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Decoder Ring
The Tootsie Shot (Encore)
00:35:59
How one camera movement from Tootsie explains the post-war American city.
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- [00:01]
A
Hi, it's Willa. We have an episode for you today that first aired five years ago, as you're gonna hear. It came about because I was trying to figure out why movies from the 70s and 80s, especially the ones set in New York, just look so much more real and lived in and feel truer than the manicured blockbusters of today. To get a handle on why this might be, I made a ton of people talk to me for hours and hours. They're all thanked in the credits. And yet it was to no avail. It was just too big a topic to wrap my arms around. But while having those conversations, I found myself coming back again and again to one particular camera shot that features in so many of the movies I was thinking of and that I could wrap my arms around. So that's what this episode is about. It's about a camera shot with a long history and a lot of uses. I have to admit that listening to old episodes is a bit of a trip for me. All I hear are the things that I would change and fix and do better. And that is certainly the case here. But something I really like about this episode is that it's a bit of a magic trick. It's an audio only, basically video essay. It's a podcast about a moving image. And though we never show it to you, I really do think as you listen, you will be able to see it. Which is, I think, a testament to this shot in and of itself. Hope you enjoy. There's a shot you've probably seen in a lot of movies. It's of the film's protagonist, but it takes a second to spot her because she's smack in the middle of a crowd. It's a dense rush hour crowd, everybody headed somewhere. And she's headed somewhere too. There's usually a rousing song playing on the soundtrack. And the camera keeps her in focus as she walks down the street, even as everyone around her is a little fuzzy. She's one of many, but she has our attention. Do you have a favorite version of it?
- [02:03]
B
Oh, yeah. I mean, I would.
- [02:05]
A
Anna Wenger is an executive producer for Film and Television. Her favorite version is from the movie Working Girl.
- [02:11]
B
Melanie Griffith and Joan Cusack are getting off the Staten island ferry. You know, workers, they're doing their commute, their 80s hair just fully blazing.
- [02:22]
C
No lunch?
- [02:23]
A
I got speech class. What do need speech class for? You talked fine.
- [02:27]
B
The shot just shows you these masses of people and everyone's trying to make it. But there's your star. She's special. You don't think she is because look at her in this mass of people. But we're focused on her and her 80s hair.
- [02:40]
A
Even if you haven't seen Working Girl, the Mike Nichols directed romantic comedy in which Melanie Griffith plays a secretary set on climbing the corporate ladder. I bet you can picture a version of this shot anyway, because you've seen it in one of the dozens of other films that have used it over the last 50 years. Like crocodile Dundee, where the main character, an Aussie from the outback in his reptile skin vest and hat, arrives in 1980s Manhattan.
- [03:09]
C
That's incredible. Imagine 7 million people all wanting to live together. Yeah, New York must be the friendliest place on earth.
- [03:18]
A
When he goes for a walk, he finds himself in in this shot on a jam packed midtown street moving against pedestrian traffic. A fish out of water. Or maybe you know it from Baby Boom, in which Diane Keaton plays a high powered businesswoman who inherits an infant. The movie opens with various versions of the shot. Streets flooded with female professionals.
- [03:39]
D
53% of the American workforce is female. Three generations of women that turned 1000 years of tradition on its ear.
- [03:48]
A
Or maybe you know it, though probably you don't. From the version in Stayin Alive, the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta, playing an aspiring Broadway dancer, gets bumped on a midtown street in the middle of the shot by a man in a dark fur bomber jacket, scarf and aviators. It's the movie's director, Sylvester Stallone making a cameo. The shots also in Ghostbusters, Wall Street, Heartburn Elf, Bridget Jones's Diary, the Devil Wears Prada and the Wolf of Wall street, among many, many others.
- [04:28]
B
It's iconic people in general who have ever watched a movie, they absolutely know that shot.
- [04:34]
A
Anna Wagner's from Southern California. But in 2011 she came to New York to be one of the showrunners of Billy on the Street, a TV show in which the comedian Billy Eichner accost New York the street to answer questions and play games.
