18 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
for emphasis—a heavy smack on a desk,”
Norton said. He had Baldwin do this in
“Motherless Brooklyn.”
For Moses Randolph’s office, the
filmmakers chose the panelled grandeur
of the library at the New York Acad-
emy of Medicine, across the bridge, on
Fifth Avenue. It has big arched win-
dows similar to those on the front of
the T.B.T.A. building. Continuity! Using
computer graphics, the filmmakers filled
those windows, onscreen, with a vista
of the suspension bridge to Queens, the
most majestic of the Triborough’s three
spans. Impossible! This view from the
T.B.T.A. building does not exist; Mo-
ses’s office had, in fact, looked out onto
the less picturesque Triborough toll
plaza. “We wanted a more cinematic
sense of the seat of power,” Norton said.
A production designer painted some
W.P.A.-like murals to cover the Acad-
emy library’s walls of medical books.
Like a lot of movies shot in the city,
Norton’s film is an intriguing puzzle of
locations and camouflaged anachronisms.
The old Penn Station is rendered en-
tirely with computer imagery. For the
old toll booth on the Triborough, the
filmmakers shot the existing one at Jones
Beach, on the Meadowbrook Parkway
(a Moses road, as it happens), and grafted
it onto a scene staged on the bridge today.
The pool where Randolph does laps (as
the parks commissioner, Moses, an avid
swimmer, had access to all the pools in
town, though he preferred private ones
or the ocean) is a remarkably unaltered
pool in Harlem, but its lavish exterior is
actually that of the Asser Levy Recre-
ation Center, on East Twenty-third
Street, a legacy of the settlement-house
movement, which Moses’s mother had
supported and whose ideals Moses him-
self, with his decimation of entire neigh-
borhoods and his promotion of the au-
tomobile, eventually forsook.
Norton’s grandfather James Rouse
was a progressive urban planner, whose
ideas about cities were in sharp oppo-
sition with Moses’s. “My granddad met
Moses in the sixties,” Norton said. “He
told my uncle that he was the most dan-
gerous man in America.” Norton said
this in such a way that the notion seemed
both credible and quaint.
—Nick Paumgarten
1
DEPT.OFP’SANDQ’S
THERULESL
et’s say you’re Rihanna, and let’s say,
last month, you were at a preview
of “Slave Play,” the edgy comedy about
race. Is it O.K.—since, after all, you’re
a superstar—to take out your phone and
text during the performance? Does it
make it less rude if the recipient of your
texts is Jeremy O. Harris, the playwright
of the play in question? Sadie Marko-
witz, a nine-year-old from Pleasantville,
New York, took time off from doing her
English homework the other night to
weigh in on this matter over the phone.
“Just because she’s a huge celebrity, it’s
still definitely wrong,” Sadie said. “It’s
disturbing to all the people around her
and disrespectful to the actors onstage.”
Sadie is the unlikely new Emily Post
of the theatre community. In June, just
before leaving for sleepaway camp, she
put Magic Marker to paper and laid out
what she calls her Broadway Rules, and
the manifesto made the rounds. Her ten
do’s and don’ts include some items that
seem obvious (“Stay in seat until inter-
mission,” “Listen to the Ushers”) as well
as a few that rarely make it into eti-
quette primers (“NEVER sing along,”
“No ‘gas passing.’ ”)
“Uncle Seth was going to take my
little sister, Isabel, to see ‘Frozen,’ ” Sadie
said recently, over lunch at John’s Piz-
zeria with her mother and Seth Frad-koff, who is an old family friend. “It was
my sister’s first Broadway show, so, be-
fore I left for camp, I had to give her a
few tips on how to behave.” Fradkoff
had taken Sadie to her first show, “Alad-
din,” when she was five. During that
outing, she repeatedly broke one of the
rules that she would later codify: “It was
the rule that there is no kicking the seat
in front of you,” she said.
Sadie, finishing her pizza, was about
to see her seventh Broadway show, “The
Prom.” As she sipped a Shirley Temple,
standing up so that she could reach the
straw, Fradkoff, a movie publicist, ex-
plained that he’d posted Sadie’s rules on
Twitter while she was at camp, and that
the list soon became, if not viral, at least
as contagious as a cough in the mezza-
nine. In a retweet, Bebe Neuwirth called
it “genius.” Donna Murphy urged, “Sadie!
Preach & teach!!” The critic Terry
Teachout called it “a MAJOR contri-
bution to Broadway civility. It should be
printed up as a flyer and distributed at
all shows!” There was talk of Sadie join-
ing him and his fellow theatre writers
Peter Marks and Elisabeth Vincentelli
on their podcast, “Three on the Aisle.”
What does it feel like to find out from
your mother, on the drive home from
camp, that you’re famous? “It was em-
barrassing for me at first, because I’m just
a little girl, and sometimes I get speech-
less about things,” she said. “But after
Mommy showed me a bit online and I
thought about it, I got really excited.” Is
she interested in a career on Broadway?
“I’d rather be a culinary chemist,” she
said. “I actually learned how to make mo-
lecular spaghetti from a book I have.”
A topic not covered in the rules is
attire. “Usually, I like to wear fancy stuff
like this,” she said, gesturing to her flow-
ered dress and gold sandals. “Also, when-
ever I am wearing a dress, I use cart-
wheel shorts to cover up my undies.”
She lifted her hem to reveal black elas-
tic shorts. “You should always dress ap-
propriately,” she said. “For instance, you
should definitely not go to a show in a
Captain Underpants T-shirt.”
Walking to the theatre, she contin-
ued the tutorial. What to do if some-
one breaks a rule? “Most people would
get out of their seats and quietly talk to
the ushers about it,” she said. She told
a story about how once, when her Uncle
Seth was seeing “Tootsie,” a womanEdward Norton