep in artificial snow, they are hard at work on the film’s “Central Park” episodes inside a Hollywood soundstage. “Garmes said the film would have cost $25,000 more had it been made in New York, but he felt it would have been worth the difference,” the Times reported.8 But independent productions like this would always be hit-or-miss affairs, so La Guardia’s real hope had been to duplicate Paramount’s “miniature Hollywood in Astoria,” where its full-service operation had produced thirty-eight features between 1928 and 1932.9 He knew that Warner Bros. had shot hundreds of short films at their Flatbush studios from 1928 to 1939 under the same conditions—with all interiors and exteriors, as well as postproduction, being done locally. Even with studios that chose not to maintain the overhead of their own East Coast operation, if any principal photography had to be done in New York, then all the principal photography could be done in New York. That was what had happened in 1933, when Columbia shot Social Register here and Universal made Moonlight and Pretzels: everything was done locally, with no return to the coast for additional photography. The only exceptions were occasional inserts of musical numbers for revue-style films like International House (1933) or The Big Broadcast of 1938 (filmed at Astoria in 1937), in which an East Coast sequence was dropped like a plum into a Hollywood pudding.

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That was the situation in the early days of sound, although things had worked a bit differently with silent pictures. In addition to those major producers like Paramount and First National, who operated their own full-service studios here, many others would send their leading actors to New York for days or weeks of principal photography then bring them back to the coast for the rest of the film. Harold Lloyd’s Speedy (1927) and King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) were just two of the more prominent examples. Hollywood had been the nation’s film production center since before World War I, but with so many of its best stories taking in place in New York it made sure to put that city on-screen in the most convincing way possible. Until around 1933 that almost always meant “in the flesh,” but things had changed.

Except for films like The Scoundrel (1935) or One Third of a Nation (1939), which were completely made in New York studios, what La Guardia would now have observed on-screen was a virtual New York evoked by the crafty manipulation of editing, stock shots, and back projection, as in King Kong (1933) or Nothing Sacred (1937). No matter how important New York might be to the storyline, Hollywood producers were no longer authorizing lengthy New York location jaunts for their leading actors. This had little to do with local chauvinism or problems with location sound recording but was instead the result of a revolution in the special effects department. Hollywood technicians had made tremendous strides in the use of rear-screen projection beginning around 1930, fueling a rapid increase in the use of back-projection plates and transparencies. By 1942, Paramount alone was processing up to 2,000 such setups a year, “and hardly a picture goes out without some of these scenes in them.”10 Decrying the “fantastically expensive” cost of location filming, Farciot Edouart argued that if a comparable location result can be achieved in the studio, with the only added expense involved being that of sending a skeleton transparency background crew, with perhaps an assistant director and such supernumerary players as doubles, for the principal actors, extras, stunt riders, and the like, to the location, and thereafter completing the scenes with the principals in the studio, it is obvious that worthwhile economies must result.11

Of course, the more a studio invested in technology like this, the more department heads like Edouart would be able to argue that it made good economic sense to never set foot outside the studio at all.

In 1933, Columbia had sent a crew of specialists to film background footage of New York locations for Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle. The director and his stars, Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young, never set foot in New York, and the work was carried out by anonymous technicians with cryptic instructions to film the city only from certain angles at specific times of day.

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The wily cinematographers even try to persuade their audiences that Mr. Tracy goes swimming in the East River. There one sees the Queensboro Bridge and Mr. Tracy approaching the river and jumping into the water. But the water that Mr. Tracy entered was California water. . . . When he is swimming he looks up and sees the city, and again the audience sees Manhattan through his eyes. This sequence was photographed from the river in New York. When the scenes are joined in their proper sequence the illusion is complete.12

The crew spent five weeks filming 6,000 feet of inserts, POV, and reaction shots, of which 450 feet (about five minutes) were said to have been used in the film.

Audiences had previously associated such techniques with fantasies like The Lost World (1925) or spectacles like Ben-Hur (1925), but what was new this time was that a high degree of movie magic was being employed on an intimate romance set among the unemployed residents of an urban shanty town.

