New York has had its heart broken by Hollywood before.
By Julia Vitullo-Martin, Untapped New York, September 4, 2024
New York has had its heart broken by Hollywood before. Absolutely quintessential New York shows like Burns & Allen upped and moved to Los Angeles in the 1950s and, worse, New York-set shows like I Love Lucy pretended to be filmed in New York, when they were in fact filmed in Hollywood—at Lucy’s Desilu Studios in this case. The Dick Van Dyke Show was also filmed at Desilu, with Van Dyke playing a television comedy writer who worked in Midtown and lived in New Rochelle. New York is a central part of iconic sitcoms like Friends and Seinfeld, but while establishing shots were collected here, most of the action was shot on the West Coast. All those jobs and tax dollars going to California, not New York. Yet another LA betrayal on top of the Dodgers’ exodus from Brooklyn.
Thus those of us living in the Arconia probably shouldn’t have been shocked—but we were—when Hulu announced that Only Murders in the Building (OMITB) would be moving to LA. How could you have Only Murders in the Building without the Building? The titular building is a pre-war Upper West Side building called The Belnord at 225 West 86th Street. John Hoffman, co-creator of OMITB, had called it “its own central compelling character.”
So they’re abandoning their compelling character? An acquaintance associated with the series said, “Listen, your building is expensive.”
Well, it’s New York. What isn’t?
Negotiations between Hulu and the building apparently stalled, then halted, then happily started up again in late winter with a gentlemanly resolution. Crucial scenes for the newly released fourth season, especially a star-studded wedding and the discovery of yet another corpse, were filmed in The Belnord courtyard, as in previous seasons.
Still, the first episode of Season 4, “Once Upon a Time in the West,” is mainly set in LA. In the show, Paramount Pictures invites the central trio—Oliver (Martin Short), Charles (Steve Martin), and Mabel (Selena Gomez)—out west to adapt the OMITB podcast into a movie. As Oliver says, somewhat callously, “The best coast is calling all of us. Pack your bags, bitches. We’re going to Hollywood!”
The Best Coast
New York is theater. LA is movies. On hearing about the Hollywood offer Oliver, like countless treacherous New Yorkers before him, jumps up and says, “Paramount? The Pictures? Yes! I’m back, baby. Fuck the theater.”
Perhaps one can’t blame Oliver. After all, his Broadway show failed miserably and Loretta (Meryl Streep), his “sexy, successful girlfriend,” headed to Hollywood for a television contract.
And what a whimsical Los Angeles the trio sees when they arrive, what the London Timescalls “a Hollywood love-in.” The crew first meanders on the Paramount lot along an imaginary New York set of slums and brownstones where yet another Godzilla is being filmed (“That lizard gets a lot of work,” says Charles). They then head to a ruthless pre-production meeting with studio executives (Molly Shannon!), followed by a stretch-limo trip down Sunset Boulevard while Irene Kral sings, “Well, I’m goin’ to California, to stay in New York gotta be right out your mind.” At an ultra-glam launch party in their honor, high above the Hollywood hills, the trio meets the three stars who will play them in the movie: Eva Longoria (Mabel), Eugene Levy (Charles), and Zach Galifianakis (Oliver). This encounter is not a love fest, and our trio seethed over Paramount’s descriptions: Mabel as a “jobless, homeless, mumbling millennial,” Charles as the “un-fun uncle,” and Oliver as someone you want to cuddle and strangle.
By the end of the episode, Charles, Mabel, and Oliver learn that Charles’s body double, Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch), has been murdered. This mystery pulls the gang back to the comforts of New York, leaving behind what the LA Times calls “the vapidness of Los Angeles.”
Weirdos. Loners. Renters.
Once home, they realize that Sazz was shot through a window in Charles’s apartment. This means she was killed by a fellow Arconia resident shooting from across the courtyard. Looking out Charles’s bullet-hole-marred window, they speculate on the sociological realities of their building and conclude that the shot came from what they call the West Tower.
In a distinctly non-PC outburst, Charles denounces the West Tower residents as “Weirdos, Losers,” and Oliver spits out “Renters!” “You don’t have to say it like that,” reprimands Charles. “Yeah, Boomer,” says Mabel, “Not everyone was born when you could buy an apartment for a bag of beans. I’d kill to rent anything.”
Getting down to business, Oliver hits his iPhone for record and says, “All right, Charles, tell us about the Westies and why they might, for argument’s sake, want you dead.” (In real New York life, the Westies were a violent Irish street gang based in Hell’s Kitchen.)
While discussing their neighbors and pointing to their apartments, the trio is staring at what is actually the Eastern side of the building, assuming we take seriously OMITB’s opening credits (which I love). Produced by Elastic, the same firm that did the brilliant opening titles for Game of Thrones, the credits show an amusing cartoon of the actual Belnord facade on 86th Street.
In the opening credits, the camera moves up from the sidewalk, revealing Charles’s apartment directly above the archway, then right and one floor up for Oliver’s, and back to the left for Mabel’s. All three apartments face 86th Street according to this visualization. All three may well be “floor throughs,” meaning the apartments encompass an entire floor to the courtyard. Thus when they are looking out Charles’s window, the cast is on the south or 86th Street side of the Arconia. They would have to be on the northern, or 87th Street side, to look out a window to the west. Does it matter? We don’t know yet.
What does seem to matter though is the coming class warfare. The murderer lives in the West Tower, a separate section for lower-income residents. This dramatized tension harkens back to a contentious real-life debate in subsidized apartments on Riverside Drive when Extell Development Corporation—a previous owner of the building—was accused of building a separate entrance for poor people living in subsidized apartments. A neighborhood newspaper, The West Side Rag, provocatively dubbed this a “poor door,” meaning a separate entrance for poor people in an apartment building or multi-unit development.
Still, the use of “tower” is odd. Nothing previously in OMITB, much less in real life, indicates that the Arconia has towers. What the Arconia does have are wings. It’s a classic courtyard building with six internal entrances beneath elegant awnings. No Upper West Side courtyard building has towers. You might say that towers and courtyards are virtual trade-offs in the real estate world. Two classical Upper West Side buildings on Central Park West—the San Remo and the El Dorado—have towers, but neither has a courtyard.
When Mable and Oliver (two Arconia “Easties”) go to “sniff around before the cops come,” they realize they need to go to their ground floor and walk around the block to get to the West Tower which, says Oliver, was sealed off when a Westie opened a brothel. Heaven knows where this is going.
But first, they encounter a poster, put up by their fellow Easties, saying: “Building meeting tonight. Keep our home from being overrun by a Hollywood movie shoot.” This incident is not far from the reality of what happened when Hulu/Disney first approached The Belnord about shooting a movie.
Will Charles, Mabel, and Oliver return to LA? Will they solve Sazz’s murder? Will there be more East vs West drama in the Arconia? Only two episodes of the new season have been released on Hulu so far. Future episodes will air weekly on Tuesdays. Stay tuned for more coverage of Only Murders in the Building, including our film locations round-up!
Escape from “Only Murders in the Building”
For viewers wanting to get into the action of the show, there is a new interactive game in town from Hulu and the Escape Game. At 295 Madison Avenue, try your luck navigating hidden bookcase doorways, secret passages, and immersive elements that reflect key aspects of the show’s storylines. You’ll be following your favorite characters as they struggle to solve the most recent murder. Learn more and book your tickets here.
