An image from Across the Sea of Time, as featured in Scenes from the City.  Photo courtesy of Photofest.

November 1, 2006 – Scenes from the City: Filmmaking in New York, a Rizzoli book edited by James Sanders and produced with the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, is now on sale!

Almost from the beginning of motion pictures, New York City has provided some of the most diverse and exciting settings and locations for movies—creating indelible images of urban life forever captured on film and collectively documenting the evolution of one of the greatest cities in the world.

Published on the 40th anniversary of the founding of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, Scenes from the City celebrates the extraordinary heritage of location filmmaking in America’s largest and most cinematic city. From Annie Hall and Taxi Driver to Do the Right Thing and When Harry Met Sally to “Law & Order” and “Sex and the City,” many of the most memorable moments in movies and television over the last four decades have been created on the streets of New York—thanks in large part to the Mayor’s Office, the first agency of its kind in the world, whose founding in 1966 sparked a dazzling explosion in film production around the five boroughs.

Scenes from the City traces this groundbreaking, forty-year cinematic history decade by decade, recalling some of the best-remembered films, places, and moments of each period, highlighting the street-style work of directors as diverse as Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Spike Lee. Along the way, it offers a revealing look at some of the most legendary New York neighborhoods and districts—from SoHo to Times Square, the East Village to the Upper West Side, Coney Island to Harlem—that have been unforgettably captured on celluloid over the years. Opening with a survey of landmark location films from the late 1940s to the early ‘60s (from On the Town and On the Waterfront to Breakfast at Tiffany’s and West Side Story ) and closing with a round-up of memorable television scenes filmed on the city’s streets (from David Letterman to “Sesame Street,” “Cagney & Lacey” to “The Sopranos”), this lavishly illustrated volume not only provides a vivid testament to the forces that have reshaped American film over the past four decades, but a startling portrait of the changes that have transformed the city itself in those same years. The book includes an expansive discussion with the director Martin Scorsese and a personal essay by the director and writer Nora Ephron, as well as a major essay by the editor James Sanders on the rise of location shooting and the impact of the Mayor’s Office in the years since its founding four decades ago.

Filled with more than 250 rare and unusual photographs, along with the insightful (and often surprising) words of celebrated dirtector such as Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone and Nora Ephron as well as scores of actors, producers, cinematographers and other filmmakers, Scenes from the City explores, as never before, the astonishing enterprise of bringing cameras, equipment, crew, and some of the world’s most famous performers onto the streets of one of the busiest, most dynamic urban “stages” in the world. Scenes from the City celebrates this most charming of settings—New York City—a captivating “character”—which rarely receives billing but always steals the show!

Click here  for a peek inside the book!