Unwelcome Film Crews Clog Brooklyn Streets
All around Brooklyn the movie business is booming—right into the streets. And the city is only pushing for more. Films provide “high quality jobs in an era when low-paying service jobs have become the norm,” the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting told the The Brooklyn Eagle.
And New York’s film industry has never been better. According to a report by Boston Consulting Group, the film scene spent $7 billion and employed some 130,0000 New Yorkers in 2011. Regardless of these booms some Brooklyn entrepreneurs are not happy.
In the beautiful Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO streets, especially, trucks have irked business owners. ‘If you only knew how difficult it is to do our job with all this filming,” said Andrea Demetropoulos, who owns a pet shop in Brooklyn Heights. Recently, a local florist couldn’t get his funeral arrangements out because the film trucks from two different shoots clogged the streets for blocks around the flower shop.
Among the stars bogging the streets recently was a bearded Russell Crowe who stalked the Brooklyn Heights shoot of Darren Aronofsky’s biblical antediluvian epic, Noah. Other shoots just in the last two weeks include, The Angriest Man in Brooklyn, Delivery Man, How to Be a Man (That’s a lot of man-titled films), and a dozen others, plus commercials and a New York Lottery bit.
It’s nice that the Mayor wants to help support so many young production peoples in our borough. But somebody needs to do something about these damn film trucks.
