Fin: The AMC Fashion District lives!

Plus: "You cut it," the (possible) death of Film TikTok, you must remember Frank Capra and remembering Bob Uecker.

(Note: I started working on this newsletter before the news of the passing of David Lynch. I’m not prepared at the moment to share my full thoughts about this filmmaker who meant so much to me, so look for those in Monday’s newsletter.)

The most contentious political fight in Philadelphia over the past three years — more than crime, more than any NIMBY/YIMBY war, and more even than the mayoral election — has been over whether or not 76 Place would be built.

76 Place was a proposal to build a new basketball arena for the Philadelphia 76ers on Market Street, East of City Hall, in an area that has struggled for decades. A couple of blocks away, there’s something called “The Disney Hole,” where a never-realized Disney mega-project was to be built in the late ‘90s, but has been a parking lot ever since.

The arena project was also adjacent to the Chinatown neighborhood, which led the opposition to the project.

Philadelphia’s stadiums and arenas are all located in the Sports Complex in South Philadelphia, amid a giant parking lot, which makes it easy to tailgate, but much harder to find restaurants and bars to go to before and after the game. Philly has never had a sports venue right in the middle of the downtown area (known as Center City), with the new arena set to become the first.

After years of debates, contentious town hall meetings, and protests, Philadelphia’s City Council approved the 76 Place project in December, indicating that it was a done deal.

But then, last weekend… word suddenly broke that 76 Place was off, and in fact, the Sixers would team up with the Comcast-owned Philadelphia Flyers to build a new arena for both teams at an undetermined location in South Philly. Comcast — which owns the Flyers, the Wells Fargo Center, and used to own the Sixers and had fought the creation of a rival arena tooth-and-nail — will also team up with the Sixers owners to push some type of “investment” in the Market East area where the arena was to go.

I’ll believe that when I see it…

Speaking of The Gallery, that’s the famed, long-declining mall on Market East; it’s where the Fresh Prince’s mom took him to get clothes in “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” The Gallery was “revitalized” a few years back as the Fashion District and included among the offerings was the AMC Fashion District 8 movie theater, which was the first multiplex to open in Center City since the turn of the millennium.

Just a few months after the Fashion District opened, COVID shut it again, and the development never really recovered. Pretty much every time I’ve ever been there for a movie, the mall has been dead everywhere except for the theater.

When the 76 Place plan was in place, the arena was set to replace the Fashion District, or at least about two-thirds of it, but the movie theater was squarely within the footprint of the new arena. There’s precedent for this; the Minnesota Timberwolves have a shuttered movie theater, at Block E in downtown Minneapolis, as part of their practice facility.

Back in September of 2022, right after 76Place was first announced, I wrote an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer, about how I hoped the movie theater, which had only been open for a little over two years at that point, wouldn’t be displaced by the arena. And luckily, it looks like I got my wish.

At least, for now… arena or no arena, the Fashion District mall still isn’t particularly viable, while soon the theater will have to compete with the revived Riverview, also in South Philly, which is set to reopen after five years empty later this year. I don’t know what the future holds, but I’m glad to know that theater’s days aren’t numbered.

“You cut the guts out of what I said!”

This week, the Inquirer ran my feature about the new movie Unstoppable, based on an interview I did back during the Philadelphia Film Festival in October, with the film’s director, William Goldenberg.

He’s not related to my wife’s family of that same surname, but Goldenberg is a Philadelphia native. Unstoppable, a biopic of Anthony Robles, the one-legged college wrestling champion, is Goldenberg’s directorial debut, and the film (and co-starring Jennifer Lopez) lands on Prime Video this Friday.

But before Unstoppable, Goldenberg spent the last couple of decades as one of Hollywood’s best editors, whose work has won one Oscar (for Argo) and several nominations. He worked on several of Michael Mann’s movies, including favorites like Heat and The Insider.

It didn’t make it into the story, but I had a great time talking to Goldenberg about those films and how the “kids these days,” for lack of a better term, have gotten really into the old Mann films, especially The Insider and Miami Vice (I also told him the Brandon Streussnig/girlfriend/Guggenheim curator Miami Vice story, which he hadn’t heard before.) And I realized that one of my favorite movie scenes of all time — in The Insider, when Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) yells at his bosses because “you cut it!” — as the editor, well, Goldenberg cut it.

I didn’t get to ask if any actor has ever asked him, "Who told you your incompetent little fingers have the requisite skills to edit me?"

Also, it ran after the newsletter last Friday, but here’s my piece for the Inquirer about Pennsylvania: Land of Decision, the 1950s Pennsylvania promotional film that’s featured in The Brutalist.

The day after it was published, someone pointed out that the video had been taken down from YouTube, thanks to a claim from NBC Universal, and I panicked for a minute that my article had caused that to happen. But it turned out the takedown was in error, and that some internal algorithm connected to NBC Universal — the foreign rights holder for The Brutalist — had somehow thought that the video was The Brutalist itself. Luckily, it’s back up:

And here’s that Jewish Exponent piece about The Brutalist.