New York City
Can Anyone Stop This Man From Writing?
My father, Bruce Jay Friedman, was saddened by the news that Philip Roth is gone.He found it disturbing, unexpected, and doesn’t think there is anyone around who will fill his shoes. Roth gave his entire life to what he did.
The BJF vs. Roth trope was a slightly annoying subject in my family. Or at least, I’ll speak for myself. It was grating to hear Roth’s name come up, automatically, when someone praised my father. What does Roth have to do with it? They have nothing to do with each other. Why must I hear that echo? A petty annoyance, probably not worth mentioning.
more...Shirley Temple Meets Mr. Death.
Forty years later, I detect an embarrassing undertone of boyhood crush in this Soho News fluff interview I did with Laraine Newman. I brought a handful of Famous Monsters mags for her to pose with. They ran the cover line “Dracula Turns Me On.”
Reprinted from The Soho News, May 18, 1978
more...Eight Million Stories.
There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.
The greatest legacy of Naked City is its location footage. This police procedural, which ran between 1958-1963, is chock-full of New York’s real streets. Breakfast at Tiffany’s/West Side Story-era New York. The year 1962 takes my breath away–because it hovers innocently in the middle of the American century, suspended from the ‘50s, just a hop, skip and gun blast away from the assassination and the Beatles.
Naked City was nearly the only location show shot in New York. We visit the fabled St. Nicholas Arena fights on 66th Street. It would be closed in a year. We take in the vista from the elevated subway at 161st Street looking out on Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds. We enter the old, cigar-hazed Madison Square Garden at 50th Street, and cross the Bowery where Lower East Side kids run amok and play stickball. Children play alone on sidewalks and playgrounds.
more...Scuba Duba.
As a child, I was given a rare glimpse into the explosion of off-Broadway theater in the late 60s. The 1967 season may have been the best ever, financially and artistically. Off-Broadway is where all the action was—a place where someone like Norman Lear could poach his ideas for future TV shows and the whole the zeitgeist would eventually be harnessed and watered down for the mainstream.
Pick a play, any play, and its small stage was likely to contain an eye-popping young cast. A $4 ticket led the way to George Tabori’s The Niggerlovers (with Morgan Freeman, Stacy Keach, Viveca Lindfors), or Murray Schisgal’s Fragments (with Gene Hackman, James Coco) or Israel Horovitz’s The Indian Wants the Bronx (with Al Pacino, John Cazale, Marsha Mason).
Ten Favorite Books on New York.
I’m sometimes asked what my favorite New York books are. These became favorites after I wrote Tales of Times Square. I never read much about New York before that. I was too busy experiencing it.
more...