From the 40th Anniversary Book

Here's an entertaining website about creating entertainment in New York City. "Celebrating 40 years of filming in New York City" is an interactive map.

Click on dots on the map, and a balloon will pop up with information about what moviemakers shot there. The site comes from the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, which began operations in 1966.

The site doesn't include television shows, so there are no dots for the locations of the many Law and Order and CSI and Sex and the City episodes filmed all over. That's why it doesn't include a dot, for instance, for a parking lot in East River Park, where a couple of years ago I saw a cabbie lying headfirst halfway out of the driver's side door, covered with blood and dead, at least until a break in the filming, when he got up and had a smoke. Just a typical day for Law and Order.

Some of the locations for Lower-East-Side filming the site does feature include:

Smithereens, 1982
When Harry Met Sally, 1989 (of course, the famous scene from Katz's Deli)
My Dinner with Andre, 1991
Basquiat, 1996
Chasing Amy, 1997
Crossing Delancey, 1998
Batteries Not Included, 1987
Pieces of April, 2003
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004

There is no location dot for Pi, the truly strange and wonderful Lower East Side-based movie from 1998 about a paranoid mathematician and the Kabbalah. It was clearly filmed with handheld cameras, given the jittery black and white images. I bet they didn't have permits from the Mayor's office to film, which is why it wouldn't show up on an interactive map.