Josh Safdie’s Top Ten (or So) N.Y.C. Films
Josh Safdie directed and co-wrote “Marty Supreme.” He also co-directed (with his younger brother, Benny) and co-wrote “Uncut Gems.” Like the heroes of those films, Safdie is a native New Yorker and a very fast, very entertaining talker. He demonstrated this one recent morning, when he arrived at Two Palms, a sprawling printmaking studio in SoHo where he was set to sign, number, and date a run of silk-screen prints that he’d created in collaboration with the studio’s artisans. The prints, fifty in total (plus multiple artists’ and printers’ proofs), were laid out in tranches of six on carefully prepared worktables. Four Staedtler 2B pencils were ready to go—sharpened and then slightly dulled, to prevent puncturing the paper. (Safdie, who is particular about writing implements, had test-driven possible pencils earlier.) Small talk was dispensed with quickly, but then the director, forty-two years old with collar-length hair and a beard that stops just shy of scraggly—you could add him to the cover of Dylan and the Band’s “Basement Tapes” LP and no one would notice—began reminiscing about a nearby office he’d had years ago, in the same building as “Greta and Lena.” And bingo: he was off on a ping-ponging monologue.
He brought up Jonas Mekas, the underground filmmaker and co-founder of Anthology Film Archives—a “genius,” but also a “difficult” boss. (Safdie’s screenwriting partner once worked at Anthology as a projectionist.) Mekas led him to Fluxus, the nineteen-sixties arts movement in which Yoko Ono played a prominent part. Fluxus led to “a girl I used to live with” whose father had served as Fluxus’s organizer and later worked with Ono and John Lennon. The father had “this house that’s packed with crap. Not crap. Artifacts.” Among those artifacts was a Nudie suit given to Lennon by his pal Harry Nilsson. “I just had to try it on because I was super skinny then,” Safdie said. (Note: He’s still pretty slender.) “We did a little photo series,” he continued. “Wow. Anyway.”
Twenty minutes after he walked in the door, the signing began. Saloni Shah, a Two Palms employee who otherwise guides the studio’s work with experimental materials, called out Safdie’s progress—“Three of fifty . . . four of fifty . . .”—to keep him on track. The print, titled “Top 10 NYC Films,” had begun life as an eight-and-a-half-by-seven-and-a-half-inch notecard on which the director listed his favorite movies shot in New York, intended as a gift for friends. “I was never going to do just ten,” he admitted. But Safdie kept adding more films, and then still more, in block letters using pens of different colors. He underlined some titles, highlighted others, changed his mind, appended qualifications here and there. The document ended up looking like Grandma’s favorite recipe card, if Grandma had O.C.D. and a pen fetish.
David Lasry, Two Palms’ founder, contrasted the studio’s collaboration with Safdie to past work with artists like Chuck Close and Sol LeWitt: “They’re conceptual artists. They made rules for making art. Josh started with rules, but then he lost control of it because of his enthusiasm.” The task for the printmakers, led by Erik Hougen, Jeremy Ruiz, and Tom Smith, was to reproduce the jottings, corrections, and accidental smears on Safdie’s notecard as faithfully as possible, and also to scale it up in size. The process took two months and involved twenty silk-screen passes, plus collage, handstamps, and stencils for a special paint designed to crackle in imitation of Safdie’s blots of Wite-Out.
Films you’d expect made the cut (“Taxi Driver,” “Do the Right Thing,” “Dog Day Afternoon”), along with some you might not (“Cruising,” a pair of Troma Z movies). Only a week earlier, Safdie had decided to add the 1978 Richard Gere picture “Bloodbrothers,” even though the silk screening had already been completed. Neither Safdie nor Lasry was sure how many films were on the finished prints, or even which ones. “Do I have ‘Wild Style’ on here?” Safdie asked, referencing the seminal 1983 hip-hop movie. He did. He counted the films, tallying a hundred and fifteen—plus another twelve he had added with asterisks, because they were only partially filmed in New York (“The Godfather,” parts I and II) or were, one way or another, “in communication with” the city (the Hoboken-set “On the Waterfront”). Lasry dryly suggested a new title: “115 of the Top 10 NYC Films.”
The signing completed, Safdie sat with a cup of coffee and mentioned several movies he’d chosen not to include, one being “Manhattan,” a film that he admitted he “didn’t really love.” This wasn’t a knock on Woody Allen; Safdie had included “Broadway Danny Rose” and “Hannah and Her Sisters.” Allen, he said, is “one of the most New York filmmakers.” He paused. “Do I not have ‘Radio Days’ on my list? Oh, my God. I’m so embarrassed if it’s not on.” He got up to check. A moan: “I fucking don’t have ‘Radio Days’!” He consulted with Lasry, and within minutes the team had begun to create a rubber stamp so that “Radio Days” could be added to the finished (and, in some cases, already sold) prints, wedged in tiny and tight, right below “The Apartment.” ♦