Last week, Big A and I spent an afternoon together taking pictures. Well, Big A took pictures, and I posed for the pictures, wearing as much black as I possibly could and thinking photogenic thoughts. After shooting a roll on the street, we went up to the roof of an art gallery and shivered our way through another roll, and whenever Big A paused to fiddle with the light meter, I went to the edge and looked out at the skyline. From a rooftop, Manhattan seems quieter, more manageable, more stately. From above, the city looks like everything people who don’t live here believe about it: vast, imposing, full of potential.

Producers and set designers must see Manhattan that way too, because movies and TV shows set in New York City seldom bear even the faintest resemblance to life “at street level” in New York City. The rule has its exceptions: Seinfeld invariably nailed the vagaries of life in Manhattan even though they shot the show in Los Angeles; Scorsese’s films, for the most part; Law & Order, which shoots on location (okay, a few of the address pop-ups between scenes would put the detectives in the middle of the East River, but most of the time they get it right). Felicity does a decent job with the locations and with street activity, not to mention with representing NYU’s uncanny ability to lose eighty-five percent of the paperwork entrusted to it, regardless of department, but no way could an underclassman score a room as big as hers at NYU. My brother could sit in the middle of his freshman-year room, work on the computer, get a sweater from his chest of drawers, fetch a drink from the fridge, clean the bathroom, and answer the door, all without getting out of his chair.

The vast majority of movies and TV programs don’t seem to have the first idea of the way life in New York City works on a day-to-day level. I certainly don’t expect a letter-perfect translation of Manhattan living – these projects have budgets, after all – but if a production company can pay David Schwimmer umpteen hundred thousand dollars per episode of Friends, surely they can afford to pick up a phone, call a number in the 212 area code at random, and inquire into basic facts like, say, the price range of an unbelievably huge two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West side.

TV shows in particular have a problem grasping the essential nature of Manhattan real estate. According to television, an aspiring twentysomething who moves to New York on a whim to pursue her dream of, um, living in New York will, after only two or three days of looking, find a cozy pad in a hip neighborhood, and her on-again-off-again coffee-barista gig will pay the rent and leave enough over for lots of nifty clothes and twee barrettes. Yeah, right. Let’s start with the so-called “availability” of said apartments, shall we? The government has broadly defined a state of “housing emergency” as a five-percent-or-lower vacancy rate among all housing units. New York City has a two-percent vacancy rate. Two. Percent. Even if our aspiring twentysomething has a decent amount of money to spend – more on the extreme improbability of that in a moment – it will take her at least a month to find a decent apartment. Furthermore, “decent” does not in any way, shape, or form mean “the loft the kids from Real World NY lived in.” “Decent” means “not horrible.” “Decent” means “the bathtub is in the kitchen, but at least I have hot water.” “Decent” means “I will do what I have to do to get out of my parents’ house in Ronkonkoma, up to and including sleeping Navy-hammock-style with seven other girls, in a one-bedroom apartment, on the seventh floor of a building with no elevator, and waiting until I get to work to brush my teeth, because I can’t keep toothpaste at home or the roaches will feed on it.” Think I exaggerate? Think again. Unless the twentysomething has a law degree, or pulls down a fat investment-banking bonus, or marries a guy four times her age and kills him in his sleep, or robs a bank, she will have to learn to live without little luxuries like light, level flooring, storage space, or privacy, and she will have to pay nearly half her monthly income for the privilege. Yes, a low-level buyer for Bloomingdale’s and a caterer just starting out on her own could conceivably afford a space as large as the one Rachel and Monica share on Friends – in Red Hook, Brooklyn, maybe, with two other roommates, and they should add a Rottweiler to the mix too because I wouldn’t walk through Red Hook at night on a bet.

(Nobody on television ever talks about real estate either, and in real life New Yorkers can barely get through a conversation without talking about it – how much they pay, how much their broker stinks, how long they stood out in the cold waiting for the Village Voice drop-off so they could get first crack at the apartment listings, how often they’ve had to withhold their rent before the super showed up to fix the faucets, on and on and on. And everyone has at least one horror story, too. Plaster showering down from the ceiling. Ants. Roommates stealing food, spending the electricity-bill money on drugs, or outright disappearing. Neighbors urinating in the stairwell. Dead bodies in the airshaft. All of these things have happened to people I know, and people I know have found apartments via the obituary column, but real estate never merits a mention on television, oh, no. On television, characters shake their heads ruefully and quip, “Only in New York.” Find me anyone, anyone at all, on this island who has ever said that out loud. Go ahead. I dare you. Then again, on television, a cartoonist can live in a duplex with a kitchen island and a view of the Brooklyn Bridge. Yeah. I’m. So. Sure.)