It would be the preferred style of establishing location authenticity throughout the decade. After the war, New York filmmakers would show Hollywood the advantages of avoiding so manipulated a mise-en-scène. But until then, American films would typically represent New York through little more than a process shot.

Wartime Blackout Movie attendance would soar during the war years, but no one in Hollywood had predicted this sort of benefit in 1939. Instead, the first thing producers began to prepare for was the expected collapse of the European market. With such a large percentage of the international gross coming from Germany and France, budgets were reduced to account for the projected loss of revenue. Stories and even stars whose core appeal was thought to be essentially European were now considered potentially risky. Unfortunately, the films most frequently produced in New York were the ones most seriously affected. The first genre to suffer was the Yiddish film, a significant part of the New York feature film business since the mid-1930s. Even as Maurice Schwartz was putting the finishing touches on Tevya in September 1939, the Times reported that the studio in which he was working, the Biograph, was closing because of “curtailment of the activities of independent producers because of the European war,” code for the collapse of the international Yiddish film market.13 The few subsequent Yiddish pictures, like Edgar G. Ulmer’s American Matchmaker (1940), were now aimed primarily at a domestic audience.

The production of both Yiddish films and race movies, another major component of New York’s local film industry, was effectively eliminated by government decree in 1942. When rationing of 35 mm film stock came into effect

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that year, the major producers were able to protect their own operations at the expense of independents serving marginal audiences. “Producers who make pictures on speculation, without definite release arrangements, makers of road show features for small theaters, of dialect films, negro pictures with colored casts and the like, will get no more 35 mm film under conservation orders of the WPB,” Lowell Mellett of the War Production Board decreed.14 Hollywood studios were ordered to restrict their purchases to prewar levels, but these niche producers were simply put out of business for the duration.

Less obvious, but with tremendous long-range impact on the future of New York production, was another dictate issued by the War Production Board that placed a $5,000 cap on the cost of new construction materials used on any single set.15 This handicapped independent producers and favored studios whose back lots contained acres of standing sets representing everything from Southern plantations to Brooklyn brownstones. There were no such back lots in the east. And when an elaborate interior setting was created at Universal or MGM, the windows, doorframes, staircases, and furnishings could be taken apart and stored for reuse in vast scenic warehouses. New York had very few of those, either. Consequently, Hollywood studios were able to build “new” sets simply by creative reuse of the old ones, giving them a significant head start when confronted with the same $5,000 budget cap.

Although a surprising number of inexpensive musical shorts continued to be produced locally, the only feature-length theatrical film known to have been shot entirely in the New York area during the war was Follies Girl. This low-budget independent production, little more than a compendium of musical numbers and comedy routines wrapped around a flimsy wartime romantic plot, stands as a link between New York’s indigenous prewar and postwar feature film industries. It was produced and directed by William Rowland at Ideal Sound Studios in Hudson Heights, New Jersey, in October 1942, with other sequences “shot at night spots in New York.”16 Where a Hollywood musical would make use of talent already under contract, Rowland brought in a mix of local performers recruited from those same theaters and night spots, including the band leader Ray Heatherton, the musical comedy star Doris Nolan, and the modern dance pioneer Charles Weidman—who can be identified in the film but receives no screen credit.17 Confronted with the War Production Board’s materiel restrictions, Rowland appears to have taken full advantage of existing theatrical locations, spending well under $5,000 each on the few threadbare studio sets built at Ideal. The staging of one musical number consists of two characters sitting in a car and smoking while they listen to a song over the radio. In another number, Fritzi Scheff, a popular musical performer of the World War I era, entertains GIs at the “Broadway Swing Canteen” by singing “I Knew Your Father, Son,” accompanied by a montage of newsreel footage that runs from the Great War up to the era of Chiang Kai-shek and

