Celluloid Heroes: New York Cinema and its Soundtracks

It all begins with a silent panoramic view of New York City and its bridges. And then, as the first bars of the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive” begin to thump, the camera zooms in on a 23-year-old John Travolta as Tony Manero strutting down a bustling working-class Brooklyn street. Decked out in an incongruous uniform of black leather jacket, open-collared crimson shirt, black flared trousers, and elevator shoes, he’s loose-limbed and square-shouldered, with a jive roll pimping out his step, a nod at every pretty girl who sashays by him and a bucket of paint bobbing at his side. And he’s moving so rhythmically to the music that it takes you a second before you realize the song isn’t actually playing on the street. It’s playing in his head and it’s what keeps him going. It’s how he sees himself: the king of the clubs, a player with a plan, rather than an aimless nobody hastening back to his job at the local hardware store. It’s how he keeps Saturday Night Fever in his everyday life.

In a nutshell, that’s how music and images have been interlinked in New York City. Every citizen is like Tony Manero, strutting down the street as the imagined star of his own movie, with a soundtrack to match. And in turn, the world has glamorized the living soundstage that is NYC, a wonderland that is constantly creating and recreating itself and whose every block, park, deli and stoop has been captured countless times both in film and in song. It’s a glorious case of the chicken and the egg, this relationship between the city and its moving images set to music, and whether you live in Ohio or Bulgaria or the Lower East Side, the exciting promise of self-transformation is what makes this overpriced city with terrible weather and overpopulation loom large in our collective dreams.

Certainly some soundtracks have emblazoned signature pictures of the city in our minds. Who can forget Audrey Hepburn warbling “Blue River” on her fire escape as she gazes upon a midnight Manhattan sky in 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s? Or the swell of Henry Mancini’s remarkable score as she contemplates the store window of Tiffany’s while mawing a coffee and Danish at dawn in a floor-length black evening gown, pearls, and serious beehive? Generations of girls (and boys) have moved to New York to experience such a moment.

Not everyone clamors to Brooklyn’s Borough Park to recreate the infamous chase scene in 1971’s French Connection, but few forget its delicious danger, indelibly heightened by Don Ellis’ score. Similarly, the 1981 dystopia Escape from New York would not so successfully play upon everyone’s urban fears without its wonderfully menacing score, composed by the film’s writer-director John Carpenter. And many people do flock to what’s left of Manhattan’s Little Italy in search of the vendor-clotted streets and the dropped fruit of The Godfather saga, as richly scored by director Frances Ford Coppola’s father, Carmine.

When it comes to downtown New York no one’s rendered it more lovingly in sound and image than Martin Scorsese. The director has proclaimed many a time that his twin loves are music and cinema, but it goes without saying that his unnamed third love has always been New York City itself. In films ranging from The Age of Innocence, in which he lushly detailed Lower Manhattan’s high society, to his 1987 Soho-based comedy of errors After Hours, Scorsese has made it his business to capture New York in various stages of age and dress (and undress).

Certainly it’s hard to remember now, but before Scorsese’s landmark films, music – especially rock ’n’ roll – rarely played an integral role in setting or dictating a scene. What would Taxi Driver, the study of would-be assassin Travis Bickle, be without the forlorn saxophone that’s central to Bernard Herrmann’s legendary score? Or take Goodfellas, the Mafia movie based on real-life gangster Henry Hill’s life, and its now-famous tracking shot that follows a young Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco through a secret entrance into Manhattan’s Copacabana club – that scene would never have conveyed so well the swank of the city if it hadn’t dovetailed perfectly with the Crystals’ “And Then He Kissed Me.” And in his breakout film, Mean Streets, about a small-time hood (Harvey Keitel) struggling to make his way on the Lower East Side, music plays such a strong role it’s practically a character unto itself. Scorsese himself has said, “For me, the whole movie was [The Rolling Stones’] ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ and [The Ronettes’] ‘Be My Baby.’” Certainly the film’s songs stand out as much as the visuals, matching the action pace for pace.

In fact, Scorsese’s triple love – movies, music and New York City – is so passionate that he actually filmed a musical love letter to the city. Entitled New York, New York, it stars his perennial collaborator Robert De Niro as a saxophonist in a troubled romance with Liza Minnelli. Though not critically praised, it honored the role that music has always played in setting the tone for New York films. It’s a meta-theme that runs through all the best movie musicals, from 1933’s starry-eyed 42nd Street (in which a young Ginger Rogers hoofs it to choreography by the wild Busby Berkeley) and the Romeo-and-Juliet-take-Manhattan scenario of 1961’s West Side Story (with a terrific Leonard Bernstein score) to Bob Fosse’s prescient All That Jazz (1979), with its ego-driven New York show-biz bustle, and the heartbreaking depiction of ’90s Alphabet City artists and radicals in Rent. Pick a rite of passage or a cultural mood, and there’s sure to be a legendary NYC movie musical moment that makes it all okay, at least for a second, be it Treat Williams caterwauling about his long Hair in Central Park or Gene Kelly singing his heart out in a sailor suit about the excitement of visiting On the Town.