- [04:48]
B
When I went to work on Billy on the Street, I watched Working Girl again. And then I was like, I'm in Working Girl walking down like fifth Avenue woman, going to work, making it in New York against all odds. Like I imagine myself in the shot.
- [05:11]
A
This is Decoder Ring, a show about cracking cultural mysteries. I'm Willa Paskin. So I was doing some early reporting and an idea having to do with 1980s movies and I found myself describing the shot over and over again. You know, really busy midtown street protagonist, smack in the middle of it. All everyone going somewhere. And whenever I did, the person I was talking to always knew exactly what I was talking about, just from a few words. On the one hand, of course, they did. This is a very recognizable image, almost a visual cliche. But on the other, this is a short transitional moment that often comes in the middle of a montage and that takes up 30 seconds max, and sometimes just two or three. It's just someone walking down a crowded street. Why is it so memorable? Why is this little image so stunning? But the thing I have learned is that this is not really a little image. It may be brief, but what it means and how it's used have changed over the years in lockstep with much bigger changes to how we think about work and who performs it and cities and who lives in them. I'm going to go backwards in time to trace this shot to its origins and then go forward to track how this image turned into immediately recognizable visual shorthand for going to work and making it in the city against all odds. So today on Decoder Ring, what is it about this shot? So there's one version of this shot that comes up more than any other. The one from Tootsie.
- [07:05]
C
Tootsie, take ten.
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E
Ron.
- [07:08]
C
My name is Dorothy.
- [07:10]
A
It's not Tootsie or Toots or Sweetie. Tootsie is a 1982 comedy directed by Sidney Pollock that stars Dustin Hoffman as a difficult actor named Michael. He can't get a job until he disguises himself as a woman, calls himself Dorothy, and gets cast on a soap opera. And the very first time that you see Michael is Dorothy, right after a fight with his agent, it's the shot.
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C
Okay, thanks. I'm going to raise $8,000 and I'm going to do Jeff's play.
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F
Michael, you're not going to raise 25 cents. No one will hire you.
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C
Oh, yeah.
- [07:45]
A
As the music swells, the camera cuts to a crowded New York sidewalk with dozens of people walking on it, all slightly out of focus. But then two of them part to reveal Dorothy in a high necked blouse and glasses and frumpy yet very plausible wig. She pats her hair and looks around like, am I pulling this off? And she is. She stumbles in her heels and then keeps walking to her audition. This moment was part of Dustin Hoffman's whole conception of the character. Here he is in an AFI interview.
- [08:15]
C
I just somehow intuitively felt that unless I could walk down the streets of New York and not have dressed as a woman and not have people turn and say, who's that guy? In drag. Unless I could do that. I didn't want to make the film. I didn't want the.
- [08:30]
A
And that's exactly what this scene shows. No one on the street turns around. They're ahead of us in the audience. They can see Dorothy as Dorothy. We in the audience, we'll get there. But at this point in the movie, we're not yet. And instead, the reveal of Hoffman dressed as a woman, it's the biggest laugh in the whole film. It's what makes the sequence so memorable. It's why, insofar as this shot has a name, it's known as the Tootsie shot.
- [08:58]
F
You know, we shot on Park Avenue, that long lens shot.
- [09:02]
A
We called it the Tootsie Shop. And as for the extras, that's one of the producers of the Will Ferrell movie Elf. Speaking in a Netflix documentary, the producer is referring to a sequence in which Farrell's character, one of Santa's elves, first arrives in the city and is filmed just like Dustin Hoffman's Dorothy, playfully singled out by the camera on a busy New York street. When someone says they're doing the Tootsie shot, they mean three things. First and foremost is that they're using a long lens, also known as a telephoto lens, which is used to shoot something far away. For a Tootsie shot, it's set up blocks back from the action and at a slight elevation so that it can pick the actor out of the crowd. And that's the second thing you need, a crowd.
- [09:53]
G
The density is what makes that shot.
