Scouting New York, which blogs about the famous and not-so-famous filming locations of New York City, have posted a 25 year what’s-it-like-now retrospective of Ghostbusters – the article hits a lot of scenes in the movie to see what the locations look like today, including comparison shots, then and now. Part 2 goes up on Wednesday.
Thanks Aaron!
It’s shaping up to be a bad year for Ghostbusters locations – not only is the Lincoln Center fountain being completely remodeled, but now The Tavern on the Green, where Louis Tully maybe had a milk bone and little Debbie Gibson had her birthday, has filed for bankruptcy, one month before being taken over by a new license holder.
Chapter 11 protection does not mean the restaurant is gone, rather it buys them time to reorganize and get back on their feet, so we’ll see how the rest of the year goes for the famous Central Park eatery.
The fountain at Lincoln Center, prominently featured in Ghostbusters, is being removed and replaced with a more ambitious, computer controlled fountain (a la the dancing fountains outside the Bellagio in Las Vegas.) Designed by architect Philip Johnson (who also designed the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center) and completed in 1964, the fountain has been a key landmark in many a New York film besides Ghostbusters, such as Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.
The reconstruction designers have opted to retain the placement of the fountain, but to radically overhaul it at the same time.
“It’s the thing that upsets me most of all about what’s happened at Lincoln Center,” Mr. Dolkart [director of Columbia University’s historic preservation program] said. “They thought that they needed to spend a lot of money ripping out Philip Johnson’s fountain and putting in something new instead of restoring something that worked well.”
“A key issue in preservation is whether or not something is worth preserving,” he added, “not whether or not the new thing we replace it with might be wonderful also. You wouldn’t want to tear down Grand Central Terminal because Frank Gehry is going to design a masterpiece in its place.”
GBTV have just released the video cousin to PC’s Shot On Site, wherein they cover the history of The Biltmore Hotel, better known as the Ghostbuster’s first bust location, The Sedgewick.
Fantastic work – be sure to watch in HD on the YouTube page (click video screen for link to YouTube page) if you have the time, as the historical stills they use are much clearer.
A quick one this time (and a request, no less) – some of the larger sequences are big undertakings! But this one is pretty straight forward.
Our favorite wannabe, Louis, is running to catch a bus, which is just located off the corner of East 75th and 1st Ave (practically around the corner from Dana’s apartment and carriage chase.)
In one single shot, we can make out a restaurant name on a blue awning, “The Wicked Wolf.” We can also see a street sign with “E. 75th” on it. And sure enough, there is a Wicked Wolf on East 75th street. The awning is now red, painted over the restaurant name, but we can still see the end of a second sign, above the awning, that is still there – we can make out the words “Bar and Restaurant” – Also, the neon rimmed clock can also still be seen.
And as a bonus treat, in the background, you can see the Slimer driven bus Louis will soon board. It’s not powered up, but rather parked where it was assumed you wouldn’t see it as the camera focuses on Louis running along!
Rolling along from the last Shot On Site, I’m still in a Ghostbusters 2 frame of mind. And so, I present to you 325 East 77th Street, New York. This is the site of Dana’s post-Gozerian apartment with her baby boy, Oscar. We first see the apartment as Dana approaches with bags fulls of groceries and a carriage full of Oscar – however, having stepped in some pink goo (likely shot in LA by a second unit practical effects team), things soon go wrong and the carriage careens off on its own, mom in pursuit. The entire sequence is shot on 77th Street, starting near the West end of the block, and moving down to 1st Ave, where Oscar has a near encounter with a bus.
To kick things off, I’ll start with some bits of trivia from the tail-end of the scene, which will make for a nice bookend effect, as this post will end with the same shot and a big piece of trivia I’ve dug up. Observe;
Only briefly seen flashing by (not counting the nice continuity of seeing it in the distance the shot before), the bus is the M15 – this is an actual Manhattan bus route that actually travels the route seen in the movie. You can see the bus’s number on the front – you can also see an ad for HOT 97 FM. What’s interesting about HOT 97 FM, is that the station as advertised was barely a few months old when the scene was shot in the fall/winter of 1988/1989. A station purchase saw the formerly WYNY 97 swap frequencies with WQHT 103 FM (a dance music station.) The station’s claim to fame was playing the same 12 inch version of popular dance tracks you could hear in the clubs. And now you know.
On with the breakdown.
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Not to spoil the surprise, but in Ghostbusters 2, the hole the team cuts in 1st Avenue isn’t 1st Avenue. It’s not even New York – which is how the post came about, starting with me watching Ghostbusters 2 on home video. The more I watched that scene, the more it didn’t feel quite right. They made it look like New York, but it didn’t feel like New York (no matter how many “New York Times” vans they had drive by.) It felt like Los Angeles – and given the hassles they had shooting in New York, it’s not hard to imagine the production would set-up a literal traffic obstruction somewhere with, well, less traffic.
As it turns out, it was shot in LA – East 8th Ave and South Broadway (not too terribly far from the Biltmore Hotel, a more famous instance of LA standing in for New York in a Ghostbusters movie) to be exact.
Like so;
Before I get into details, feel free to check out the site yourself on Google Maps – you can pan, zoom, and generally slide around the site. See if you can spot the site (but a warning – there’s been a big change from when the movie was filmed.)
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