March 1, 2005 - Last month, Broadway Books published New York: The Movie Lover's Guide, by Richard Alleman. A follow-up to his eponymous 1988 guide, which was being sold online for as much as $100 after it went out of print, the book goes behind the scenes at locations made famous on film, from the Godfather Estate on Staten Island to Jack Nicholson's As Good As It Gets apartment on West 12th street.

"When I did the first edition of New York: The Movie Lover's Guide back in 1988, it was a very exciting time for filmmaking in New York... the Museum of the Moving Image had just opened, Kaufman-Astoria Studios were starting to come on strong, and the city was regaining its place as a major movie capital--just as it was in the early days of filmmaking in the U.S., when it was the country's premier movie town, long before Hollywood," Alleman said.

"Happily, some 17 years later, New York is even more exciting--with bold new directors like Spike Lee and Wes Anderson taking advantage of the city's rich architecture and atmosphere for their ground-breaking films. And then, too, there's television--with the success of series like Sex and the City and Law & Order bringing cutting-edge New York into people's living rooms every week. At the same time, new studios have been opening like Steiner in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and others--Astoria and Silvercup notably--have been expanding. Indeed, so much has happened in the 17 years between the first and current edition of this book that doing the update was really more like writing a whole new book, discovering a whole new town within the old one that we all know and love--both on and off screen."

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