25 Inaccurate Depictions of NYC in Film and TV

Hollywood has been in love with New York ever since Hollywood became Hollywood. L.A. can't stop writing digital love letters to its cooler older brother. The problem is that they just can't seem to get Gotham right. It should be easy to place the Empire State Building the correct distance from the World Trade Center, have trains travel on the correct lines, or keep palm trees off of “New York” airport runways.

Hollywood flubs like these are trapped on film forever, providing more fuel for Internet nerd snark bonfires. While we ain't no damn nerds, we went ahead and put together 25 of our favorite New York film and tv inaccuracies for your condescending, cooler-than-thou amusement.

What's Wrong: In this golf scene (!) from Rumble in the Bronx, mountains loom large in the background. Now, in a ritzier part of the Bronx you'll find country clubs, but mountains? No mountains.

What's Right: Jackie's hottie love interest is wearing a cross. Every true baller knows hot chicks become Bible thumpers just to torture men. Look it up. It's true. Hot chicks are generally stuck-up, super-religious, or married. Fact.

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What's Wrong: Musicals are to film inconsistencies as New Yorkers are to fashionable scarves: the worst offenders. That said, there's no denying that even the most athletic of theatre nerds would have trouble getting from Times Square to Central Park, then down to Washington Square Park and back up to Time Square in three minutes. It is also likely that song-and-dance theatrics such as these would be met with a chorus of honking cabs and waving middle fingers in the real New York. A word of advice for any Drama Clubs, Glee Clubs, or Thespian Societies who might be visiting the Big Apple to see Wicked: Keep the singing to your hotel room shower. No one wants to hear it.

What's Right: Douchebags who look like Finn do actually take cabs to shop at Abercrombie & Fitch (see :54). These men tend to drink at these bars.

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What's Wrong: The clip below offers three different takes on City subways in the films of the '80s. The graffiti-ridden subway car of Coming to America is not far of the mark for the time period, nor is the subway upon which Christopher Walken stunts in King of New York, but the red-paneled subway cars of Jason Takes Manhattan? That's a train of a different color.

What's Right: No one in the subway car cares if Jason's victims live or die. If you've been on a 3 a.m. train ride, you know this is true.

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What's Wrong: While there is a Hotel Grand Union and an Empire Hotel in New York City, there is no Empire Grand Hotel in NYC, particularly not smack-dab in the heart of Times Square. If that were true, there would be no space for people to sell comedy tickets or wave at the Forever 21.

What's Right: There are several moments in the clip below where tourists stare stupidly up in the air as objects descend upon them. You ever walked around in Times Square? Ever taken note of the average person there? Sounds about right.

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What's Wrong: For a show focused on New York geography and the class differences between neighborhoods and boroughs, this show gets pretty much everything wrong. The show revolves around the lives of employees at the Williamsburg Diner, which is in the “dangerous” neighborhood of Williamsburg, where “no one from the Upper East Side would ever go ever.” In fact, viewers are told that Williamsburg is so dangerous, “you can't wear a fancy leather jacket in this neighborhood” lest it be stolen.

Though this might have been the case twenty years ago, the only reason not to wear a leather jacket in Williamsburg today would be to avoid the mockery of better dressed residents treading down Bedford Ave. from the Cheese Shop to the McCarren Park Dog Walk. Furthermore, it is implied that Williamsburg is an ethnically Russian and East Asian neighborhood when in fact this is a predominately Hasidic, Latino, Polish, and Italian hood.

Even the trains are messed up. One of the main characters is going to Manhattan, but the conductor announces the next stop as Greenpoint, making the train the G, which does not go to the City.

What's Right: Kat Dennings.

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What's Wrong: Anyone who has ever taken the train to Brooklyn knows that this is not what greets you when you end up on the BK side of the bridge, though the “Hotel Hotel” is a pretty sweet hotel name. Who wouldn't want to eat at the “Restaurant Restaurant” or observe titties at the “Titty Bar Titty Bar”?

What's Right: If there were dickish futuristic robot police in real life, they would have vaguely German accents.

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What's Wrong: The dispute in this scene, and much of the action of the film, takes place on “New Amsterdam Street” which is a “downtown” neighborhood that's half Israeli, half Palestinian. According to set dressing seen later in the film, it's off of an intersection between the blue and orange subway lines, which would put it at West 4th Street in the Village. Which would be NYU territory.

What's Right: Sandler has recently said his goal as an actor is to “tell the truth.” It's right to say that Sandler is a failure.