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A
Joe Reedy is a first assistant director who has worked on scores of movies, including many Martin Scorsese films. Back in the early 1980s, when he was a second assistant director, he worked on Tootsie. He explained to me how they did the original Tootsie shot.
- [10:09]
G
Well, we did it twice.
- [10:11]
A
The first time, they had Hoffman walk down a busy street in midtown surrounded by regular pedestrians who had no idea they were being filmed. It worked. The camera was so far away, no one noticed it. And Hoffman was unrecognizable in drag, but the pedestrians kept blocking the camera, so. So they tried again with a few hired extras around Hoffman.
- [10:30]
G
This time, the extras look like the people on the street, so you didn't notice the difference, really. But because the number of people there, there are plenty of people in the deep background who are real civilians, so to speak.
- [10:42]
A
In the rare film where everyone on screen needs to be in, say, period costume, everyone in the shot will be an extra. But that's expensive. So much more Common are the two methods they used in Tootsie. No extras or a handful of extras surrounded by regular people. And that means the shot gives you something that's pretty unusual in films. Real people and actors, real life and fiction. The city and the movie's version of the city in one frame. So that's what you need to do the shot. Technically and logistically. A telephoto lens and a crowd. It's pretty straightforward. But there's a third thing you need too. Levity. The Tootsie shot is fun. It's comedic and upbeat. It shows us a character embarking on a professional adventure, often the first day of work. That's how it's used in Tootsie and in Working Girl and Elf and dozens of the other films in which the shot has appeared as shorthand for a character on the move and on the make. But that's not what it has to signify. Before it was the Tootsie shot, this shot was something else, something less high spirited. And that's the version we're going to look at next. So the other most famous version of the shot is from the X rated best picture winner, Midnight Cowboy.
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C
I'm Joe Buck from Texas and rico Rizzo from LeBron. And I'm going to buy you a drink.
- [12:12]
A
What the hell do you think of that? Directed by John Schlesinger, it stars Jon Voight as Joe Bach, who comes to New York City with dreams of becoming a sex worker and can't even make these sordid fantasies come true. Joe falls in with Ratzo Rizzo, an impoverished small time crook in bad health, played by Dustin Hoffman. A lot of the movie is set on the streets of New York. In an extremely famous scene, Ratzo and Joe are crossing a street when a cab driver almost runs into them. Ratzo lets him have it.
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C
Hey, look at that. I'm walking here. I'm walking here. Up your son. Me. That way. Get out of here.
- [12:51]
A
This walk and talk before the conflict with a cab. It's a sparsely populated version of the shot, but I want to look at a more visually arresting version earlier in the film. Joe has just arrived in New York by bus. It's his first day ever in the city and there's a montage of him wandering down fifth Avenue taking it all in. Everybody's talking at me.
- [13:14]
B
I don't hear words saying in this
- [13:18]
A
montage for a few seconds is the shot Joe in the middle of a crowd so thick with people you cannot see a speck of sidewalk, but you can see him. Because his cowboy hatted head is sticking out above the crowd like a sore thumb.
- [13:33]
H
It seemed like throwing him in to the crowd of people, New Yorkers, real life people was the way to go.
- [13:45]
A
Adam Hollander was a cinematographer on Midnight Cowboy. He's originally from Poland, and when he first arrived in New York in the 1960s via a bus from Montreal, he took the same route in from New Jersey that Joe Buck does early in
- [13:58]
H
Midnight Cowboy allowed John just to do what Visitor in New York would do is to walk in, look left, look right, look at the store windows and discover the city. City. And it worked and gave film the look that it has.
