{"id":82305,"date":"2025-12-28T04:07:18","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T04:07:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/82305\/"},"modified":"2025-12-28T04:07:18","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T04:07:18","slug":"how-jack-fisk-recreated-1950s-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/82305\/","title":{"rendered":"How Jack Fisk Recreated 1950s New York"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJack Fisk<\/a> is behind the looks of some of the most distinctive films of the past 30-plus years, from David Lynch\u2019s \u201cMulholland Drive\u201d to Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s \u201cThere Will Be Blood.\u201d For Josh Safdie<\/a>\u2019s \u201cMarty Supreme<\/a>,\u201d Fisk brought his long experience working with auteurs to create the expansive world of 1950s New York that Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet inhabits as scheming ping pong champ Marty Mauser.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe three-time Oscar-nominated production designer, who just turned 80, is likely the only one on the crew who remembers what the city looked like back then. But Safdie was just as obsessed with getting things right, Fisk says \u2014 even down to searching for the right size ping pong balls, since balls were slightly smaller in the 1950s than today\u2019s version.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cJosh has got so much energy and is such a lover of New York, and I was always trying to find things that I could tell him that were a little different. But he was ahead of me,\u201d says Fisk.<\/p>\n

\n\tWorking with the likes Terrence Malick, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese, Fisk says, \u201cwas exciting times \u2014 we thought, like, we\u2019re taking over the film business. And so now this was exciting for me, because there\u2019s a whole new wave of young filmmakers that are brilliant,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMarty Supreme\u201d takes place over numerous settings, from the atmospheric Lower East Side of 1950s New York, with its street vendors and small shops, to Japan, where the crew prepped and filmed for two weeks.<\/p>\n

\n\tLocations included New York\u2019s Plaza Hotel and Indonesian Embassy, which stood in for swanky London hotels, and the Woolworth mansion on East 80th Street, where Gwyneth Paltrow and Kevin O\u2019Leary\u2019s wealthy characters lived. \u201cI couldn\u2019t believe they let us shoot there. It was over the top,\u201d Fisk recalls. International table tennis tournaments were recreated at Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey.<\/p>\n

\n\tFisk worked closely with Safdie to envision some of the film\u2019s biggest set pieces, including the table tennis parlor Marty Mauser frequents that is based on Lawrence\u2019s Broadway Table Tennis Club.<\/p>\n

\n\tChalamet, too, was involved in the production design, Fisk says. \u201cHis enthusiasm and his dedication to acting, and what he was doing was inspirational. I\u2019m married to an actress (Fisk is married to Sissy Spacek), so I\u2019m always building sets for the actors to help them, and he just took advantage of all of it. He knew what kind of research we were doing. He would come in all the time and look at drawings and models, and show up at locations. His excitement about the film made you excited to be a part of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFisk details what went into creating some of the film\u2019s most important settings. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tLawrence\u2019s Broadway Table Tennis Club<\/p>\n

\t\tThe Table Tennis Club\t<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen Fisk read \u201cThe Money Player,\u201d written by Marty Reisman, the 1950s ping pong champ who loosely inspired the story<\/a>, he realized that Lawrence\u2019s Broadway Table Tennis Club, where Marty hangs out, would be a central location. Though the building no longer exists, Fisk found vintage photos taken by the city.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe then asked Safdie\u2019s wife, executive producer Sara Rossein, who was working on research for the film, to see if she could find the blueprints. \u201cNot only did she find the blueprints, but she found an article from Look magazine or one of those magazines that had beautiful black and white photos of the place. We were able to see exactly how it was set up,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe art department even added the hand-painted landscape murals that were created when the space housed an indoor miniature golf course, though they aren\u2019t very visible in the final cut.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhy was this level of detail so important?<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou like to start somewhere, and you think that if it\u2019s closer to authenticity, it might help the actors understand their character,\u201d says Fisk. \u201cWe start with the most accurate representation we can find, and then we alter it to work for the film.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI think in my heart, I approach a lot of these films that I do as documentaries. So research is fun, exciting, and it gives you a starting point,\u201d Fisk says.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tJosh Safdie, right, on location at the shoe store.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAtsushi Nishijima<\/p>\n

\t\tThe Shoe Store and 1950s Orchard Street\t<\/p>\n

\n\tFisk lived in New York in the early 1960s, so he had a fairly good idea of the right look. In addition, the crew studied N.Y. experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs\u2019 short film \u201cOrchard Street,\u201d which shows the crowds and streetscape of the Lower East Side neighborhood in color.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe actually shot Orchard Street on Orchard Street,\u201d Fisk says. \u201cWe found a store there that we wanted to make the Northridge shoe store, and right next to it was a brand-new hotel. So we had a problem up and down the street. Everybody had modernized their buildings and put in tall plate glass,\u201d he recalls. Plus, the street signs were different, and there was graffiti everywhere, which wasn\u2019t there in the 1950s. Fisk explains that set designers built a modular system of tenement fronts that covered the ground-level building fronts.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThen Adam Willis, our decorator, started doing layers from the awnings over these modular fronts to the tables with all the things they were selling, and the storefronts, the windows we kept working on layers right out into the middle of the street. And it started to look very real.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe graphic artist created signs for us, and then the scenic artist aged them beautifully, and we used those to hide a lot of the modern signs underneath and anything else that was offensive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was fun to be on the street at that time, because you could kind of lose yourself and think you\u2019re in the 1950s,\u201d Fisk remembers.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile the tenement interiors were shot on a stage, the shoe store was shot in an actual store that was rebuilt because the ceiling was falling down and the floor was unsafe, Fisk recalls. It was important to him to communicate a 1950s feeling through the colors of the interiors.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhenever I go into an old place, I start peeling away paint or moving light switches to see what was under it, trying to get back in time,\u201d he says. \u201cWe use a lot of colors from the \u201950s, because they were just beautiful. Looking at period color charts, there\u2019s very little white, but a lot of really rich colors. In my career, I\u2019ve tried to always bring that color back in and avoid white like the plague. White just seems more contemporary to me, but it also just burns a hole in the film. If you look at white on a piece of celluloid, it\u2019s just clear there\u2019s nothing there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe Japanese table tennis tournament in \u201cMarty Supreme.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTokyo\t<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a climactic scene, Marty heads to Japan for a championship game. Fisk exchanged drawings and photographs with the Japanese art department for a month before the crew traveled to Tokyo, and they had already pulled together most of the graphics.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe had a plan on how to design the stage where they were going to have the tournament. We just didn\u2019t know which stage it was,\u201d Fisk says. After touring locations, they found a concert shell in a park outside Tokyo. \u201cIt was perfect. It was close to the period and it looked like you were in another country. Our crew put together some towers out of bamboo that we then covered with Japanese graphics.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe found photographs of some artwork from the World Tournament in Tokyo, just a year or two after our film, and we were able to borrow from that,\u201d says Fisk. <\/p>\n

\n\tSafdie, who speaks Japanese, was thrilled with how the scene came together, Fisk says. \u201cIt was such an easy place to work, and the people were so kind, and the art department was so talented. You would just kind of wish something and it would show up. The ping pong table was based on an old Japanese table. I sent them a picture of it, and next thing I knew, we had one.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jack Fisk is behind the looks of some of the most distinctive films of the past 30-plus years,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82306,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[39281,37372,28006,9,24,55,54,56,21537],"class_list":{"0":"post-82305","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-jack-fisk","9":"tag-josh-safdie","10":"tag-marty-supreme","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","14":"tag-new-york-city-news","15":"tag-ny","16":"tag-timothee-chalamet"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82305","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=82305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}