While the rest of America will no doubt flock to see Friday’s “I Am Legend” for all the usual reasons – to see Will Smith, to be part of an event movie, to be allowed the opportunity to pay $6 for Goobers – we New Yorkers will see (or avoid seeing) this movie for far more personal reasons.
Unless you count the just-wrapped “Sex and the City,” there is probably no film in recent memory that is so completely New York. There is no film in which the city feels so integral to the story, no film that has used its sights and streets to such dramatic effect and, it can’t be overlooked, probably no film that has so ticked off residents during its complicated shoot.
For better or worse, this baby belongs to us.
Which is especially odd considering that the Richard Matheson book upon which the apocalyptic thriller is based takes place in Los Angeles. The film’s writers, producers and director Francis Lawrence, however, felt that the story of Robert Neville (Smith), the so-called last man on Earth who tries to survive in the deserted city after a virus has turned the rest of humanity into vampire-like mutants, would work better in New York.
La-la Land, filmmakers reasoned, is too sprawling to convey the claustrophobic effect they were looking for, and seeing familiar parts of the-city-that-never-sleeps completely empty and overgrown with weeds is just plain jarring. And by empty, we mean empty. It’s not this deserted at a Kevin Federline concert. The film opens with a montage of Flatiron, the UN and other familiar locales eerily devoid of people, noise or activity of any kind.
In other words, what Gotham will look like if real estate prices keep doubling every few years.
“You just can’t beat actually walking down the center of a New York City street with an M-16,” Smith says. “It helped in creating the stress of the character when you are actually in the place and not in Baltimore pretending you are in New York.”
In fact, the entire movie was shot in the five boroughs – a rarity these days when even in a movie called “Rumble in The Bronx” you can glimpse the snowcapped mountains of Vancouver in the background.
Besides the street scenes, the producers built two gigantic sets. One in the Kingsbridge Armory in The Bronx was home to a cavernous Times Square set, and another in Brooklyn’s Marcy Avenue Armory served as the interior of Neville’s Washington Square brownstone.
All in all, the production added up to a massive beast that made an episode of “Law & Order” look like a student film.
“It could reasonably be called the largest production ever to film in New York City,” says Katherine Oliver, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcast. “They shot from October of last year to March or April. It employed over 3,300 people.”
And the biggest scene of all was one in which residents are evacuated off the island after the virus begins spreading. (It appears as a flashback in the movie.)
That segment alone required some 1,500 extras, military helicopters and the cooperation of nearly a dozen city, state and federal agencies, including the Army Corps of Engineers.
The sequence was shot over six nights in temperatures that would kill one of those magical polar bears from “The Golden Compass.”
“The evacuation was the hardest, far and away,” says “Legend” executive producer Michael Tadross, who calls the film the “most difficult” of the 30-odd he’s produced. “You have 1,500 people, you have to feed them and have tents for them to be warm in. It’s very, very difficult shooting nights in the winter, 12 degrees, in New York with helicopters and children. It’s all of the things that you’re trained are not a good idea to do.”
Comedian Anne Biondich cracked that she and the other extras had renamed the movie “I Am Frozen.”
The crew spent a week rigging lights off the Brooklyn Bridge and rented a barge to serve as a pier, because there wasn’t one there already. For authenticity’s sake, members of the New York Army National Guard 69th Infantry were hired to play the troops in the scene.
Some reports, including one in the Hollywood Reporter, claimed the scene is the most expensive ever shot in the city, putting the cost of that single sequence at $5 million. That’s about 200 times more than what Kevin Smith spent on all of “Clerks.”
Tadross, however, disputes that figure.
“It was nowhere near that,” he says. “The truth is, a shooting day in New York ran us about $310,000 a day. The big scene with the helicopters and everything else was $100,000 to $150,000 beyond what a normal day would cost.”
Another complicated sequence – and one that will surely appeal to New Yorkers sick of the holiday crowds – is a creepy swing down a totally empty Fifth Avenue. Call it commuter porn.
Early one Sunday morning, the filmmakers cleared out the busy stretch from 49th to 57th streets. Weeds were trucked in from Florida to give the road that overgrown look. Hundreds of production assistants and police kept throngs of people hoping to see Will Smith behind barricades and just off-camera.
“We started setting up at 3 a.m. and we started rolling the camera as soon as the light came in,” Tadross says. “My wife came to visit me on the set. She said, ‘Listen.’ I said, ‘To what?’ She said, ‘You’re in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and there are 10,000 or 15,000 people that are being held back and you can’t hear a sound.’ I gotta tell you, it’s the eeriest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.”
If only every scene were as quiet. Some sequences, including the buzzing helicopters of the evacuation and another in which explosions rock Neville’s Washington Square hideout, had residents ready to do to Will Smith what the guy who played Joe Frazier did to him in “Ali.”
“I would say percentage-wise it’s the most amount of middle fingers I’ve ever received in my career,” Smith says. “I was starting to think F.U. was my name.”
“They abused us beyond belief,” says Adelaide Polsinelli, co-op president at 2 Fifth Ave., near which key scenes were shot. “Let’s start with blowing up cars in the middle of the night in the park. Setting trees on fire. Having carcinogenic fumes going up the building. They wouldn’t allow us home.
“My residents were ready to picket in front of the park. They were banging pots out the windows to disrupt the film,” she adds. “Calling the city was a waste of time. They did not get back to us. We called the mayor’s office, and they said there’s nothing they can do, they have a permit. Then we get the speech about how this gives so much back to the community and it brings jobs and gives so much revenue.”
Commissioner Oliver says her office didn’t get more complaints than normal for “I Am Legend,” which is hard to believe considering the number of gripes that filled the media last winter.
“We’re working closely with the production so that they are sensitive to the needs of the community and also reminding people that this will be an imposition for a period of time, but it means jobs for New Yorkers and more revenue coming into the city,” Oliver says.
She also predicts that once the rest of Hollywood sees what was accomplished in “I Am Legend,” film crews will come flocking in even greater numbers to our streets.
If you have a helicopter for rent or are looking to get your copy of “Big Willie Style” autographed, you’re in luck. If not, better invest in a set of earplugs and chalk up film production as one more thing – like smog, strange smells and Al Sharpton – to grin and bear in the greatest city on Earth.
Flight Plan
Three helicopters, including this Black Hawk, were rented from the military.
New York’s Fighting 69th
Members of New York’s 69th Infantry Division were hired to play troops for authenticity’s sake.
Our huddled masses
1,500 extras were recruited through ads in trade magazines. During one lull, Will Smith entertained the frozen masses by hopping on a car and rapping “Summertime.”
Taking It to the Bridge
Crews spent a week before the shoot setting up lights on the bridge and shore.
A River Without Pier
Because no actual pier existed in the location, producers rented a barge that served as a pier. After the shoot, it was floated back to Staten Island.
Big Willie Style
Smith plays the last man on Earth, a New Yorker, of course.