context ·After Hours (1985)

SoHo before the money, 1984

After Hours was shot at night in a neighbourhood of artists' lofts that money was about to discover. The film catches the moment, and treats the uptown visitor as the intruder.

setting
lighting
context
setting
new-york
gentrification

The datum

The film was shot at night in SoHo and TriBeCa, where Scorsese was then living: "I was living in TriBeCa at the time" (Kelly, unpaged). Kelly describes the attraction:

Scorsese liked the nighttime quiet and emptiness of pre-gentrified SoHo and TriBeCa. Like the Russian cemetery in Mean Streets, the taxicab sanctuary of Travis Bickle, and the boxing ring roped off from the howling crowd in Raging Bull, SoHo is a place apart, especially "after hours."

— Kelly, unpaged

Griffin Dunne remembers it as a secret: "Soho then was uncharted territory for people who lived above 14th Street. We knew it, but no one else did" (Dunne on After Hours (2024)).

The change under way

The urban-space chapter of the Companion puts a date on it:

SoHo was, by 1985, the epicenter of a new wave of culture-led redevelopment in America's cities. Yet the SoHo of After Hours is still very much a neighborhood "in transition," as the developers would say, and Hackett is marked as decidedly "other" from the moment he steps out of his taxi.

— smc 354

Its reading of the film turns on who belongs. In Mean Streets the streets belong to the men who grew up in them. "Here, Scorsese reverses that polarity; the space of SoHo 'belongs' to characters like Kiki and Gail, and Paul is distinctly marked as an interloper" (smc 355). By the end of the night there are wanted posters with his face on them. The chapter's conclusion: "In his farcical treatment of one uptown man's misbegotten attempts to find downtown love, Scorsese offers us a poignant study of the social consequences of rapid gentrification" (smc 356).

What it does to the images

The streets look empty because they were. The Companion: "The streets of SoHo are eerily quiet and dark, with a scarcity of streetlights and seemingly no automobile traffic or ambient light" (smc 355). Scorsese adds that the new fast film stock could see more than the eye: "for some scenes we had to take the street lights down because it was so bright" (sos 99). So the darkness is partly real and partly made.

Ebert, in 1985, thought New Yorkers would recognise it: "For New Yorkers, parts of the film will no doubt play as a documentary" (Scorsese by Ebert, unpaged, where the scan reads "New Torkers").

Why it matters

A Setting case with a date stamp. The same few blocks are "just a few blocks west of the Little Italy of Mean Streets, and yet there is no hint of the shared geography that the two films inhabit" (smc 355). Twelve years apart, one neighbourhood is home and the next is a foreign country. Compare New York was Los Angeles, where Scorsese had to fake the city, and Church and street in Little Italy.

Go on, then

film After Hours (1985) A word processor goes downtown for a date, loses his last $20 out of a cab window, and cannot get home. Scorsese's comedy of paranoia, shot in forty nights for $4 million after Paramount killed The Last Temptation of Christ.
idea Tim Burton stepped aside Before Scorsese, the producers of After Hours wanted a Disney animator with a six-minute cartoon to his name. They could not raise the money with Tim Burton, and then Scorsese's big film collapsed.
idea Five set-ups a day became sixteen Scorsese drew every shot of After Hours in the script margins and found he had about 500 of them. At his usual pace that was impossible. Michael Ballhaus said he could do it.
scene After Hours — the keys A cab ride in fast motion that eats Paul's only $20, then a set of keys dropped from a loft window with the camera riding them down at his face. The point-of-view shot as a joke, a threat and a stunt that nearly went wrong.
scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
scene Mean Streets — Tony's bar Charlie walks into a room lit like hell in slow motion; later Johnny Boy walks in on the downbeat of 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' with a girl on each arm. Two entrances, one room, and the camera's opinion of both.