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A Nostalgia for New York, by Way of the Toronto Film Festival
If all goes according to plan this weekend at the Toronto
International Film Festival, voices caught on tape at a Manhattan rap
session more than 33 years ago will introduce a film about the making of “A Chorus
Line.”
Those voices, and others from a handful of movies at this sprawling, 10-day
film festival opening on Thursday, are also likely to rouse some serious
nostalgia for a New York that somehow got away.
At least three pictures at this year’s festival take an unusually deep look
at the city as it roiled its way through the messy, magnificent, slightly mad
1970s.
“Every
Little Step,” set to be shown on Saturday with live dance performances at a
party afterward, unspools part of its story from a reel-to-reel audio tape on
which Michael Bennett, the original director of “A Chorus Line,” recorded
real-life tales that would become grist for the show, the era’s signature
musical. Directed by James Stern and Adam Del Deo, the documentary follows the
casting of a 2006 revival of “A Chorus Line,” while also probing the people and
the times at its root.
Another documentary, “American
Swing,” which first screens on Friday, takes a walk on the wilder side.
Directed by Mathew Kaufman and Jon Hart, the film follows the rise and fall of
Larry Levenson, a Coney Island ice cream seller who in 1977 turned the basement
of an Upper West Side hotel into a merrily public sex club named Plato’s
Retreat.
A personal drama, “Lymelife,” then looks at those who were stuck in the role of suburban outsiders. It is
about growing up on Long Island amid crumpled families whose men, not unlike Mr.
Levenson, were off chasing their dreams, while their children waited their turn.
Directed by Derick Martini and written with Steven Martini, his brother, the
movie first screens on Sept. 8.
(Inevitably, other films among hundreds at the festival are set in New York
and its environs. They include “Pride and
Glory,” a cop drama starring Ed Norton and Colin
Farrell; “The
Narrows,” about life in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn; and “New
York, I Love You,” an anthology of love stories set in the city.)
In different ways those stories of the 1970s turn on aspirations, many of
them failed.
“Goals seem more achievable now,” said Mr. Stern, a seasoned theater producer
whose credits include “Hairspray” and “The
Producers.”
In making “Every Little Step,” Mr. Stern said, he was struck by a sense that
the Manhattan of 30 years ago broke hearts — and so forged those wounded “Chorus
Line” characters — in a way that does not quite happen today.
“New York is much closer” for the outsider, he said. “Broadway is more
achievable than it was.” If Manhattan was meaner in the mid- and late-70s — the
city near bankruptcy, crime seemingly out of control, fires raging in the Bronx
while a nation tuned in to watch the Yankees in the World Series — it
nonetheless could be a delightfully haphazard place. Mr. Stern, then a
15-year-old from Chicago, tells of jumping off a train with a friend, running to
Times Square in hopes of catching a show and being handed balcony tickets to “A
Chorus Line” by a couple with a pair to spare.
Mr. Stern and his friend sat on the stairs and watched close-up. “It changed
my life,” he said of the experience. “I went home, quit basketball and
auditioned for a play.”
From “American Swing” — of which Magnolia Pictures is the prospective
distributor, while “Every Little Step” and “Lymelife” are for sale — we learn
that Mr. Levenson, too, had aspirations. One was to have sex with every woman in
New York.
According to interview subjects and more than a few archival shots of Mr.
Levenson in action, he got further toward that goal than one might now think
possible.
“We’re interviewing these people, and they’re grandparents now,” said Mr.
Kaufman, who grew up in Westchester County and at 38 is too young to remember
much about Plato’s. “But they were doing stuff back then that would make my
friends get red in the face.”
Mr. Kaufman’s subjects, men and women alike, talked freely before the camera
about swinging at the club. “I found them to be wistful,” Mr. Kaufman said.
Before AIDS — and Mr. Levenson’s being hauled off to prison on tax charges —
intervened, patrons had discovered the city’s democratic side at Plato’s. There
were no velvet ropes. Beautiful people and the not-so-beautiful, power players
and suburban nobodies all writhed on the same sticky mats.
Trouble with sex and boundaries also has much to do with “Lymelife,” whose
director, Mr. Martini, grew up in Syosset on Long Island during the same era.
As he got older, Mr. Martini, 33, said he became acutely aware of a hunger
that had driven men like his father, a real estate entrepreneur in those years,
to pursue professional dreams and personal liaisons in a heady mix that wrecked
families.
“In Queens, Brooklyn, all those places in the late ’60s and early ’70s, you
had all this opportunity opening up for blue-collar guys,” said Mr. Martini, who
last week was still in Los Angeles finishing a film that he financed with money
cobbled together privately. “They were suddenly able to jump ahead in life,”
thanks in part to a real estate boom. With Alec
Baldwin, Timothy
Hutton and Rory
Culkin among its stars, “Lymelife” tells a story that Mr. Martini says is
modeled on that of his family, before he left Long Island after high school to
write for the theater in Manhattan.
One lesson learned in making a film about New York suburbanites of 30 years
ago, Mr. Martini added, is that many ran too fast for their own good.
“I’m going to get married, I want to have kids,” he said. “In my own life I’m
going to slow down a
bit.”
