Their “revenge”, says Sanders, was to fashion a celluloid New York so glamorous and thrilling that it would put Los Angeles to shame. And having decamped from the world’s most bustling, exciting city, they were appalled to find themselves in Los Angeles’s dusty, low-rise sprawl. The likes of Dorothy Parker and Herman Mankiewicz were used to being the toast of Broadway, so they felt humiliated when they were treated as scribblers-for-hire. The money was fantastic, they discovered, but the job satisfaction wasn’t there. The Cupids who helped the movies fall in love with the skyscraper, he argues, were the New York writers who moved to Hollywood at the end of the 1920s to lend some cosmopolitan sophistication to its screenplays.

“Films caught the exact moment when the city found its own distinctive look,” says Sanders, “achieved through the maturity of its greatest creation, the skyscraper, and recorded exactly as it happened.” But it was in the 1920s and ‘30s that films and skyscrapers were at their most symbiotic, whether King Kong (1933) was plunging from the Empire State Building, or Fred Astaire was soft-shoe-shuffling around a 50th-floor nightclub in Swing Time (1936). In James Sanders’ book, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, he notes that some of the very earliest films – such as The Skyscrapers (1906) – featured nothing except views of high-rise buildings, “a truly miraculous sight to audiences living outside New York or Chicago”. Both were pioneered in the late 19th Century, and both flourished in the years leading up to World War Two, by which time the connection between them was already strong. Both skyscrapers and films were larger-than-life and intoxicatingly new – and they both cost a fortune. By then, Hollywood movies were already linked more tightly to skyscrapers than to any other kind of building.

Mother in skyscraper movie