Went into the vaults this weekend for a taste of New York based cinema. Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn doesn’t quite look as harsh as when first viewed almost 20 years ago, and some of the scenes come off a bit melodramatic in comparison to Requiem for a Dream, which Selby also penned. Still, a very ambitious project and worth another view if you haven’t seen it in a while or missed it. But LETB’s “making of” documentary yielded some vintage clips of Brooklyn and Red Hook that provide quite a time capsule:
The locals that inspired “the gang” of Selby’s story.
More clips of the nabe, complete with color commentary and interviews with director Uli Edel and producer Bernd Eichinger.
3 responses so far ↓
1 carolina salguero // Jul 2, 2008 at 12:47 am
Where did you get Last Exit to Brooklyn “making of” documentary? We’re interested to see it as part or our research into Red Hook waterfront history. We’ve got a copy of LETB.
thanks
2 donflan // Jul 2, 2008 at 7:52 am
Nice! Even though the German adventurer-director puffing himself up and bragging about boldly going where no sensible Brooklynite would ever dare to tread is a bit much, but the shot of the late, lamented Tiburon Grocery at the corner of Coffey and VanBrunt is worth the whole 6 minutes! Where on earth did you dredge this up? Was this ever included as a Last Exit DVD extra?
How ironic to see the same exact disused dockside cranes that IKEA has now incorporated into their historical waterfront diorama.
It is remarkable how unsophisticated, at the level of marketing, this “making of” footage is, in part because it has mild intellectual pretensions and dares to mention things like literature, and writers. What an indictment of today’s slick “making ofs,” which are so often nothing but extended celebrity interviews and selected whiz-bang footage, little more than a long commercial for the film.
3 Reed // Jul 2, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Video is the best evidence of what once was. People try to move into these old neighborhoods and rewrite history, but this proves what was there before them.
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