Making 'Manhattan'

(free episode)

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 35 years of my life.

When I started writing my 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.

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.

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.

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.’