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Joseph Stalin. Although Motion Picture Daily praised Follies Girl as “an ambitious effort at a smart musical production,” it also criticized an overall lack of “cohesive continuity.”18 An innovative low-budget producer whose prewar New York musicals included both Moonlight and Pretzels (1933) and Sweet Surrender (1935), Rowland understood that filmmaking in New York was intimately connected with the rest of the local entertainment industry, especially radio broadcasting and Broadway. So to make Follies Girl he covered as many bases as possible by partnering with Donald Flamm, the former managing director of radio station WMCA, and W. Horace Schmidlapp, a wealthy young investor from Cincinnati who had recently taken an interest in bankrolling Broadway musicals.19 They called their new operation Associated Producers, Inc. and immediately sold their first feature to an appropriately low-end Hollywood distributor, Producers Releasing Corporation.20 Rowland soon picked up his career in Hollywood (and Mexico), but Horace Schmidlapp decided he liked producing movies in New York. After leaving his day job at Chase Bank’s foreign division, he had begun investing in Broadway shows in 1939. He was one of many backers to profit from Cabin in the Sky (1940), and his production of Cole Porter’s Let’s Face It (1941–1943) ran for 547 performances. But Schmidlapp was not just another playboy investor; he had been operating a successful “commercial” film studio, making industrials and other sponsored films, even before joining Associated Producers.

Along with two film industry veterans, Leon Leventhal and Stanley Neal, he had incorporated Associated Filmakers as early as September 1941, suggesting that his later partnership with Rowland was to some degree an outgrowth of his existing industrial film operation.21 Yet the glamour of working on Follies Girl was obviously more appealing than supervising the production of industrial films. Associated typically rented stage space at the Fox Movietone studio, where Follies Girl originally hoped to shoot. But as soon as work on the feature wrapped—in New Jersey—local trade papers announced that Associated would be expanding into a studio of its own.22 In March 1944 Associated Filmakers released through Astor a forty-nine-minute film called The Meadville Patriot, directed by another sponsored film veteran, B. K. Blake. Although three of the actors were carried over from Follies Girl, including Cora Witherspoon and Gordon Oliver, the film was not a musical but a conventional melodrama about a big-city reporter who takes over a small-town newspaper.23 Inserts of newspaper headlines shown in the film are all dated April or May 1942, suggesting that The Meadville Patriot might never have been intended for theatrical release at all and had instead been filmed much earlier and targeted at an entirely different market.

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A 1945 article in Film Daily makes no mention of Associated Filmakers having produced anything but sponsored films (eighty of them, in fact) and notes that it is currently working on three full-length features “for commercial firms.”24 There are a few examples of feature-length industrial pictures being released into the theatrical market—like The Middleton Family at the New York World’s Fair (1939), an extended commercial for Westinghouse—but what client would have commissioned The Meadville Patriot? When Gordon Oliver arrives in Meadville to take over its local newspaper he soon finds himself at odds with a coterie of old women, censorious puritans who pressure him to support their prohibition crusade. Although the Twenty-First Amendment had repealed federal prohibition in 1933, ten states had either voted against repeal or continued to enforce their own prohibition statutes. A decade later the “liquor interests” were still fighting this battle, and they or their allies could easily have fostered the production of The Meadville Patriot, hoping to circulate it in those states still debating the issue of repeal. Indeed, the only review I was able to locate dismisses the film as “more a preachment against prohibition than anything else.”25 But for its national advertising campaign in 1944 Astor bypassed the liquor angle and tied the film to Roosevelt’s more popular “Four Freedoms” campaign (“Freedom of the Press Was More Than a Phrase to This Country Editor”).26 Desperate for product, Astor was happy to put anything new on the screen, even if they had to repurpose a “wet” promotional film as a theatrical feature to do so.

