Next Stop, Greenwich Village | |
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Directed by | Paul Mazursky |
Produced by |
Paul Mazursky Anthony Ray |
Written by | Paul Mazursky |
Starring |
Lenny Baker Shelley Winters Ellen Greene Lois Smith Christopher Walken |
Music by |
Bill Conti Dave Brubeck Quartet |
Cinematography | Arthur J. Ornitz |
Edited by | Richard Halsey |
Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
Release date
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Running time
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111 min. |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Box office | $1,060,000 (US/ Canada) |
Next Stop, Greenwich Village is a 1976 drama film, set in the early 1950s, written and directed by Paul Mazursky, featuring, amongst others, Lenny Baker, Shelley Winters, Ellen Greene, Lois Smith, and Christopher Walken. The film was generally well received by critics. Film review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a "fresh" score of 80% based on 10 reviews. Filmmaker Mazursky had made his acting debut in Stanley Kubrick's 1953 film Fear and Desire (shot in New York) and Next Stop, Greenwich Village is a semiautobiographical account of Mazursky's early life as an actor in that city. The film was entered into the 1976 Cannes Film Festival. This film is also notable for being Bill Murray's first film, although Murray has but a few seconds of screen time and no lines. Jeff Goldblum and Christopher Walken (credited as Chris Walken) also appear for the first time in this film.
The film takes place in 1953. Larry Lipinsky is a young Jewish boy from Jewish enclave Brownsville Brooklyn, New York, who has dreams of stardom. He moves to Greenwich Village, much to the chagrin of his extremely overprotective mother. Larry ends up hanging out with an eccentric bunch of characters while waiting for his big break. He has a group of tight-knit friends, which includes a wacky girl named Connie; Anita, an emotionally distraught young woman who constantly contemplates suicide; Robert, a young WASP who fancies himself a poet; and Bernstein, a gay man. All the while, he tries to maintain a stormy relationship with Sarah, his girlfriend. This band of outsiders becomes Larry's new family as he struggles as an actor and works toward a break in Hollywood.