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What's Wrong: In this episode of HIMYM, our hero Ted agrees to meet an ex where they first met, at a quaint coffee shop (where all photogenic New Yorkers meet) at Smith and 9th in Brooklyn. While bistros and flower shops surround the coffee shop, aptly named “The Intersection,” the actual intersection is surrounded by highway, an above-ground subway stop, and a Budget Truck rental lot. Love is in the air!

What's Right: The theme of this episode is “Getting back together with your ex is a bad idea.” Truth.

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What's Wrong: There are no above-ground trains in this part of Manhattan. There is an above-ground park made from train tracks where one can pick up hot tourists and eat gourmet ice cream sandwiches. But now that you know, we don't want y'all blowin' up our spot.

What's Right: If you look closely, you'll note this is an R train, which often inexplicably blows by listed stops on its route, as it does here.

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What's Wrong: Friends came under attack from day one for the vast studio set apartments that are a far cry from tiny-ass actual New York apartments. Attention should also be paid to the inaccuracy of the show's establishing shots. The Friends apartment exterior is located at 90 Bedford St. in the West Village, while they hang out at Central Perk, which is modeled after a now defunct Upper East Side coffee shop. Even more ridiculous, however, are some of the one-off establishing shots, like the gym you see above. This three-story steroid-factory (complete with a lawn) is not to be found in Manhattan, as a building of that size would be reserved for post offices, libraries, and police precincts. Smells like L.A. douchebaggery.

What's Right: Quitting a gym in New York City is impossible. It is a painful subject for everyone. We don't want to talk about it any more.

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What's Wrong: This scene from The Incredible Hulk (the one with Ed Norton) portrays the blocks surrounding the Apollo Theatre as gleaming with neon, just like that hellhole of hellholes, Times Square. But they don't. We have special love for the multi-level 7/11 though. It's about as tall as the theatre itself. That's a lot of Slurpee real estate.

What's Right: The number of African hair braiding shops.

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What's Wrong: Please forgive us for failing to provide a video link, the ravenous fans out there have ensured that clips of Sex and the City are locked up tighter than Big's emotions (Am I right, ladies?!).

But you have to give us a pass on this one, as we trolled old SATC message boards and blogs with titles like “Big Apple Bitch” and “Pink is the New Blog” to get the skinny on Carrie Bradshaw's apartment. In this particular episode, Carrie states that she paid $750 for her Upper East Side studio in 2000. Though the apartment was rent controlled, it was also pretty big. The most conservative estimates put her apartment in the neighborhood of at least double that.

What's Right: Every time you read a Sex and the City blog, you die a little inside.

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What's Wrong: Since there is so much to pay attention to here, between the action-packed scene and the beauty of Angelina Jolie, it is easy to miss the California highway signage in the background. But there it is, whizzing by.

What's Right: It was hard for us to watch this clip objectively to determine what is accurate, as the entire City Guide crew is on Team Jennifer.

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What's Wrong: This chase scene begins around Grand Central and ends when Will Smith is carried on a five second magic bus ride to the Guggenheim on 88th and 5th. Again, five seconds.

What's Right: Will Smith's character says at one point, “NYPD. That means I will knock your ass down.” This is sometimes true.

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What's Wrong: There are so many lame parents who have stopped at Katz's Delicatessen on their walk from counterfeit purse shopping on Canal Street to see the matinee of Wicked, and have left sorely disappointed. While Ma and Pa may have dreamed of sitting at the same tables that Meg and Billy immortalized, this most famous of endings to this most famous of comedy scenes would never have actually happened. The restaurant is predominately self-service, so, there would have been no Harry, no Sally, and no old lady at the end saying, “I'll have what she's having” to an uncomfortable waiter.

What's Right: Meg Ryan.

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What's Wrong: While it is a pity that these characters happen to be on the Brooklyn Bridge when it collapses, it is an even greater pity that they walked by the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges before finally choosing to walk across that most iconic of New York bridges. These refugees were coming from Times Square—something is wrong with the geography of this sequence. Perhaps dying on the Brooklyn Bridge is more iconic?

What's Right: On second thought, we probably would avoid the Williamsburg Bridge as well. It would suck being around all those hipsters fleeing the tentacle monster ironically. [Ed. Note—Sorry for that joke. This article is also the writer's audition for the staff of 2 Broke Girls.]

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What's Wrong: While Starbucks is ubiquitous in New York City now, in 1989 this was a dead giveaway that the scene had been shot out West; the first Starbucks in New York did not open until 1994.