The “Broadway Swing Canteen” referred to in Follies Girl was modeled on the American Theater Wing’s “Stage Door Canteen,” which had opened in the basement of the Forty-Fourth Street Theater in March 1942. Frank Borzage began filming Stage Door Canteen in Hollywood in December 1942 on a detailed reproduction of the forty- by eighty-foot club. But five weeks later the production moved to New York—not to shoot at the actual club (“because of lighting difficulties”) but to work at an identical recreation built at the Fox Movietone studio at Tenth Avenue and Fifty-Fourth Street. “The trek to Manhattan was necessary to shoot sequences in which Broadway figures such as Katherine Cornell, Tallulah Bankhead, Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne, Helen Hayes, Gertrude Lawrence, Dorothy Stickney and Ilka Chase will appear.”27 Steve E. Fitzgibbon, manager of the studio, was still using the production of this film to drum up business in the summer of 1944 when he announced plans for construction of a third sound stage, “which will start going up after the war.”28 Despite rare exceptions like these, one would expect that restrictions on travel and transportation would limit New York’s appearance on wartime screens to a series of stock shots, a trend which was already in place during the 1930s. Conventional wisdom has it that producers were forced onto their back

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lots, not only to make better use of those standing sets but because of the logistical problems of extensive location shoots. For example, Carlo Gaberscek’s detailed examination of location sites used for the filming of American westerns shows that wartime production in places like Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado dropped to almost zero after Pearl Harbor. Westerns were still being made but on less picturesque locations a lot closer to Hollywood.29 But there was another side to this coin, the side that limited the amount of money that could be spent on set construction. Once filmmakers grew tired of rearranging the studio’s standing sets, some degree of filming on location began to seem like a reasonable option. Far-flung locations would still be off-limits, but even a trip to downtown Los Angeles was still a location shoot, often requiring busloads of actors and trucks full of technical apparatus. One location that would stand to benefit from this realization was New York, which had structural advantages that made it far more attractive than Arizona or New Mexico.

The first “Hollywood” film to do any principal photography in New York after December 7 was Tarzan’s New York Adventure (originally Tarzan Against the World), for which traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge was tied up for an entire morning in early January.30 When Boy is kidnapped, Tarzan and Jane track him to New York, only to find he is being forced to work as an elephant wrangler for a circus. Johnny Weissmuller is clearly established at the bridge, and in a nicely staged scene we see him (and his stunt double) evade the NYPD as Tarzan makes a spectacular dive into the East River. The film contains plenty of New York back projection, but the money shot here looks at least as good as a newsreel.

Twentieth Century Fox sent director Irving Pichel to New York in July 1942 to film location scenes for Life Begins at Eight-Thirty—not just back-projection plates but scenes with the principal actors, Monty Woolley and Ida Lupino.31 Pichel did not need to bring along his own extras, nor did he need to drag in truckloads of studio apparatus from Hollywood. Instead, he simply hired New York crews and local Fox cinematographer Larry Williams. They shot their exteriors, mainly around East Fifty-Second Street and near the Queensboro Bridge, and went back to Hollywood. Unfortunately, by the time the film was released nearly all of this footage had disappeared. Monty Woolley, as a washed-up ham reduced to playing Santa Claus at the “Marcy Herald Square” store—a role once envisioned for John Barrymore—does his best to carry the film with a string of acidulous insults. Channeling his trademark Man Who Came to Dinner performance, Woolley taunts a waiting crowd with a sneering chorus of “How I hate you, one and all!” But what could have been a sharp-tongued precursor to Miracle on 34th Street then goes straight downhill, trapped in a few small studio interiors. Woolley finally leaves his apartment and walks out into the city (two shots, maybe), but by then the film is just about over. One or two

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well-placed location exteriors might have relieved the film’s air of claustrophobia, but whoever was responsible for assembling Life Begins at Eight-Thirty had not yet learned the lesson George Seaton would demonstrate so clearly only a few years later.

