Among the New Yorkers far and wide marching outdoors in the middle of day on Monday to watch the moon’s shadow hover dangerously over the sun was Steve Martin, taking a break from shooting his Hulu TV show “Only Murders in the Building.”
The program is somehow only the studio’s latest TV show to be renting out space in Ridgewood. Just a week earlier, the second season of “Goosebumps” had rented out the Peruvian chicken spot Super Pollo and the cafe around the corner called Nomad. Just a year ago`, the HBO Max show “The Penguin” was spotted shooting near the Seneca Avenue M Station, retrofitting a quiet travel agency into a “fake sex shop storefront,” according to a reddit post.
“Every director wants a piece of the Seneca, Palmetto strip these days,” speculated a reddit user that goes by the name “pepino.”
Locals will also remember when Netflix paid to set up a fake dinner on Catalpa Avenue for use in Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” and which later survived for a few years afterward as a Austrian cafe, an upscale Asian concept and that will allegedly reemerge as an Italian spot called “Hasta la Pasta.”
The largest crowd seen so far has seemingly gathered outside the Windjammer, a local dive bar that “Only Murders” was rending out that week to shoot the mildly popular mystery show’s fourth season. Later that week, the show would tell the trades that they were confirming the casting Catherine Cohen and Richard Kind, among others, involved in “unraveling the murder” of a “mind-bogglingly identical stunt double” played by Jane Lynch, who perished dramatically at the end of the show’s second season. The spectacle had even attracted the attention of the neighborhood’s local, bespectacled curmudgeon, an HBO documentarian named John Wilson, who appeared carrying his oversized camera, as his peculiar wont, taking further digital reams of footage.
Perhaps fittingly, the show appeared to retrofitting the Ridgewood dive bar into a meeting spot for the stunt community called “Concussions,” where one imagines that Steve Martin’s investigation takes him, joined no doubt by Martin Short and Selena Gomez, the once-Disney singer trying to use the show as a brand parlay into prestige television.
“Damn, she hotter than them,” a woman dressed in a crossing guard outfit could be heard saying among the crowd waiting expectantly to see Selena Gomez in Ridgewood. Both Martin, dressed in a quietly puffy jacket, and Short himself had already popped outside, amid filming, in order to capture the once-in-generation solar eclipse, before heading back to continue searching the bar for murderers.
Gomez would finally appear some hours later, dressed in a black leather jacket, before entering a nondescript SUV with tinted windows. She had been accosted immediately by fans and took pictures with two of them, before getting driven away.
Top photo taken by Andrew Karpan.
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