New York Movie Map: The Answers

First of all, thanks to everyone who enjoyed the New York Movie Map, spread the cheer around, and especially ordered one! It went gangbusters over the last week and took my site down three times with all the traffic, so, that was fun.

Hey order yours here wooo!

One thing that struck me while I was working on this thing was how often I’d see the World Trade Center pop up. It made sense, since a whopping 71 out of the 91 movies were released before 9/11, and showing the WTC was just a stock way of saying, “hey, we’re in New York now”. You can probably imagine, though, that each time I saw it I raised an eyebrow. Interestingly, there ain’t a lot of notable scenes that happen there (Snake Plisskin lands a glider on top of one of the towers in Escape from New York, and the 1976 King Kong climbs it, but I had fine alternatives for both), so it wasn’t that tough of a decision to leave the WTC off the map.

There was surprisingly little complaining about movies I screwed up or left out, so I’m pretty pleased with myself, but the most common gripe was that I left out the other boroughs and the upper part of Manhattan. Like I either half-assed it, forgot about, or wanted to take a dump on all the fine folks that don’t live in the exact epicenter of the universe. Look, I grew up in Queens, went to school on E. 94th, and lived out in Brooklyn so I know what it’s like to be neglected by pop media. And that’s just it – blame Hollywood, not me. These roughly 12 square miles of Manhattan is where THEY put everything. If I included all of NYC, or even just upper Manhattan, there’d be a ton of wasted space where relatively little’s happening and it’d reduce the impact. I had to make it work as a visual piece and not just as a reference. So it made sense to focus on where most of the action is concentrated. I don’t think anyone really needs to see it go all the way up to Inwood or down to *cough* Staten Island just for the sake.

I’m still going through all the answer submissions I’ve gotten over the last week; if you won you’ll be hearing from me by email within the next 2 days!

And with this, the submission deadline is over… because HEY LOOK THE ANSWERS…

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