- [14:16]
A
In this version of the shot, Joe's not bounding to a job interview or an audition. He's walking around, taking it in, seeing what there is to see. And the city he's looking at, it's indifferent to him. He's not going to triumph over it. The moment when the camera singles him out from the teeming urban mass does not foreshadow his professional or romantic success. It indicates his inability to fit in, to find his place. He doesn't know it yet, but he's adrift in a sea of people. This version of the shot has a ton of jammed up energy and vitality. The camera is curious and roving, but it's not light or comedic. Neither are the versions in other 70s movies like Jane Fonda's Clute or the original Shaft, which has a long opening montage in which Richard Rountree walks through a sleazy midtown. In these movies, the camera is trained, not totally unlike a rifle sight on someone transgressive, a hustler, a call girl, a vigilante. So what happened? How did this go from a visual trope about a rule breaker in an overwhelming, alienating, too vivid city to one about a peppy go getter in a bustling hub of ambition and activity. How did the Midnight Cowboy shot become the Tootsie shot? To start to answer that, I need to go back further still to another version of the shot. One that's neither gritty nor bouncy, nor from the movies at all. So where does the Tootsie shot come from?
- [15:51]
F
I'm not saying this is the definitive source, but one obvious source is in the work not of a filmmaker, but of a very well known New York photographer, still photographer called Andreas Feininger.
- [16:03]
A
James Sanders is an architect and filmmaker and the author of Celluloid New York and the Movies. He's referring to a specific photograph taken by Feininger called Rush Hour Fifth Avenue from 1953.
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F
And it's from roughly about 48th street and it looks all the way down to 43rd street, but it's as if it was. It's totally compressed and you've never seen a shot that looks like so crowded with people. It's just this jam of people. And there are the streetlights and there are the flags and there is the cross traffic going, but mostly it's hats and heads and bodies.
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A
I googled this photo while I was talking to Sanders and when it loaded I thought, oh, this is exactly the shot.
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E
And this is a shot that I'm particularly fond of. This was, as far as I know, the first time that any photographer ever used a 40 inch lens in the city to make close ups.
- [16:59]
A
That's Feininger in a BBC documentary from 1983. He's holding up another photograph of a bustling city block, this one taken in 1948, when he says he's the first person to use a 40 inch lens this way. He's talking about using a telephoto lens, the kind you need for the Tootsie shot.
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D
The essence of a telephoto lens is that it is a little telescope, right? It brings nothing that's far away closer.
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A
Chris Bonannos is the city editor at New York Magazine and the author of a number of books about photography. I called him up to talk about Feininger.
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D
He was one of the very first people to use them. They were huge compared to what you see now. 4ft long.
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A
He had a 4 foot long camera,
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D
basically 4 foot long lens on a camera which had a bellows, which had a box on the back.
- [17:48]
A
Feininger grew up in Germany and arrived in America right before World War II by way of Sweden. It was there in the 1930s, while taking photos of Stockholm, that he got interested in telephoto lenses, which were so rare and expensive he had to make his own. What he liked about them was the way they kept large objects in accurate proportion to one another. But telephoto lenses have a more germane effect too. They compress distance.
- [18:13]
D
That thing that is 200ft away and that thing that is 400ft away look like they're right on top of one another.
- [18:19]
A
If you've ever wondered why the sidewalks in a movie can be so impossibly crowded, this is the reason. It's a camera effect. And the compression the lens is doing gives the image a certain feel. Here's Feininger talking to the BBC documentary again.
- [18:36]
E
I deliberately backed up about six or eight blocks and used the 40 inch lens to get this feeling of traffic jam, this feeling of car stacked up tightly one on top of the other, to give the feeling of New York traffic. And only the telephoto lens can give you this feeling.
- [18:53]
A
This photograph Feininger is talking about was widely seen. It appeared in Life magazine, where Feininger was a staff photographer, and which had a circulation of 8 and a half million. It was also in the Museum of Modern Art's blockbuster photography exhibition, the Family of Man, which toured the world for eight years and was seen by an additional 9 million people. It wasn't just one of the images in the exhibition either. It was blown up so as to take up an entire wall of it. So this image, this technique, it was out there. Why did it take almost 20 years for it to show up in the movies? And there's a concrete answer to that. It's because movies only started filming on the streets of New York City at volume in the late 1960s. The film industry was not born in Hollywood.
- [19:42]
F
What we call Hollywood now was orange groves and citrus farms.
- [19:45]
A
That's James Sanders again, the author of a number of books about cinema, including Scenes from the City Filmmaking in New York.
