idea ·Mean Streets (1973)

New York was Los Angeles

The definitive Little Italy film was mostly shot in Los Angeles, with garbage added to the streets. What couldn't be faked were the hallways.

setting
continuity
mise-en-scene
atomic
production-story
locations

The money meant Los Angeles. Paul Rapp, who budgeted the film, told Scorsese that to shoot it for $300,000 "you're going to have to shoot it in Los Angeles" (Kelly, unpaged). Scorsese's own summary:

I did ten days of rehearsals in New York; shot all the interiors in Los Angeles, as well as most of the exterior stuff including the final car crash; then we did hallways and the beach in New York to get the authentic look.

— Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 41

Charlie's apartment was a set in an office building on Hollywood Boulevard; the bar was in "the Chicano section - a very rough area" (sos 41). To make LA look like Mulberry Street, "we had to put garbage in the street" (Kelly, unpaged).

What couldn't be faked. The tenement hallways. "The halls in LA weren't the same. I couldn't fake them" (Kelly, unpaged). The seams are everywhere once you know: when Johnny Boy fires off the roof, "the roof is New York because you see the Empire State Building, but the window is Los Angeles" (Kelly, unpaged). The final car crash was shot in downtown LA at night, and the script was changed to send the characters to "Brooklyn" so that the unfamiliar streets would make sense.

How many days in New York? Nobody agrees. Rapp offered four; Scorsese says he "swindled eight days" (sos 41); elsewhere he says five, and six (Kelly), and six "with a student crew of NYU" (Scorsese by Ebert, unpaged).

Why it matters. Ebert's 1973 review said: "The whole movie feels like life in New York." He later corrected himself: most of it was shot "in disguised Los Angeles locations" (Ebert, unpaged). A film can be authentic without being actual. For Setting, the lesson is that an audience reads a handful of true details, like a hallway, a skyline, or a feast in real Little Italy, and fills in everything else. It is the same principle as Continuity editing, applied to place.

Go on, then

idea The hand in the flame Charlie holds his fingers over a flame three times in Mean Streets: a votive candle, a match, a kitchen grill. It is his private theology, and it recurs in Taxi Driver.
scene Psycho — the parlour scene Norman and Marion eat sandwiches while the mise en scène quietly explains the entire film.
scene The Craft — light as a feather Four girls, a chant, and a body that rises. The best sequence in the film contains no special effect at all — only rhythm, faces and a cut.
scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
idea Bickle sees through glass The windscreen and the rear-view mirror are the film's two apertures. Travis is a viewer before he is an actor, and the film is careful about which passengers he is allowed to see.
idea Nancy is the only poor one Three of the four girls want something about themselves changed. Nancy wants out of a trailer. The film punishes her hardest.