Making 'Manhattan'

March 15th, 2024

‘She adored New York City. To her, no matter what this season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated through the great tunes of George Gershwin’.

Like Woody Allen, Manhattan definitely was my muse for the first thirty-five years of my life.

When I started writing my book of short stories, Manhattan Short Stories Tall Tales, I was playing on a variation of my own experiences, and putting a bit of a twist on them, playing with different characters, different neighborhoods, different realities, different time periods, making it something different, something new, something fantastical.

It steals from the architecture of Manhattan and the vibes of the era that lent themselves to the city. For example, my friend lived on the Lower East Side in 2009 and we’d often pass by Meyer Lansky’s old haunts right down the block. The Jewish gangster had joined forces with his childhood friend Lucky Luciano and they got into the bootlegging business and this was one of the spots they used for their operations. It looks unassuming from the side entrance but going down the alleyway to the back of the building there’s a beautiful speakeasy joint with a tiny backroom behind a bookshelf in the wall and you need to know the secret password to open it up. That inspired, in small part, the first romantic Tall Tale of my book which takes place on the Lower East Side & Little Italy in the 1920s.

Another historic moment that I played with in another Short Story is from 1954. The famous photoshoot with Marilyn Monroe on the set of Seven Year Itch. The iconic scene was taken in front of the old movie theater on 52nd Street and Lexington Ave. That theater became the setting of my story - inside the small claustrophobic space of the theater’s projection booth.

These short stories and tall tales were written over the course of a few years. It takes from fairytales and folklore and turns them into mystical, mythical, psychological fairytales, placing some of the emotional experiences I had into different scenarios, different eras, different time periods, also playing around with the idea of past lives or parallel lives depending on the perception of the concept of time itself. I wrote each of these stories while outside in the city - walking down city streets, sitting in Central Park, sitting in an open atrium, a library, a bookstore, listening to the rumbling of the train cars, feeling the vibrations, it soothes my mind, I really can drift there. All of the sounds of the city serve as a comforting background noise. Most of them were written while I was taking the subway.

The Projectionist came from the train cars traveling through the tunnels at such a speed I feel like I’m inside a projector reel. I’m watching the strips of film speed past my eyes.

Each person on the street, walking in a crowd, has an entire universe within them. And we can never know their entire story. It all exists inside them. And each universe inside them, collides with other universes, other realms of existence, all happening simultaneously.

The title from the book, Manhattan Short Stories Tall Tales, came to me as a visual idea. Somehow it made me think of the Manhattan skyline, skyscrapers short and tall. Standing on a rooftop just a few stories high and looking out at the horizon of high and low rectangles. Each of these buildings of brick and stone and cement hold hundreds and thousands of tiny rectangles and a million intricate stories.

There's a quiet haunting loneliness that is often present in the crowded gritty streets of the most popular city in the world. These are the lost souls that can only exist on this tall mysterious island. Woody's character in his 1979 movie, Manhattan, also has a sort of a loneliness. He is unsatisfied, a victim of life, of history, of society, of himself, haunted by a pervasive victim-mentality, always harping on the woes of the past, whether it's cultural, familial, religious. And the protagonists in my ‘Manhattan’ have a similar sort of mentality.

There’s the man hidden underneath the floorboards of a tenement building on the Lower East Side during the roaring 20s. There is a story of the man who subway surfs through graffiti tunnels under the crime ridden streets of Time Square during the 70s. There’s the story of a man who lives a secret life among the movie stars of the glamorous 50s.

But in each of my short stories, the main characters die of a broken heart, of depression, of being stuck in a reality that they refuse to let go of. They are a victim in the world. We experience these metaphoric deaths constantly, each time we give in to the weight, the gravitational pull downward into victimhood. But each protagonist is given another life experience to see the truth, to get it right, to create a life that is sovereign and free.

While my main characters are so serious, wanting to escape their realities, run away from their troubles, feeling helpless or hopeless, Woody's character finds humor in it all. He accepts this trait almost heroically. He can step outside of himself and see the absurdity of it all. He can find a way to joke about his own mentality.

I like to think Woody's movies are cloaked in a sort of secret truth that the key to overcoming this kind of mentality is transforming it into something positive and new, to make light of it, and most of all to make art.

I think my grandfather understood this as well when he spoke about his performances as a traveling stage magician. He said in an interview that “the medicine in magic is in taking people out of themselves. And when they relax and they’re lost in a happy fantasy and they’re laughing and giggling having a good time, that’s my reward.”

Back in 2012, I had put out a call for artists to shoot whatever they thought the title, Manhattan Short Stories Tall Tales meant to them, selecting any neighborhood in New York, and placing me somewhere inside the frame of their picture. The winner of the contest would have their image on the cover of my book. I was met with so much enthusiasm and inspired ideas for photoshoots. Each artist, each personality, is shown in the photographs they took. It was so much fun to see what each person envisioned. They picked the neighborhood, they picked the scene, the time of day, whatever kind of equipment they wanted to use.

The street artist Keith, aka SIDE, photographed me on the Manhattan Bridge and nearby rooftops.

Mariclaire even brought a suitcase of costumes for me to wear. She really wanted to put a magical spin on it, so creative and artsy. We shot over by the Brooklyn Bridge and Chinatown.

Oshrat shot me at Lincoln Center, then down near a Hell’s Kitchen parking lot. She was really playing around with different angles in the photographic framing.

With Keren, we were on the fire escape of her apartment in the East Village. That was so much fun.

Daniel shot me in black & white film at Grand Central. These are such beautiful moody shots, playing with the crowds of the bustling train station and natural sunlight.

This is only to name a few of the artists that participated. They all had phenomenal ideas.

In 2016, Manhattan Short Stories Tall Tales was selling at Barnes & Noble and Amazon stores online but my favorite place that housed this book was a local bookshop downtown in SoHo. I published five different bookcovers for a limited time, but the one that won the contest was by Jeffrey Vock.

Here is my Time Capsule episode on 'Making Manhattan' - a comparison of my 2011 book, 'Manhattan Short Stories Tall Tales', and Woody Allen's 1979 movie, 'Manhattan.’