- [19:51]
F
So the filmmaking industry was basically standard in New York and they went all around the city for these short, and then later not so short, silent feature films.
- [20:00]
A
One of those silent films was King Vidor's 1928 movie the Crowd. It's a life story of an everyman who comes to the city with big ambitions and is nearly ground down. But before the grinding, there's a sequence of the hero arriving by ferry that's followed by a montage that's all hustle and bustle, subways and ships and cars, and numerous shots of people flooding across and down city streets, some double exposed to make them look even busier. None of these are the shot. Vedor's not using a telephoto lens, but they're not that far from it either. They're striking semi documentary images that capture the intense busyness of the city and the commute. And you can draw a straight line between them and say, the opening commute in Working Girl. But that line had to make a detour because with the advent of talkies in the late 1920s, the movie industry moved away from New York City and its crowds and into Hollywood. Afterwards, there were still plenty of New York movies. They were just no longer shot in New York.
- [21:04]
F
It turned out that you could couldn't really shoot outdoors on the city streets with the very sensitive microphones and recording equipment for Decades and decades. If you wanted a show outdoor New York and have action and characters in it, you shot in a backlot in Hollywood. And they recreated at incredible scale whole blocks and blocks of the city.
- [21:28]
A
Over the years there were high profile exceptions. The Lost Weekend and On the Waterfront, filmed in and near New York. Breakfast at Tiffany's and West side Story shot key scenes on location. But for the most part into the 1960s, shooting in the city was an expensive, difficult hassle involving many permits and lots of bribes. And it just didn't happen very much. But all that changed in 1966 when Mayor John Lindsay issued executive order number 10.
- [21:57]
F
Mayor Lindsay comes along and says he's a of a glimmer hound himself. He has a lot of friends on Broadway and they establish a one stop permit process where you only have to get one permit. They have a special police unit, high profile, no more bribes and you can have them whenever you want for free.
- [22:14]
A
It works. In 1965, there were 11 films being made in part or whole in New York. By 1967 there's 70. And it would only skyrocket from there. Suddenly all these directors and cinematographers who have seen New York images like Feininger's can use them, adjust them, adapt them for film. Freed up not only by executive order number 10, but by the new MPAA rating system that was introduced in 1968 as a replacement for the Production Code. But when these filmmakers finally look through a camera out at New York, the functional bustle that Feininger captured in the 40s and 50s has vanished. Meanwhile, the seize the day ambition of the 1980s hasn't arrived yet. Instead, the city they're looking at is just gritty and dysfunctional.
- [23:05]
F
It was one of the ironies of ironies that here's old John Lindsay trying to get film production in New York in 1967. 68 just at the years when New York in many people's eyes is totally going down the tubes.
- [23:17]
A
Starting in the late 1960s, New York enters a spiraling fiscal crisis so severe that by 1975 it's on the verge of bankruptcy crime. So social services bought about, transit workers and garbage men go on strike. And movies like the French Connection and Panic and Needle Park, Mean Street, Serpico, the taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3, Dog Day Afternoon, they capture this dissent. Midnight Cowboy is part of this cohort of films. And that's why its version of the shot is relatively bleak. So was the city.
- [23:49]
F
New York is shorthand all around the world for the dangerous city, Sanders pointed out to me.
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A
That Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver has its own variation on the shot. The movie, filmed during a garbage strike, has Robert De Niro's violent and mentally disturbed Travis Bickle loping down a derelict New York City block in the eye of a long lens camera. Except in this version, there's no crowd. Travis is all alone, walking past a sea of taxi cabs. But things would soon change for New York and the shot. The 80s were coming. In the 1980s, New York was still going through hard times. Crime was high, social stratification was becoming obscene. The streets were filthy, and the crack epidemic and the AIDS crisis were just beginning. But in certain places, for certain people, there was money in the air.
- [24:48]
F
The Reagan era comes in, there's a lot of new money in New York. Things are popping up, new buildings are being built, there's a kind of new spirit. The city is out of bankruptcy. And you start to get a new kind of film about New York.
