The Real NYC Back in the Day Through the Eyes of Laura Mars
If you’re a recent visitor to NYC, you’re likely to take for granted the clean(ish) streets and subway cars, the Starbucks on practically every corner, the ease of calling for a car with an app on your cellphone while people-watching the happy hordes in Times Square waiting to go to the theatre after spending their life savings at the Disney Store, with a chaser of goodie bags to tide them through the matinees from the M&Ms store just up the block.
Is this the authentic NYC, you may ask? Well, if you’re a longtime New Yorker, allow me to answer with a resounding Are You Freaking Kidding Me?
NYC Back In the Day
Back in the day when I moved to NYC, the streets were strewn with trash, the subway cars made you want to squirt hand sanitizer everywhere (too bad it hadn’t been invented yet) and were covered in layers of graffiti, you got your bilge-water 25-cent coffee from a surly deli guy, you froze your butt off waiting for some jerk to get off the payphone on the corner so you could make a call, and the only reason to go to Times Square was if you were looking for some jollys in an X-rated peep show.
The city was dirty and dangerous. We’d walk around with “Mugger’s Money”—a few dollars to hand over just in case. The corner of 10th Street and First Avenue (now home to a sushi restaurant named Jintan; try the curry udon) around the corner from my apartment, was heroin/cocaine central, where dealers brazenly stood outside, waiting for their customers to pull up in their limos. (Like the couple in the opening scene in another back-in-the-day-NYC trash classic, Wolfen, starring Albert Finney.)
But you know what? It was a helluva lot more interesting and fun. No, of course it’s not fun worrying that you might get mugged or robbed or desperately trying to flag down a nonexistent taxi when you’re trying to get home. But it was fun when you didn’t have to spend your entire salary on rent, and you could afford to shop at the unique little boutiques found on practically every street (since replaced by banks and/or Starbucks or chain drugstores), and communication was more difficult so you had to be creative with your plans, and you had to use your imagination instead of lazily going online to find the answers. And when Keith Haring’s Radiant Babies and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s SAMO graffiti appeared seemingly overnight in subway stations and walls all over downtown.
Eyes of Laura Mars Takes You Back
If you want to get a feel for the filth of days gone by, there’s no better way to spend 104 minutes than by streaming the totally highbrow trashy and ludicrously entertaining 1978 thriller, Eyes of Laura Mars. Starring Faye Dunaway in her first role after winning a Best Actress Oscar for Network, Faye plays a fashion photographer who starts having psychic visions of people in her orbit being savagely murdered. The cast was stellar—Tommy Lee Jones as a cynical cop, René Auberjonois, Raul Julia, Brad Dourif, 1970s supermodels Lisa Taylor and Darlanne Fluegel, and famed hairdresser John Sahag as himself. The original script was written by John (Halloween) Carpenter, and director Irvin Kershner went on to helm Star Wars. Yep, highbrow trash indeed. (It would have been even trashier had Barbra Streisand starred in it, as originally intended, but she got freaked out by the script’s “kinky nature,” and merely sang the theme song, the power ballad “Prisoner,” instead. No doubt the fact that Helmut Newton took the photographs seen in the movie had something to do with the, ahem, kink.)
As you settle back with your popcorn, watch in wonder as bygone trendy NYC flashes by. The cigarettes hanging from everyone’s lips! The drugs, the drinking, the disco soundtrack! The grotty police station with the manual typewriters! The Checker cabs and rickety city busses and hideously enormous 1970s cars! The even uglier shoes and clothes!
Location, Location, Location
But it’s the location shots that will amaze, as it can be hard to believe that now-sleek Manhattan was basically a garbage dump not that long ago. In one scene, Laura’s psychic vision has her running through the streets of SoHo before it was trendy/art gallery/designer shops/$8 million lofts only hedge-fund schmucks can afford/SoHo. The streets are gross…the grungy lofts home to decrepit factories and not financiers…there is a glimpse of the World Trade Center (heartbreaking)…and one of the murder victims trudges up steep flights of stairs in one of those loft buildings which didn’t have buzzers or video cams to let visitors in—your visitor would have to find a pay phone, call to say they were nearby, and then you’d put the keys in a heavy sock when they called up to you and throw it out the window, hoping it would land nearby.
In another, now-notorious scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoaEkz5oF_U) that was shot over four days in Columbus Circle—which is about the only location that still basically loks the same today—Laura is doing a shoot with her favorite models. Cameras with real film! Light meters! Cars are flipped and set on fire. The models, clad in PETA-non-approved enormously ugly fur coats over their lingerie and thigh-high boots, shed their coats and start fighting on cue and pulling each other’s hair. Think this would happen today? As if!
One of my favorite scenes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToxmdB8DrhI) is an indoor photo shoot at Laura’s enormous waterfront studio, with the casually nude models, clad in filmy see-through frocks and other assorted garments that would now be ideal Studio 54 Halloween costumes, primping and then posing and dancing to “Let’s All Chant” by the Michael Zager Band. (You can see them in the lobby card distributed to theatres, above.) When Laura approaches the lone male model, looking a bit smarmy in his tux, she says, “You’re in the pool. Dead.” He shrugs. “For a hundred bucks an hour,” he says. Sure! Why not. I guess that was the going rate for models back when the minimum wage was $2.65/hour.
I can’t quite place Laura’s studio, which was accessible only by a dangerously dark and isolated staircase. That such a glamorpuss would have chosen to work in such a place is, however, exactly what NYC used to be—you gave up a bit of safety knowing that overcoming your fears would be worth it, if it allowed you to follow your muse and create something magical.
That NYC is gone forever, but at least you can still watch it through Laura’s eyes.