Perhaps the only director whose love of music, movies and the city matches Scorsese’s is Spike Lee. In Lee’s movies, the many sounds of Brooklyn – ’70s soul, jazz (often composed by his father Bill Lee), Latin music, and hip hop – mingle together to fire up the quintessential vibe of the borough. The melting pots that comprise Spike’s scores show how Brooklyn, unlike Manhattan, is about many kinds of people building roots together rather than just going for broke. Crooklyn, his ode to his ’70s Brooklyn childhood, would be much less powerful without the mix of R&B tunes such as the Five Stairsteps’ “Ooh Child” and hip-hop tracks by The Crooklyn Dodgers (a Lee-gathered NYC hip-hop supergroup consisting of Chubb Rock, Jeru tha Damaja and O.C.). And all the edgy, enlivening defiance of the borough is captured in the opening sequence of Lee’s 1989 opus Do the Right Thing when a young Rosie Perez performs some powerfully choreographed kickboxing to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.”

That’s how the best marriages of music and movies have always worked: they brilliantly distill a moment in time in a way that lives on in the cultural zeitgeist long after the credits roll. The eternal, elusive cool of the Beat Generation’s New York chapter is most thoroughly encapsulated by the 1959 avant-garde short Pull My Daisy, set in a bleak New York apartment and featuring Jack Kerouac reading from a poem he wrote with fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, over a jazz piece by David Amram. The early days of rap music and breakdancing can immediately be summoned in Breakin’, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo and Beat Street, all released in 1984. The 1980 movie Times Square recalls the raw DIY ethic of the New York punk movement, both visually and musically. Though The Warriors was set in another dystopian near-future, it anthemized the chaotic helplessness many felt in 1979 by combining driving rock rhythms with rough-voiced soul.

Kids, director Larry Clarke’s artfully fractured study of grungy 1995 downtown youth culture, would have flailed without its post-grunge soundtrack, mostly crafted by lo-fi pioneer Lou Barlow (Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, Folk Implosion). And Jenny Livingston’s high-impact 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, about the fashion balls thrown by New York’s transgender community, would have been nothing without its soundtrack of drag staples like Diana Ross’ “Love Hangover,” Patti LaBelle’s “Over the Rainbow” and, of course, Malcolm McLaren’s “Deep in Vogue.”

Other iconic images of New York are better established through particular songs than anything else. The titular tracks of 1971’s Shaft and 1972’s Across 110th Street (by Isaac Hayes and Bobby Womack, respectively) easily evoke ’70s Harlem bad-assery. The happy-go-lucky chaos of mid-’80s Midtown is best captured by Ray Parker, Jr.’s “Ghostbusters,” accompanied by the image of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man floating across a mayhem-struck Manhattan. And the mainstream’s vision of downtown ’80s cool is epitomized by a young Madonna – decked out in mesh, ribbons, and leather – bopping to “Into the Groove” in Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan.

Indeed, the relationship between image and music is so powerful in New York that the best way to conjure any era of the city is to build out the right soundtrack. Cue Cheryl Lynn’s “Got to Be Real” and Ross’ “I’m Coming Out” and presto! You’ve got the foundation upon which director Whit Stillman built his sarcastic Studio 54 study, The Last Days of Disco. The tackiness of late-’80s New York wealth is deliciously summoned in the satirical thriller American Psycho (2000) through songs like Huey Lewis’ “Hip to Be Square”; it’s pop music that’s even more ostentatiously empty than the kiwi-laden un-local cuisine and shoulder pads that also defined the era. Movies that fetishized late-’50s NYC biker-gangs, like The Lords of Flatbush (1974) and the infinitely better The Wanderers (1979), would be nothing without their doo-wop numbers – nothing says greaser culture like The Shirelles.

And then you have a film like Wes Anderson’s magical The Royal Tenenbaums, loosely based upon the mid-century novels of J.D. Salinger, with a touch of Edward Gorey and the occasional dry reference to such mid-century Manhattan kid novels as The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Harriet the Spy. Focusing on a family of former child prodigies, The Royal Tenenbaums interrogates the kind of loneliness that’s most keenly felt in crowded New York City – or, even worse, in your own home. It relies heavily upon a New York that’s never quite existed except in Anderson’s mind: a charismatically ordered sea of brownstones, parks and streets that boasts a unique grid, differently colored taxis and, yes, Dalmatian mice.

It all might be a little too quirky except for the wistfully nostalgic soundtrack that grinds out all that whimsy: the devil-be-damned abandon of The Ramones’ “Judy Is a Punk,” the glee of Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” the poker-faced longing of the Velvet Underground’s “Stephanie Says” and the sweet melancholy of Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay.” It doesn’t seem a coincidence that nearly everyone on this soundtrack hails from New York (or at least made it their home for a spell) because the entire film reads like the most loving valentine ever posted to this Crazy Apple.

In fact, The Royal Tenenbaums reads just like New York itself. After all, New York is a place whose patently unnatural backdrop allows everyone to imagine we are our ideal selves in our ideal settings – with the ideal soundtrack whistling in the darkness. The music and movies of this city make us feel glamorous when we’re uncertain, tough when we’re scared, and part of something when we’re most solitary, whether we actually live in New York City or just, from time to time, adopt a New York state of mind.

A version of this article appeared in The Daily Note, a free daily newspaper distributed in New York during the 2013 Red Bull Music Academy.