Cinematic Immunity: An Oral History of New York Filmmaking as Told by the Crews That Got the Shot

The unbelievable insider stories of how they 'got the shot'!

Cinematic Immunity tells the story of New York City's movie industry from the crew members who created the sets, lit the scenes, and shot the film. Focused on the golden age (1950-1990) of New York filmmaking, Cinematic Immunity covers On the Waterfront through The Sopranos.

The East Coast film industry, thousands of miles from the Los Angeles executives, existed by its own rules and with little oversight. It was a close-knit and freewheeling community of movie technicians that took on the most outrageous challenges to get every shot perfect. Behind-the-scenes documentaries and books feature "above the line" talent--actors, producers, directors, and writers. For the first time, readers will hear the unvarnished truth of the New York movie industry--tales about union politics, labor strikes, movie families, dangerous locations, difficult shots, volatile directors, anecdotes about actors, pranks, friendships, rivalries, generational shifts, substance use and abuse, technical feats, and more.

Readers will hear never heard before stories about classic (and not so classic) films and television shows including: Midnight Cowboy, The Warriors, The French Connection, The Exorcist, The Godfather, The Wiz, The Taking of Pelham 123, Annie Hall, Cruising, Do The Right Thing, When Harry Met Sally, Home Alone 2, The Sopranos, and Law and Order.

Expect to discover secrets about how your favorite scenes were shot and the outrageous characters with outsized talents whose personalities sometimes dwarfed actors and directors. Tales of their exploits, what they saw (and did) on these sets was previously only passed among themselves as showbiz lore but now, readers learn of Marlon Brando's pranks on the set of The Godfather, how crews kept William Friedkin from killing them, the actors, and himself, and how consummate New Yorker Sidney Lumet was the angel to Friedkin's demons.

Author Michael Lee Nirenberg has worked as a scenic artist in New York since 2006, and in many cases, alongside many of the people featured in the book. This book is a labor of love comprised of over 150 interviews and hundreds of hours of recordings. Cinematic Immunity includes hundreds of behind-the-scenes images from studio archives and from the technicians who were there.

"Cinematic Immunity chronicles the wild behind
the scenes tales from the legendary films made in dirty old New York... but told
from an entirely new perspective. Not the usual stars, directors and
publicists but from the people who did all the work and can actually tell the
truth - the below the line crews who know where all the bodies are
buried! Fascinating, funny and impossible to put down." -- Larry
Karaszewski, Academy Award winning screenwriter, Ed Wood, Dolemite,
Big Eyes.
"Michael Nirenberg's writing about film is as funny, incisive, gritty, and thrilling as the films whose lore he is diving into. He knows where to get the real scoop, the stories too good to be true, and gives them to us with all the wit, wisdom, and insanity we could hope for." Lena Dunham
"Cinematic Immunity addresses filmmaking and all the
resulting lore borne out of it in a book that flips our perception of who
cinema's true "insiders" actually are. Excavating a secret history of the last
50 years in movies via interviews with the crews that made them, Nirenberg
presents a book that is riotously fun, full of gossip, and worthy of any
world-class cinema studies program." Alissa Bennett, Writer and Director of the Gladstone
Gallery

"They tell some great stories. The appearance of
light-weight Arriflex cameras having made location shooting
possible, these NY crews were thrown into diabolically dirty and dangerous
and polluted locations where no film was ever shot before... A film could
not be shot that way today. It shouldn't. And yet Pelham 123 remains a
very good film." -- Alex Cox, director, Repo Man, Dead Souls, Walker, and
actor, An Unknown Enemy.
"In amassing these superb, often eye-popping accounts of the
Golden Age of New York film, Michael Nirenberg has dug deep under the skin of a
scene that was as gritty, inventive and character-filled as the city itself.
Cinematic Immunity contains some rollicking stories - camera crews on the
tracks dodging subway trains, Albert Finney betting on camel racing, a wild car
ride with James Gandolfini - but the shared thread is a burning passion for the
craft of filmmaking, even if the realities of this work were rarely as
glamorous as the end product seen on screen." -- Oliver Milman, Staff writer, The
Guardian "This book is a dream! Nirenberg gives us the real, juicy,
behind-the-scenes lore from all the best movies that New York City gave birth
to in the second half of the twentieth century, straight from the mouths
of the people who actually made them happen. Fantastic." -- Naomi Fry, Staff writer, The New Yorker
"Michael Nirenberg dresses like a drug dealer - trenchcoat,
sunglasses indoors - and his Cinematic Immunity is pure, uncut dope for
cinephiles, full of real drugs and fake blood. It's equally entertaining
documenting established classics (The Exorcist, Do The Right Thing)
and forgotten curios (Izzy & Moe). Reading it made me want to make a
movie, score some drugs, and buy a time machine." -- Matthew Danger Lippman,
musician and actor.
"Michael Lee Nirenberg makes art from the everyday. Expanding
his decades of years and deep well of connections, he's assembled the definitive
history of New York films and those who make them, w

Author: Michael Lee Nirenberg
Publisher: Feral House
Published: 04/07/2026
Pages: 488
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.76lbs
Size: 9.90h x 6.90w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781627311717

About the Author

Cinematic Immunity is by filmmaker, writer, and artist Michael Lee Nirenberg. His first book Earth A.D.: The Poisoning of the American Landscape and the Communities That Fought Back was released in July 2020. He has directed several music videos and the award-winning documentary Back Issues: The Hustler Magazine Story (2014). His second feature documentary The Carpenter is slated for 2026. Mr. Nirenberg has contributed to national magazines and websites. Since 2006, he has worked as a scenic artist in IATSE local 829 on many, many movies and television shows. He lives in New York with his wife and two kids.