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Posted on 02/02/2026 6:04:04 AM PST by Twotone
There's a fascinating anecdote in an oral history of Martin Scorsese's 1985 dark comedy After Hours. Griffin Dunne, who played the film's protagonist Paul Hackett, recalls the director's apartment in New York's Tribeca neighbourhood, where Scorsese "had devoted a room in his loft to maybe 15 VCRs that ran 24 hours a day. He would go through the TV Guide and circle the movies that an assistant had to record from television. Quite often he would hand me a VHS tape and go, 'Griffin, this is a noir movie that reminds me of the kind of tone I like for After Hours.'"
Many people who watch After Hours today marvel at the time capsule it presents of mid-80s New York in general and the SoHo area in particular. The city has been changed utterly, with SoHo far in the rear-view mirror of massive gentrification, which has since consumed the East Village, Alphabet City, the Lower East Side, Chelsea, Chinatown, Hell's Kitchen and much of Brooklyn, spreading north to Harlem and establishing beachheads in Queens and the Bronx. (Staten Island remains, apparently, stubbornly resistant.)
But this anecdote brings those of us old enough to remember back to a time before TCM, Tubi, Mubi, Plex and the Criterion Closet, to when Scorsese – a movie-mad cineaste long before he was a director – could go pro with what so many film nuts had been doing for just a few years: scanning the TV listings and painstakingly setting their VCRs to harvest whatever obscure films the networks' local affiliates and independent channels had used to plug holes in late night or weekend programming, an era when film scholarship was a cottage industry.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
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It’s a great movie. It was the first thing I thought of when I heard that Catherine O’Hara had passed.
Link appears to be wrong.
How did that happen?!
https://www.steynonline.com/15922/never-leave-the-house-martin-scorsese-after-hours
He played the brother who went to VietNam in This Is Us. His father was a celebrated New York writer, Dominick Dunne.
A very thoughtful and meticulously researched McGinnis review.
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