We all know the films. 42nd Street, Rear Window, King Kong, Dead End, Naked City, Ghostbusters, Annie Hall, Taxi Driver, Do the Right Thing are only a few of the better-known movies made about New York over the past century. They have entertained and excited us. But Celluloid Skyline proposes they are something more: an extraordinary urban resource, with profound lessons about the shape of cities. At one level, the hundreds of New York movies -- made in Hollywood studios and on the streets of the city itself -- can be seen as a filmed urban history, a record of the city's changing face from decade to decade. At the heart of Celluloid Skyline is the notion that the movies created their own New York, a mythic city based on the real one but possessed of a life of its own. After all, a great city is far more than a geographic or economic entity: it is a distinct locus of image and style, memory and dreams. Because the real New York possesses this "other" city as a dream version of itself, it holds a true claim to urban greatness, one shared by only a few places in history: London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Troy, Babylon, Ur. They were once called the "storied" or "fabled" cities.

Today we tell our fables with celluloid.

Sanders has been researching and writing Celluloid Skyline for more than a decade. His extensive research into the design and production of American films has led him to archives and private collections in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Paris,London, and Berlin, where he has located scores of rare and unusual images for the book, including production stills, location stills, art department sketches and models, frame enlargements, and views of standing sets, miniatures, scenic backings, process plates, optical and computer generated special effects, and other images that reveal how the "mythic city" of movie New York was created in the Hollywood studio and on the streets of the city itself.