- [25:09]
A
The New York movies of the early 70s were edgy, violent dramas about oddballs, outlaws, criminals. And in films like Midnight Cowboy, Klute and Shaft, the shot had been used to show us an outsider, a hustler, a call girl, a black private eye in a city that was indifferent, if not downright menacing. But in the 1980s, the movies lose some of their edge. They're more likely to be comedies, romances, romantic comedies. They still look a little shaggy, but they're warmer and more big hearted. They take the techniques developed in those gritty 70s films, including the shot, and use them to show us a different kind of protagonist living in a different kind of city. And you can see all of this in the original Tootsie shot. In that sequence, Michael might seem at first like an outsider too. After all, he's a cross dresser. But he's also just doing everything he can to get and keep a job. And his fellow city dwellers, they respect that. They're not threatening or threatened. They're just people extending to him the courtesy of minding their own business. Everyone's preoccupation turning the street into a zone of privacy, even safety. Michael, in drag or out, is just a young professional with big dreams in a city full of them. He, in other words, He's a quintessential 80s movie protagonist. And as movies shift their focus to this type of upwardly mobile go getter, the striving secretaries and businesswomen and Wall street brokers, so does the shot, which starts to primarily capture people going to work. Working Girl, Wall street and Nine and a Half Weeks are just some of the 80s movies that open with shot laden commuting montages. The grit isn't gone. In fact, these movies are way grittier and shaggier than contemporary New York films. But the grime and danger of the city are less central than the glamour and power you might accrue there. Especially if you're a woman with professional ambitions, a figure who is increasingly central to the shot at the dawn of the 1980s, there's an important precedent here. Nine to Five is the Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin comedy about three working women getting revenge on their sexist boss. It came out in 1980, two years before Tootsie, and it opens with another commuting montage set to the famous song, women waking up and heading to work, thronging in the streets, their heels click clacking on the pavement. It too has a variation on the shot, but one without any of the protagonists in it. It's just a sea of female office workers, the implication being any of them could have a similar story. The movie's geography is also hazy. Those opening images are from San Francisco and New York, but the office building or the stars work is in Los Angeles. Again, the movie's saying this is a universal story. But maybe at this time, New York's menacing reputation also kept it from being a proper any place. But as the 80s go on and New York moves further from its 70s nadir, this kind of story does begin to take place explicitly in the city. In 1987, Baby Boom opens with a montage very similar to the one in Nine to Five, except the geographical haziness is gone, and so is any concern about New York's danger, replaced instead by concern over what it's doing to a woman's work life.
- [28:53]
B
Balance.
- [28:54]
D
One would take it for granted, but a woman like this has it all. One must never take anything for granted.
- [29:06]
A
Heading into the 1990s, as New York continues its glow up, the shot gets even more closely linked to female led romantic comedies. It shows up in the first episode of Sex and the City and in the Devil Wears Prada, just as the protagonist is getting good at her job. It becomes such a genre staple that there it is, not even in New York anymore, as Bridget Jones crosses Tower Bridge in London, glowing from a career change. When the shot doesn't focus on women, it can be a little meta, an intentionally retro reference to previous occurrences of itself. That's how Martin Scorsese uses it in the Wolf of Wall Street, a 2013 movie set in the 1980s about the gonzo Rise and fall of a criminal stockbroker. I'm 22 years old, newly married and already a money crazed little shit. So what do I do? I go to the one place on earth that befit my high minded ambitions. Leonardo DiCaprio's character arrives to his first day of work in the shot, a knowing wink at Oliver Stone's Wall Street. The shot is now so well established, its significations so innately understood, that a movie can use it not just as an establishing sequence, but as a climax and as the movie's destination. That's how it's used in the Will Smith vehicle, the Pursuit of Happiness, which is also set in the 1980s, but that came out in 2006. Smith plays a brilliant aspiring businessman who becomes homeless while he's completing an internship at a brokerage. The shot shows up almost at the very end of the movie, right after one of his bosses has patronizingly informed him he's gotten his big break.
- [30:48]
G
I thought I'd wear a shirt today,
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A
you know, being the last day and all.
