A location scout is a casting director for buildings. They walk the city looking for doorways to stage first kisses, grimy kitchens that crack characters open, trash-strewn underpasses where bad deals get sealed. This summer, Low Cinema in Ridgewood turned that invisible job into a five-night film series, and put three of the people who actually do it in the room.
Low Cinema and Urban Omnibus, The Architectural League of New York’s publication about city-making, co-hosted “Locations, Locations, Locations,” a screening series built around the craft of location scouting and how it has shaped the movie version of New York for decades, according to Low Cinema’s event page. The series ran June 28 through July 2 at the theater at 70-11 60th St. Each screening came with an in-person discussion featuring three veteran scouts.
The series grew out of an essay Urban Omnibus published in June by Cosmo Bjorkenheim, who the outlet describes as a film critic, cinema founder and urban planner-in-training. Those same three scouts are featured in Bjorkenheim’s essay, which considers a newly assembled collection of location scouting photographs at the Center for Brooklyn History.
Per Urban Omnibus, that collection is a record of the craft’s analog golden age, the era before Google Maps and digital photography made the whole city searchable from a phone. It represents the accumulated knowledge of more than two dozen scouts over three decades, and thousands of hours spent on subways, sidewalks and front stoops looking for the right spot and convincing whoever held the keys to let the cameras in. It became a trove of snapshots of “old New York” from the ’90s and early 2000s, a version of the city Urban Omnibus says is only now being historicized.
Urban Omnibus frames the scout as an endangered species. Industry contractions and technological encroachments are squeezing the profession. New York, meanwhile, keeps betting on film with new sound stages and other infrastructure. Bjorkenheim’s essay asks what gets lost when the analog practice of walking and discovering goes away.
Urban Omnibus is a recurring presence in local reporting; Bushwick Daily previously covered its project mapping Amazon’s last-mile delivery footprint across New York. More on Low Cinema’s programming is at the theater’s site.