And speaking of Caroline In The City – and no, I’d really rather not either – TV and movie producers could stand to do a bit more research in the wardrobe-and-hair department. (Listen up, Kevin Williamson, because grad students don’t wear lavender twin sets, and believe me when I tell you, you need the help.) No chambray, no Keds, no oversized-sweater-and-leggings ensembles. One word: black. Black, black, black. We wear other colors – they don’t issue a uniform with the voter’s registration card or anything – but characters portraying grad students, artists, writers, singer-songwriters, ad execs, agents, lit-folk, music scenesters, or Silicon Alleyites need to wear black. Lots of it. And sunglasses. And messenger bags. And tattoos.

I notice that directors and wardrobe masters don’t bother dressing the extras in black either. I wonder why not? Oh, right – because there aren’t any extras in this scene, even though it takes place outside, on the sidewalk, in midtown, during the lunch hour. Yeah, I wish. By nine o’clock on a weekday morning, I have brushed up against, bumped into, jostled, collided with, and otherwise invaded the personal space of at least a hundred other people, none of whom I know even by sight, and yet two characters in a movie can stroll down Fifth Avenue eating ice cream at rush hour and not see another soul. One-and-a-half million people live in Manhattan; during the day, the population swells to more like four or five million. Four or five million people, and the assistant director can’t scare up two or three dozen suitably scruffy types to mill around while the actors run dialogue? I’ve never understood why the AD closes the block to foot traffic, because it just pisses off the natives, and besides, a shot without a bunch of people zipping around in it doesn’t look like New York. Neither does a shot without pretzel vendors, or at least a little woman in a chador selling roses out of a shopping cart, but no, the AD kicked them all out of the nabe too. I can see that clearing the set makes the shot easier to supervise, but it also makes the shot look like Silver City. (The corollary: characters in New York movies and TV shows always “run into” other characters they know – fanciful, and probably necessary for plot development, but highly unlikely. Remember, four or five million people, most of them in transit from one place to another. My best friend and I lived four blocks apart for three years. We ran into each other by accident only once. Did this happen in our neighborhood? No.) And for heaven’s sake, pick up the pace. Anyone wandering unhurriedly through Manhattan might as well have the word “Milwaukee” written on his forehead in laundry marker. Even if we don’t have a place to be, we walk fast, so tell the guy pulling the dolly-cam to get it in gear.

I don’t hear a lot of noise in most New York-based movies and programs, either. In Law & Order, yes, and in Taxi Driver, but in most of them, the characters’ unrealistically fabulous apartments must also reside roughly seventy stories up, because seldom does the omnipresent sound of sirens pierce their lavishly over-decorated sanctuaries. I live in a loud neighborhood, but even in quieter, more residential spots, the ambient noise – horns honking, gears shifting, bass thumping, dogs barking, air-conditioner exhaust fans whirring, a million and a half people getting on with the business of living – is constant. In movies and on TV, we almost never hear it.

We almost never see people smoking, either. Over the last ten years, film and TV have started using smoking as a simplistic shorthand for depravity and evil, but regardless of your feelings about smoking, you can’t walk five steps in the city without spotting a smoker. Ashtrays sit in front of every single office building, and every single ashtray positively bristles with stubbed-out butts. New Yorkers smoke, a lot, everywhere, and if I’ve seen one bar scene shot through sparklingly clear air in a so-called “Village dive,” I’ve seen a hundred, and not one of them rings true. Oh, and memo to Hollywood: women can tend bar. In fact, in seven out of ten bars, they do, so send the beefy forty-year-old with the brush cut back to central casting, okay?

And for the love of Pete, I beg of you, if you have a scene in which a character steps from the curb and says, in a normal, non-shouting voice, “Taxi,” and a cab actually stops to pick up said character, cut it, because this never happens. It has never happened, and it will never happen, because, contrary to Hollywood’s evident belief, a conversational tone does not carry over the din of honking and sirens and Radio Free Haiti, through the closed windows of the cab, and into the ear of a driver who has just shot past you at thirty miles an hour, so go back to that page and write in a stage direction for the character to raise his or her right hand like everyone else who actually lives here.

One more thing. The Empire State Building? Not fluid. Not in motion. Not capable of magically appearing outside the window of EVERY DAMN APARTMENT IN NEW YORK. Basic physics. Figure. It. OUT.

Rachel and Monica need this.
He wouldn’t stop, either.

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