For Norkin’s, they scouted a business in the area. “We found an old clothing store that was going out of business, and it was pretty run-down. So we went in and fixed it up,” Fisk says. The issue was that right next door to the clothing store was a brand new hotel. In order to cover it up without actually touching it, the team designed modular storefronts and bottom floors of buildings that could sit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel and then put period cars on the street. “It was so much to recreate,” he recalls, “there were so many people there that remembered it from their childhood and were cheering us on.”
Marty and Rachel’s cluttered and cramped tenements were completely built by the crew, as tenement buildings have been thoroughly modernised due to building laws. To accurately recreate these spaces, the entire art department took a field trip to New York’s Tenement Museum to inspect a preserved tenement from 1938. Both Rachel and Marty’s homes have brightly painted walls, and Fisk explains that this is because, at the time, most heating systems in tenements were coal-powered and left a pervasive dark dust, so people would paint the rooms bright colours to manufacture a more cheery atmosphere.
London, England
After scrounging up the money for his flight, Marty’s first trip overseas is to the table tennis championships in London. We see Marty in his element, focused as ever, swinging his hips, exhaling loudly, and thwacking ping-pong balls with his paddle at the old Wembley Stadium. It turns out, all of the scenes in London were actually shot in the tri-state area. The grand stadium was filmed at Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey, where they had to build a massive wooden floor. “It’s not hard to do, but it’s just so massive,” Fisk recalls, “ I think we had 600 sheets of plywood. And then we built about 48 ping pong tables. So it was fun to work in that space, but it was so big. It was hard to light.”
London is also where Marty smugly argues his way into a hotel room at the Ritz and first encounters the elegant Kay Stone (Paltrow). While holding court with two British sports journalists and spewing insensitive comments about his opponents – Marty couldn’t care less about being politically correct – the men lose their focus when the retired actress ambles by. That pivotal scene was actually shot in New York’s Plaza Hotel. When we see Stone dining with her husband, Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) later in the hotel’s dining room, the cast and crew had relocated to the Columbus Citizens Foundation, also in the city.
Lawrence’s Table Tennis Club
We briefly see Marty enter Lawrence’s, a real table-tennis club where Reisman used to play, located on Broadway between 54th and 55th. The original building had been torn down, but by looking at tax records, Fisk was able to find photographs of the place. Safdie’s wife, Sarah Rossein, who was helping with research, was able to locate old blueprints of the building. “I found out that before it was a table tennis parlour, it was a miniature golf course,” he explains. Fisk was surprised to learn that there was mini golf on the second floor of a midtown building, but evidently, they had painted murals all along the walls of the floor to give it a countryside look. “And when they moved in to use it as a table tennis place, they just left all that. We found some film, black and white photos of Lawrence’s from the period, and we saw how the room was set up. And then we painted the murals, but I don’t think you really get to see it in the film because the place was vast.”
The Morosco Theatre
We see Kay Stone again stateside in the Morosco Theatre in Midtown’s Theatre District. She has returned to the stage and is rehearsing for a play with an actor she finds exasperating. Marty, watching from the wings, chimes in to give the actor some unsolicited advice. The real Morosco Theatre was demolished in March of 1982 in order to build the 50-story Marriott Marquis Hotel, much to the chagrin of a crowd of protestors and demonstrators, some of whom reportedly wept. It was nearly impossible to use a real Midtown theatre due to near-constant performances, so they filmed the interiors in a New Jersey theatre and then had just a few minutes outside a 42nd Street theatre to capture the scene of the exterior.
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