Once upon a time in New York City

It was on an icy night in February of 1981 that the New York City of old came most fully alive for me.  The occasion was a once-in-a-lifetime showing of Abel Gance’s epic film, “Napoleon” at Radio City Music Hall.  The tickets were hard to get -- it seemed like you had to know someone who knew someone to get in the audience, even though the venue sat 6,000.  

There were numerous reasons it was to be a gala night in New York City.  The film itself had just been restored in a 4 and a half hour print by British film historian Kevin Brownlow.  The great American director Francis Ford Coppola was somehow involved, and he had convinced his own father, Carmine Coppola, to write a score for the film and direct the American Symphony Orchestra.  The film had hardly ever been seen in modern times, and certainly not in a cut that amounted to more than two-thirds of its original six-hour running time, and certainly not with a full orchestra playing an original score for the entire length of the film.

I remember being in a cab going up 6th Avenue wondering what I was getting myself into, and then we came into Radio City out of the cab and heard the orchestra warming up in the pit and saw the theater full of tout-New York at a time when New York really had a tout to toot.

I saw my editor from Doubleday sitting a row in front of us next to Jackie Kennedy Onassis, who was at the time a fellow editor at the publishing house and a friend of hers.  All around us were New Yorkers in full going-out regalia – dark suits and ties and fancy black evening dresses both short and long.  People were waving to each other as they spied friends who had gotten as lucky as they had with tickets.  It was one of those nights when you congratulated yourself for putting up with the grime and the crime and the garbage on the streets outside to be a New Yorker.

The house lights blinked a couple of times indicating the movie was about the start and Carmine Coppola had taken his place on the conductor’s podium in the orchestra pit when I felt something rustle at my left elbow and turn to watch as Gloria Swanson took her seat next to me.

Here I was, watching one of the masterpieces of the silent film era, sitting next to one of its biggest stars!  What could be more New York than that?  And then I flashed on another delicious only-in-New-York irony:  seated just one row in front of us was the widow of JFK, whose father, Joseph Kennedy, had had an infamous and lengthy affair with Ms. Swanson.

And then the lights went down and the orchestra swelled and the film began.  Abel Gance was the auteur of multiple film-making innovations, including being the inventor of what became Cinerama, using three cameras and three projectors, all of them synchronized to put a massively wide image on the screen, a technique he used to film the movie’s climax, an enormous wide-screen battle using thousands of extras, during which Napoleon on horseback rides across the shot with the battle in the background.

But the film’s beginning was just as amazing. To show Napoleon’s precocious military genius as a boy at a boarding school Gance filmed a gigantic pillow fight “directed” by Napoleon.  He shot the fight using a technique that showed as many as nine images on the screen at once as the boys pounded each other with pillows.  He did it by shooting one length of film over and over, masking off parts of the frame with tiny shutters before the film was rewound and reshot to pick up the next section of the image.  At the climax of the fight, the screen seems to explode with flying feathers in every corner of the frame.

As the film went on, one innovation after another filled the screen.  Gance used an invention of his own, tiny gyroscopes, to help steady the camera during hand-held action sequences.  He mounted cameras on cars, dollies, even one on horseback for a complicated battle scene during which the camera had to be powered by another invention of his, a tank of compressed air behind the camera. 

During all of this, I was spending almost as much time watching Gloria Swanson watch the movie as I was the film itself.  She of course had been there during the early silent film days and had actually experienced some of the film innovations as they came into being.  She sat forward in her seat for the entire four-plus hours, often resting her elbows on her knees and cradling her chin in her hands. 

There were several intermissions, during which she would disappear and then reappear as if by magic just as the lights went down to resume her intense observation of the masterpiece on the screen.  The opening night audience, which must have been filled with cinephiles, often burst into applause as one great shot and filmic innovation followed another, all of it accompanied by Carmine Coppola’s epic score.  Afterwards, I read that the four-plus hours had something like 60 cues that had to be hit exactly on time with the music, but the experience was so seamless, you didn’t notice it. 

I just sat there awash in the spectacle of the movie and the crowd and the night.  It was the kind of night you moved to New York City hoping would come to pass, the kind of night you had to be a certain kind of New Yorker with a certain kind of special knowledge and a certain kind of connections even to be there.

For a single magical night, I was not just among New Yorkers, I was one of them, and I’ll never forget it.