City News (PBS film)
| City News | |
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Elliot Crown, publicity still from the film City News (1983)
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| Directed by | David Fishelson and Zoe Zinman |
| Produced by | David Fishelson, Zoe Zinman, Richard Hoover |
| Written by | David Fishelson and Zoe Zinman |
| Starring | Elliot Crown, Nancy Cohen, Thomas Trivier |
| Music by | Saheb Sarbib, Jules Baptiste |
| Cinematography | Jonathan Sinaiko |
| Distributed by | Cinecom Pictures; Season 3, PBS' American Playhouse |
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Release date
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1983 |
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Running time
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63 minutes |
| Language | English |
City News is an independent, American comedy film, written and directed by David Fishelson and Zoe Zinman in New York City in 1983, which was nationally broadcast on PBS in 1984, exhibited theatrically in the U.S. and Canada in 1983, and selected for 12 international film festivals (winning at 3) in 1983-4.
The film is about "Tom Domino", a riffing, self-styled, noir-like protagonist who runs an East Village alternative newspaper by day, but who struggles by night when he gets home and tries to create a cartoon strip. A verbal sparring match with a sexy woman in a Manhattan bar one evening enables him to snap his cartoonist's writer's block, leading him to dash home after the encounter, and set down in cartoon form everything that just happened between him and the girl (whose name is "Daphne"). The cartoon strip (later named "City News") becomes a local hit, boosting his newspaper's sales. Now, with the newspaper finally a success, Domino finds himself in a conundrum: does he love Daphne genuninely for who she is, or only because she is the muse who has enabled him to become a success?
The style of City News owes a debt to various pop culture sources, including the cartooning of R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, 1950s film noir narration, and the use of silhouettes to make the film's reality look more cartoon-like. Several sequences are modeled on early-1980s MTV music videos, including a seduction scene that unfolds during the playing of an arcade driving game, and an automobile wreck that intercuts live footage with comic strip imagery of the accident.
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