Please Like Me

RSS Archive

Hello, my name is Liz Belsky. I live in New York City, where I'm studying TV/Radio and attempting to do something cool with my life. This is my blog where I sometimes post musings about ladies' issues, general interest ramblings, and scholarly analyses of comedy and TV in general, but more frequently I post photos of my fingernails and of my face.

If you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, you can email me at eabelsky@gmail.com.

My Twitter is @lizbelsky and so is my Instagram handle.

Ask me anything

April 23, 2012

oldhollywood:

1930s imagining of 1980s New York in the sci-fi musical Just Imagine (1930, dir. David Butler) (via)

Designed by art director Stephen Goosson, the city set was an elaborate miniature model that covered a ground area of 75 x 225 feet and whose tallest tower measured 40 feet.

Just Imagine’s New York was primarily inspired by architect Harvey Corbett’s prediction that 1970’s New York would resemble a “very modernized Venice” and by the futuristic urban designs presented in Hugh Ferriss’s 1929 book, The Metropolis of Tomorrow.

Ferriss’s drawings of the ”business center of the future” (pictures #3-5) provided the most direct inspiration for Goosson’s sets. Broad superhighways establish a geometric ground plan that extends upward through overlapping levels of bridges, streets, and terraced walkways. The grid of streets and bridges is pierced by huge freestanding skyscrapers surrounded by lower setback buildings.

The opening scenes of the film, which feature this cityscape, can be seen here.

More on the building of the Just Imagine set. Collection of Hugh Ferriss’s futuristic city sketches here.