From Show magazine, July 9, 1970, p. 12 ("Showing Up" section), A short piece about Gordon Willis:

"Cinematographer Gordon Willis has become recognized as one of the great talents working in films today. So far this year he has in release End of the Road, Loving, and The Landlord. With stark simplicity, he has found out how things really look, distilling appearances and discovering a reality that transcends most of what has been seen on the screen up until now. With the most accurate, artistically devised lighting, he has developed a style that is clearly his own, but that is also perfectly right for the style of the film. He starts filming Alan J. Pakula's Klute next month in New York, where he has a knack of fining more poetry in litter than most cinematographers can find in a rose garden."

Recent interview blogradio interview with Owen Roizman and Sonny Grosso. Roizman briefly discusses his dissatisfaction with Friedkin's color "restoration" of French Connection for blu-ray disc: http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2009/02/atrocioushorrif.php

Spanish (or italian?) poster in the style of "man over city" a la Fântomas, Captive City, etc.

In her book on the Erotic Thriller, Linda Ruth Williams interviews William Friedkin about the production of Cruising. Among other things, Friedkin claims that the main inspiration for the film was not the book with the same name by Gerald Walker, but a series of columns by Village Voice writer Arthur Bell, who apparently covered homicides taking place at the clubs Friedkin would later shoot in. Bell later joined others in vehemently denouncing the film.

To start, look at "Looking for Mr. Gaybar," Village Voice, 24 January 1977, p19, 20.

From July 25, 1977. With articles on the emergent "underclass." Referred to in the introduction to Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of Slums.

A dreaded moment: Another scholar has succinctly captured what I want to say about 1970s urban cinema.

"In the end, Scorcese's films translate a city in crisis into a geography of desire, a fascinatingly undetermined social space with as yet illegible rules."

That's Sabine Haenni in her article "Geographies of Desire: Post-social urban space in the films of Martin Scorsese."

I'm hoping she doesn't tread too far into my territory and I'm sure that this will complement rather than eclipse my own research. Anyway, I'm glad she says it, it means I'm not wrong. And there's many more films with which this case can be made and complicated.

The Jack Bigel Archive at Baruch College holds a copy of a pamphlet titled "Welcome to Fear City" published by the "Council on Public Safety" in 1975. The CPS was an amalgam of Fire and Police Unions who, facing massive layoffs by the city, joined to publicize to tourists the dangers of New York. The contents and impact of this stunt is documented in Miriam Greenberg's Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World.

Image from Slave-Unit, a series called "Welcome to Fear City." Inredible series of photos updating Atget's style for the urban paranoia set.

(http://www.slave-unit.co.uk/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=166&g2_page=2)

It's difficult to track how many times an anecdote emerges about real-life law enforcement / crime fighting draws on fictional sources. Below (somewhere) is a story (from Mark Seltzer's book, I believe) about the emergence of FBI profiling and how it drew on classic detective fiction, such as Poe and Doyle. The mind-melding of the Purloined Letter is, of course, FBI profiling avant la lettre, and was later taken up by Michael Mann's Manhunter.

SO - the tag is "fictions of law enforcement," okay? Remember that.

Here's another one, recounted by Christopher Wilson in Cop Knowledge: Lincoln Steffens, author of The Shame of the Cities, a classic muckraking tale of urban corruption in a number of US cities in 1904, tells (in his memoir, and with Jakob Riis as an interloctuor no less!) of being regaled by a Chief Inspector of the true tales of his own heroism, but realizing that this detective was in fact drawing his material from popular detective fictions of the time (which Steffen's knew the detective read and enjoyed -- he surreptiously borrowed them from him from time to time). Writes Steffens "Thus I discovered that instead of detective's posing for and inspiring the writers of detective fiction, it was the authors who inspired the detectives."

(qtd in Wilson, Cop Knowledge, 26)