- [30:54]
C
Well, thank you, thank you, we appreciate that. But wear one tomorrow though, okay? Because tomorrow's going to be your first day if you'd like to work here as a broker.
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A
After hearing the news, he heads out onto the crowded sidewalks of San Francisco. His character is crying, smiling and clapping, walking in the sea of people. It's not a particularly private place to celebrate a huge personal milestone, but it is exactly where you're supposed to be when you're a character in a movie who's about to start a new job right in the middle of the Tootsie shot. One question that came up as I was talking to people about this was is this shot less common than it was in the 1980s or does it just feel that way? I had a bunch of theories, concrete ones, about what might have changed to make it rarer. Was it more complicated and risky, legally speaking, to try and get permission from the random pedestrians who ended up on camera? Here's Sam Bayard, a media and entertainment lawyer.
- [32:03]
F
I don't think that these scenes rise or fall on legal issues, really.
- [32:07]
A
We're permits to shoot this kind of scene. Harder to come by. Mara Al Kelly, a location manager. No, permits like that are pretty easy. Had New Yorkers started to disrupt the shot by waving and mugging at the camera? Executive producer Anna Wenger.
- [32:23]
B
Again, if they're true New Yorkers and they're on their way somewhere, they're like, whatever, there's a camera. I don't have time for this, had
- [32:30]
A
the shot just become so much of a cliche, directors didn't want to use it anymore? Assistant director Joe Reedy Again, no.
- [32:38]
G
The only thing that I get tired of is when someone thinks it's a brilliant idea to have a lonely office building with somebody cleaning the floor.
- [32:46]
A
So, yeah, not all my theories held water, but I have some others. The shot was popularized in an era, the 1980s, when mid budget movies for adults were still a commonplace. This kind of film, which was made for a significant but not crazy amount of money and made a significant but not crazy amount of money, has famously gotten squeezed out in an industry fixated on blockbusters and superheroes. But those are the kind of movies that are likely to be about normal people with career ambitions. They're the movies where starting a new job might constitute a major story beat. But even in contemporary movies where new jobs are important, professional ambition probably doesn't look like office workers flooding through the streets of Manhattan anymore. Nowadays, when movies want to show us that a character is a striver, we don't see them hustling to the office in the morning. We see them bent over a computer screen late into the night. Even so, the shot still pops up a lot. But the newer iterations are often less memorable than the older ones. And that might have something to do with New York itself, which is cleaner and blander than it used to be. Safer too. More chain pharmacies and bank branches. More people looking at their phones. Don't get me wrong, I am always glad to see the shot and its bustle. I'm always interested in what it's trying to say about who is worth picking out of a crowd. But it has become a convention, if not a cliche, and the instances do bleed together in a kind of mental montage. For one to stand out, it has to be big. It has to have a movie star like Will Smith making really large gestures or Will Ferrell in an elf costume freaking New Yorkers out the shot. It's like it's in the shot jostling against hundreds of other sequences just like it that all appear in a movie of their very own. But to stick out in a crowd like that, you have to be a little special.
- [34:52]
H
This.
- [34:53]
A
This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. Please consider signing up for Decoder Ring. Plus you could skip all the ads and listen to episodes of Decoder Rings Back, our new feature in which I answer a listener's question. With that listener, you can sign up on the Decoder Ring show page on Apple podcasts or Spotify, or visit slate.com decoder ring this episode was written by me. It was edited by Gabriel Roth and Benjamin Fresh, who also produced this episode. Cleo Levin was our research assistant. Decoder Ring is produced by me, Max Friedman and Evan Chung. Our supervising producer, Merritt Jacob, is senior technical director. Thanks to June Thomas, Jared Holt, Jason Bailey, Sam Levy, Glen Kenny Carlo, Mirabella Davis, Marielle, Callie J. D', Amato, David Sims, Bill Parker, Doug Brody, Sam Bayard, Sean Fennesee and Jody Rosen. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us@decoderinglate.com or give us a call at 347-460-7281. We'll see you in two weeks.