What's Right: If you, child of the '80s, ever find yourself thinking, “Man, they just don't make movies like they did when we were kids,” remember that they also made this movie, which is about a talking baby who ogles a woman's breasts because they may contain a lot of milk.

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What's Wrong: This is a particularly strange case. See, John Carpenter's film, though it came out in 1981, is set in the future of 1997, which gives us license to make criticise it from the now of 2012. Now, onward: Here is another instance of a cinematic subway looking nothing like the smelly-ass subways of New York.

What's Right: As the film predicted, and is announced in its trailer, New York has actually been one large maximum security prison since 1997. I am writing this article on my cell wall so that future generations may guffaw ironically at film inaccuracies. This article shall be my legacy and live on once I have died. Sincerely, the writer.

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What's Wrong: This piece of cinematic majesty deserves a hallowed spot in the New York Film Inaccuracy Hall of Fame. Here is a representative, but by no means exhaustive list:

1. As seen in the clip below, the relative position and distance between the Statute of Liberty and the City is out of whack.

2. New Yorkers are watching local news on WTTG-5, a D.C. news station, throughout the film.

3. L.A.'s AT&T Building appears in the middle of 61st Street.

4. When the tsunami hits Manhattan, Brooklyn is simply not there.

What's Right: New Yorkers are callous enough to block the entrances to libraries and buses during a disaster because they feel like it. Believe that.

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What's Wrong: While this film is known less for its geographical continuity errors and more for its ritualistic orgies, we are going to tackle the less interesting of the two topics. Throughout the film, the London shooting location bleeds into the New York created by Kubrick. British electrical sockets, road signs, and even newspaper headlines make their way on screen.

What's Right: A YouYube search of this film revealed that it is just as weird as we imagined. No, none of us have seen it, with the exception of the orgy scenes which we all Yahoo! searched as horny teenagers. But now that we have watched those scenes and watched weird occult groups analyzing said scenes, we can die happy men.

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What's Wrong: Many film mistakes are easy to miss, but if you mess with the biggest buildings in a place people love, they're going to notice. In Independence Day there are numerous instances where the size, relative distance, and surrounding architecture of the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building are completely out of whack. The Empire State Building is shown as being in-line with an avenue; the alien ship moves from the WTC to the Empire State Building as though they were almost next to each other; and the ship almost hits the Empire State Building, but does not hit the WTC, though the WTC was much taller than the Empire State Building.

What's Right: Fifteen years later, this speech still rules.

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What's Wrong: Being John Malkovich is just one in a long line of films, from Sweet Home Alabama to Newsies, that let California dip into New York. Sure, we could have chosen any number of films to pick on, but watching clips of Being John Malkovich is preferable to catching up with either of the aforementioned cinematic gems. In Malkovich, you will catch L.A. buses, traffic signs, and foliage (like that palm tree next to Cusack's head). You will even peep an oil well. There are no oil wells in the Greater New York City Metro Area.

What's Right: It is accurate to say that the Malkovich Dance scene is both superficially and metaphysically dope.

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What's Wrong: This shot of Vito staring up at the Statue of Liberty is profound, beautiful. Unfortunately, you would not see the front of Lady Liberty from this angle; rather you would peep her oxidized-copper ass, a much less iconic view.

What's Right: It is impossible to resolve an argument over whether Part 1 or Part 2 is the best except by calling it a draw and mocking Part 3.

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What's Wrong: The secret concert that takes place in the clip below is supposed to be at 68th and 5th, but you can see the Empire State Building in the background. When they leave the concert to go home, they are almost immediately at Penn Station, on 34th Street. Here, Michael Cera suggests that they “go home.” It is established early in the film that while Nick lives in Hoboken, Norah lives in Englewood, where the PATH does not run. She would require a bus from Port Authority to get her fine-ass home, because you know she's not crashing at Michael Cera's place.

What's Right: It is right to say that everyone wishes Kat Dennings was on a better show than 2 Broke Girls.

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What's Wrong: The Spider-Man trilogy makes the list with all three films. Well done, Spidey franchise! You are the kings of continuity errors! In this scene, you can see a bunch of Cleveland landmarks. The link above is from some early studio cuts before the fx were fully finished. Pretty dope.

What's Right: The shame—the shame of filming in Cleveland, the shame of knowing that something is found in Cleveland but popping up in a film set in New York. Cleveland, Cleveland, what have ye done?

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