From Hitchcock to Wilder Producers now had to decide if the added value of location filming—increased realism plus reduced set-construction costs—might offset some of its associated headaches. But whatever the economic benefits, leaving the studio would have a lasting effect on American films and filmmakers. Alfred Hitchcock, for example, was already well known for his extensive use of studio settings and special-effects technology, a tendency that had only increased on his arrival in Hollywood. But Shadow of a Doubt, the first film he put into production after the announcement of the War Production Board’s materiel restrictions, sent him off in a new direction. “Right from its original conception,” Hitchcock’s friend and biographer John Russell Taylor would write, “Shadow of a Doubt was built on a principle new to Hitch’s American films, and indeed new to his sound films altogether—that of detailed location realism.”32 The decision had aesthetic consequences as well as economic benefits. “With the government limit on new sets,” the New York Times reported, “Hitch was virtually forced out into the open.” Four weeks of this location shooting took place in Santa Rosa, California, which was not just a convenient small town but one that had been “cast” by Hitchcock and his writer, Thornton Wilder, during preproduction.

The anonymous Times reporter immediately connected this style of shooting with silent film technique: Hitchcock soon discovered advantages in this older and more informal method of making a film, for it offered opportunities that could never have occurred within the well-guarded gates of a modern Hollywood studio. There was a wider latitude for the extemporaneous, for the impromptu touch; even the accidental sometimes found itself accepted.33

Shadow of a Doubt not only can serve as a model for postwar location shooting in cities like New York (sometimes by Hitchcock himself) but also should be recognized as one of the earliest wartime films to do some of its own filming there. The opening scenes of the film, where “Uncle Charlie” escapes from two detectives who have been shadowing him, were shot there by Hitchcock in August 1942, even before Joseph Cotten had been cast in the role. “For the atmospheric opening shot of the Pulaski Skyway over the Hackensack River, Hitchcock dressed a couple of neighborhood factory workers as bums sitting

—DAVID BORDWELL , author of Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling “ ‘Keep ’Em in the East’ is a valuable (and long overdue) work of cinema scholarship. It broadens the parameters of American film history to include the boroughs of New York, where independent artists thrived far from Hollywood’s picture factories. Koszarski’s exemplary research shows that New York’s influence extended beyond Broadway’s influential writers, directors, and performers.”

—EDDIE MULLER , host of TCM’s Noir Alley “In this reassessment of the role of New York City in the history of film, ‘Keep ’Em in the East’ restores the city’s filmmaking reputation with impeccable research and enthusiasm. No one would dispute that Richard Koszarski is the only film historian who could have written this book.”

—JEANINE BASINGER , author of The Star Machine “ ‘Keep ’Em in the East’ is absorbing and enlightening. The dramas and disasters are expertly told and brilliantly researched. The book is a pleasure to read.”

—KEVIN BROWNLOW , author of The Parade’s Gone By . . . “ ‘Keep ’Em in the East’ is an extraordinary achievement. Koszarski knows more about the history of filmmaking in New York City than anyone else, living or dead. This distills the central part of his lifelong research. No one will ever match it. For those who love New York and the movies, this book’s many surprises will provide an unending source of fascination and information.”

—CHARLES MUSSER , author of The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907

RICHARD KOSZARSKI is professor emeritus of English and Cinema Studies at Rutgers

FILM AND CULTURE SERIES PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK cup.columbia.edu

Cover design: Chang Jae Lee

University. He was formerly a curator at the Museum of the Moving Image and is the founder and editor emeritus of Film History. His many books include Hollywood on the Hudson: Film and Television in New York from Griffith to Sarnoff (2008).

Cover image: Ray Milland, photographed on Third Avenue near 103rd Street, for The Lost Weekend, October 1946. No hidden cameras. Bison Archives.

“Richard Koszarski deftly weaves together industrial history, political infighting, social conditions, personal and very human biographies, and pointed appreciation of films as different as Naked City and Tall, Tan, and Terrific. He brings to light forgotten movies and trends, from little-known urban docudramas to the important ‘race films’ made for Black audiences. The book’s final stretch ‘crosscuts’ Kazan’s making On the Waterfront with Kubrick’s preparing Killer’s Kiss, and the result is as exciting as a Hollywood chase. ‘Keep ’Em in the East’ permanently reshapes our understanding of American film as an art, a business, and a cultural force.”