REMEMBER ‘My Dinner With Andre”? The 1981 film classic by director Louis Malle is being re-released Friday. Its entire plot consists of two old friends waxing philosophical during a meal in an uppity Manhattan bistro. Well, guess what? Amazingly, in a city that played host to 51 major films on location last year, the restaurant doesn’t actually exist.
Thankfully for Hollywood directors as well as local foodies, this is a highly unusual setup. New York is chock-full of real, honest-to-goodness restaurants and bars that have appeared on the big screen. And they are chock-full of adoring patrons who just eat up their celluloid status.
Cafe Lalo hasn’t been the same since Tom Hanks played Meg Ryan’s e-mailing pal in last year’s ‘You’ve Got Mail.” ‘We’ve had a lot of tourists coming from around the world saying that they saw the movie. We’ve had letters from Germany. It’s a very big attraction,” says Gil Nezry, general manager of the West 83rd Street coffeehouse.
Nezry calls the ‘You’ve Got Mail” shoot ‘just about the best advertisement anybody could dream about.” Cafe Lalo closed for a week to film the 20-minute scene where Hanks realizes that Ryan is his secret cyber-pal. The crew took pictures of the alterations made to the cafe – they were major – and afterwards put things back ‘in the exact angle they were at before. I was just amazed how efficient they are,” he enthuses.
The crew of a ‘Law & Order” TV movie wasn’t quite as thorough when they cleared out of Elaine’s last year, it seems. It was only when patrons of the Upper East Side celebrity haunt noticed that their cocktails lacked the usual punch that the bartender realized he was still pouring from the fake TV bottles.
Night-bird owner Elaine Kaufman recalls a little joke she played on Woody Allen’s people when they set up a dawn shoot for the opening scene of ‘Manhattan” (1979) featuring her place. ‘Rather than go home, I slept on the window bench. When they wanted to come in at 6 a.m. I told them they were too early. I held them up for a while.” Her guests still talk about the prank.
In that same film, Allen takes his son to lunch at the Russian Tea Room. But the movie most indelibly linked with that West 57th Street spot is ‘Tootsie” (1982). The samovar palace is set to reopen under new owner Warner LeRoy in October. Coincidentally, that’s when former proprietor Faith Stewart-Gordon’s book ‘The Russian Tea Room: A Love Story” is also to be released. In it she reveals how Dustin Hoffman stayed in his female character ‘even when he wasn’t acting, even insisting on using the ladies’ room during the shoot!”
When moans of ecstasy start building in a certain section of Katz’s Delicatessen, it’s not necessarily from the pastrami on rye. The ‘When Harry Met Sally” table there has been known to elicit impromptu re-enactments of the faking-an-orgasm scene in the Meg Ryan-Billy Crystal comedy. ‘It takes a couple of seconds, but then everyone starts laughing because they realize what’s going on,” chuckles manager Kevin Albinder. ‘It’s definitely the hottest table in the store. We have a little sign on it, and we have to replace it a few times a week.”
Tavern on the Green at Central Park West glitters in a long list of screen gems: ‘Ghostbusters” (1984), ‘Heartburn” (1986), ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989), ‘Wall Street” (1987), and the recent remake of ‘The Out-of-Towners.”
In ‘The Out-of-Towners,” Mayor Giuliani and friends in the Tavern’s Crystal Room turn on the lights to ‘unveil” a new statue outside – only to catch Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin in a passionate grip beneath it.
The antithesis of glitz, Vazac’s Horseshoe Bar has been the backdrop for its own incredible string of feature films. Look for the gritty East Village hangout – called 7-B because it’s located at Seventh Street and Avenue B – in ‘The Godfather Part II” (1974), ‘Serpico” (1973, ‘The Paper” (1994) and the famous ”Crocodile’ Dundee” (1986) scene involving Paul Hogan, a cab driver and a transvestite.
Bartender Nathan sums up the bar’s photogenic appeal with ‘It’s gorgeous,” adding that its horseshoe shape allows actors to be filmed from a wide range of angles.
One of the most interesting tales about Gotham bars and restaurants on the silver screen has to be that of P.J. Clarke’s, the 1890 landmark bar on Third Avenue and 55th Street. Filmed as the watering hole for Ray Milland’s alcoholic character in ‘The Lost Weekend” (1945), the footage was never used because of noise from the el that ran overhead in those days. The scenes were reshot on a set built to look like P.J.’s out in Tinseltown. The real bar, however, should be featured when an unnamed Al Pacino flick filmed there several months ago finally makes it into theaters.