‘Pretend It’s a City’ Trailer: Martin Scorsese’s Surprise Fran Lebowitz Doc Heads to Netflix

Where is Scorsese’s SCTV doc?

She seriously is a creature who could only live in New York.

Well, I can see why she is [bold]behind[/bold] the camera.

She is the reincarnation of Dorothy Parker.

I'm looking forward to this. I love Fran and hope she sticks around for a long time, but she's 70 and still smokes like a chimney.

A LONG TALK

Fran Lebowitz vs. the World Talking (on a landline) with the star of Martin Scorsese’s cranky, necessary love letter to New York, Pretend It’s a City.

I've always wondered how Fran manages to live such a lavish lifestyle. She doesn't come from money and her income is mostly from speaking fees, (which certainly can't be in the Obama/Clinton range) yet she seems to want for nothing, her clothes are custom made on Savile Row in London and she lives in the Chelsea Merchantile building. That takes some serious money.

When I heard about this I didn't have very charitable thoughts:

- Do we really need another series about New York and New Yorkers going on about how great their city is?

- Fran Lebowitz? Oh, I saw her once on Bill Maher, she seemed awfully full of herself.

- Martin Scorsese just makes films about horrible people you don't want to spend any time with.

But I was bored last weekend and put on an episode, thinking that they were only short so I wouldn't have to waste too much time if I hated it. Ended up watching the entire thing and enjoying it! So my preconceived notions were very wrong, I'm happy to say.

I enjoyed that it was through Lebowitz's perspective, because it wasn't a lame "love letter to New York" as it was described as, it really was just her honest feelings about the city that she obviously loves and wouldn't want to live anywhere else - but she's totally honest about all the failings she sees too. And funny about it. And it wasn't even all about New York anyway, it was much broader. And when she spoke of her past there it got me interested to know more about the old New York.

And what I had taken for smugness in a brief interview I had seen of her years ago, I now see more like her trying to bring people into the joke with her, smiling and inviting them in, if that makes sense. She's a curmudgeon, but really entertaining too. In the beginning I couldn't understand why Scorsese was laughing at everything she was saying, but over the episodes I got into the rhythm of her humour too, and found myself laughing.

And Scorsese seems sweet. I dunno, I am glad my preconceptions were proven wrong.

Oh, and one part I loved was how she ran rings around Spike Lee so effortlessly with their discussion on sport. He sounded like he had no real argument and was just trying to pull a few "gotchas" on her and she just casually responded to everything and held her position. I got a kick out of that. Lee came across like one of those people who says things like: "Oh you can't prove there isn't a God, so there IS a God" type people when it came to his arguments on sport. Not very convincing.