Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
With Hollywood Going Ape these days, we're monkey-ing around and offering 20% Off the ENTIRE Sci-Fi Collection!
Ending May 13th, 2024
And we're so excited about film & criticism:
MZS had 14 pieces published in the last 14 days in NY Magazine, Vulture.com, Ebert.com w/ articles coming For D Magazine & Texas Highways
April 21-April 23 2024 20% off History & Criticism Collection!
Los Angeles will always be the city of angels and the city of dreams. But New York is the city of mean streets, the sweet smell of success, the summer of sam, the midnight cowboy, the taxi driver, the pickup on south street, and the 25th hour, among so many other classics. New York always wins. It's the Naked City, with eight million stories, and it never, ever sleeps. Moviemaking as an industry began on the East coast of the United States but soon migrated to Southern California where the weather was nicer, the real estate was cheaper, and producers could manufacture almost any fantastic vision they liked. But mentally, spiritually and often geographically, filmmakers never stopped drifting back east, because New York City was always the greatest set of them all. It was real. It felt real, even when it was photographed to evoke a dream or nightmare. When the Avengers assembled, they didn't do it in Los Angeles. When Godzilla finally surfaced in the US, he didn't go to Houston. Geddafuggouddahere.
Film critic, entertainment journalist and biographer Jason Bailey takes viewers on an adrenaline-jacked tour of New York time and space, onscreen and off, in Fun City Cinema: New York and the Movies that Made It. As the title confirms, this is not merely a list of movies that happen to be set in New York, or that used New York for one reason or another. It's about New York City as a birthplace to, and dream prompt for, innumerable classic works. Some were physically produced elsewhere (like the indelible last act of King Kong, all versions), but the vast majority were shot on location. The waxing and waning attraction between Hollywood talent and New York production deals (and soundstages) constitutes a major part of Bailey's story. And he plays close attention to how different New York City mayors (movies stars in their own rights, some of them clowns or antiheroes) played a role in shaping the character of the movies shot during their time in office.
Lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed and laid out, featuring a foreword by film and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz, Fun City Cinema is a classic work of film scholarship,—a swaggering, ambitious, brilliant, dirty, powerfully visceral experience, like New York itself.
MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.
Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The store's inventory of nearly 1000 volumes is currently in the process of being reconstructed after its relocation from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Dallas, Texas. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz, Carter, and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."
“Since MZS is the brains behind the brand and concept, I guess that makes me the brawn. Even though my 'gun show' looks more like a water pistol exhibit in a toy store window...”
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; a staff writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.
Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets such as Texas Highways and AARP. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.
Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, and The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. He is currently launching a Dallas extension of his MZS Film Series at the historic Texas Theater.
Judith is quoted as saying "his hobbies include exotic dancing, moonwalking, and affixing masking tape labels to every food item in the refrigerator, including eggs. Oh and he has the attention span of a gnat." MZS agreed to it all except the moonwalking.