{"id":376727,"date":"2026-10-19T10:24:23","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T10:24:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/376727\/"},"modified":"2026-10-19T10:24:23","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T10:24:23","slug":"josh-safdies-top-ten-or-so-n-y-c-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/376727\/","title":{"rendered":"Josh Safdie\u2019s Top Ten (or So) N.Y.C. Films"},"content":{"rendered":"

Josh Safdie directed and co-wrote \u201cMarty Supreme.\u201d He also co-directed (with his younger brother, Benny) and co-wrote \u201cUncut Gems.\u201d 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\u2019d created in collaboration with the studio\u2019s artisans. The prints, fifty in total (plus multiple artists\u2019 and printers\u2019 proofs), were laid out in tranches of six on carefully prepared worktables. Four Staedtler 2B pencils were ready to go\u2014sharpened 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\u2014you could add him to the cover of Dylan and the Band\u2019s \u201cBasement Tapes\u201d LP and no one would notice\u2014began reminiscing about a nearby office he\u2019d had years ago, in the same building as \u201cGreta and Lena.\u201d And bingo: he was off on a ping-ponging monologue.<\/p>\n

He brought up Jonas Mekas, the underground filmmaker and co-founder of Anthology Film Archives\u2014a \u201cgenius,\u201d but also a \u201cdifficult\u201d boss. (Safdie\u2019s 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 \u201ca girl I used to live with\u201d whose father had served as Fluxus\u2019s organizer and later worked with Ono and John Lennon. The father had \u201cthis house that\u2019s packed with crap. Not crap. Artifacts.\u201d Among those artifacts was a Nudie suit given to Lennon by his pal Harry Nilsson. \u201cI just had to try it on because I was super skinny then,\u201d Safdie said. (Note: He\u2019s still pretty slender.) \u201cWe did a little photo series,\u201d he continued. \u201cWow. Anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

Twenty minutes after he walked in the door, the signing began. Saloni Shah, a Two Palms employee who otherwise guides the studio\u2019s work with experimental materials, called out Safdie\u2019s progress\u2014\u201cThree of fifty\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. four of fifty\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d\u2014to keep him on track. The print, titled \u201cTop 10 NYC Films,\u201d 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. \u201cI was never going to do just ten,\u201d 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\u2019s favorite recipe card, if Grandma had O.C.D. and a pen fetish.<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cHe was going on about \u2018Alas, poor Yorick,\u2019 and I didn\u2019t want to say anything, but I was thinking, Dude, you don\u2019t exactly seem to be thriving right now yourself\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein<\/p>\n

David Lasry, Two Palms\u2019 founder, contrasted the studio\u2019s collaboration with Safdie to past work with artists like Chuck Close and Sol LeWitt: \u201cThey\u2019re conceptual artists. They made rules for making art. Josh started with rules, but then he lost control of it because of his enthusiasm.\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s blots of Wite-Out.<\/p>\n

Films you\u2019d expect made the cut (\u201cTaxi Driver,\u201d \u201cDo the Right Thing,\u201d \u201cDog Day Afternoon\u201d), along with some you might not (\u201cCruising,\u201d a pair of Troma Z movies). Only a week earlier, Safdie had decided to add the 1978 Richard Gere picture \u201cBloodbrothers,\u201d 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. \u201cDo I have \u2018Wild Style\u2019 on here?\u201d Safdie asked, referencing the seminal 1983 hip-hop movie. He did. He counted the films, tallying a hundred and fifteen\u2014plus another twelve he had added with asterisks, because they were only partially filmed in New York (\u201cThe Godfather,\u201d parts I and II) or were, one way or another, \u201cin communication with\u201d the city (the Hoboken-set \u201cOn the Waterfront\u201d). Lasry dryly suggested a new title: \u201c115 of the Top 10 NYC Films.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Josh Safdie directed and co-wrote \u201cMarty Supreme.\u201d He also co-directed (with his younger brother, Benny) and co-wrote \u201cUncut…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376728,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[97134,1472,9,11,10,11004,138570],"class_list":["post-376727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-_talk-of-the-town","tag-magazine","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-splitscreenimageleftinset","tag-the-pictures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376727\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}