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Will Woody Allen’s Next Film Be Shot in Coney Island?

Posted in amusement park, film, video, tagged Annie Hall, house under the roller coaster, roller coaster, Woody Allen on May 22, 2016| 1 Comment »

The return of the nervous kid who grew up in a house under a roller coaster? Woody Allen says his next movie will be set in an amusement park and could possibly be shot in Coney Island this summer. “If I can work out the logistics of it,” he told reporters at the Cannes Film Festival.

Scenes from Allen’s 1977 Annie Hall were filmed in Coney at the since demolished Thunderbolt roller coaster and the Cavalcade Bumper Cars on Surf Avenue. Where would he film today? Well, there’s Luna Park’s new Thunderbolt roller coaster, which does not have a house under it but does have a hair-raising 90 degree drop, and the roller coaster like thrill of the Wonder Wheel’s swinging cars, and the mighty Cyclone.

As Allen’s alter ego Alvy Singer says in Annie Hall, “My analyst says I exaggerate my childhood memories, but I swear I was brought up underneath the roller-coaster in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. Maybe that accounts for my personality, which is a little nervous, I think.”

The house under the roller coaster in Annie Hall was the real life home for 40 years of Mae Timpano, who shares vivid memories of good times and sad in a 2005 documentary by Lila Place. “If the wind was blowing towards the house, I heard everything going on in Coney Island,” says Timpano in the film.

Sunday Matinee: Under the Roller Coaster (2005)

Posted in film, video, tagged Coney Island, documentary, film, Fred Moran, Freddy Moran, house under the roller coaster, Lila Place, Mae Timpano, Thunderbolt, Under the Roller Coaster on February 23, 2014| Leave a Comment »

The house under the roller coaster in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” was the real life home for 40 years of Mae Timpano, who shares vivid memories of good times and sad in this 2005 documentary by Lila Place. “If the wind was blowing towards the house, I heard everything going on in Coney Island,” says Timpano in the film. For most of those years under the Thunderbolt, her companion was Freddy Moran, who owned and operated the famed coaster built by his father over the Kensington Hotel in 1925. She recalls the two of them going for swims to the end of Steeplechase Pier at 2AM after she got off work as a waitress.

“Mae’s story is a window onto a lost world and makes us think about the importance of place in a new way,” says the film-maker. In addition to Timpano’s candid reminiscences, the 16-minute documentary includes interviews with family, friends and historians as well as old news clips. Moran tells a TV reporter asking about changes in Coney Island: “Roller coasters are a very, very stable element of the amusement business and I don’t see any way they’re going to be replaced by anything else and give the same feeling.” But after Moran died in 1982, the coaster closed and would never reopen.

Timpano was a spirited survivor who lived alone in the house for several more years. “I got used to the quietness,” she says, just as she had gotten used to the clatter of the roller coaster passing overhead and finding wigs and dentures lost by riders in her backyard. Horace Bullard, who bought the Thunderbolt and other properties with the dream of rebuilding Steeplechase Park, once said of Timpano: “She’s Miss Coney Island. When you get close to her, you get sort of the feeling of what Coney Island used to be like.”

Timpano, who died five years ago, outlived the coaster and her former home, which were controversially and illegally demolished in 2000 on the orders of Mayor Giuliani.

“Under the Roller Coaster” won a number of awards including Best Made in Coney Island Film at the Coney Island Film Festival (2005) and Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary Short at Slamdance (2006).