The Times Square Story

Black-and-white photographs of billboards, seductively worded marquees and steamy film stills illustrate O'Brien's (Hard-boiled America) graphic scenario for an imaginary movie about life in Times Square in the early 1950s. A young hayseed freshly discharged from the Army arrives at the exploding ""crossroads of the world"" and is swiftly swallowed up by the promise of ""jazz, exotic nightlife, hipster talk, black tights, psychoanalysis."" O'Brien attempts to capture the feel of the era with raw, bare-knuckled prose; his director aims to assault the viewer relentlessly with ""every kind of noise and spectacle, neon, high heels, lipstick, taxicabs, quick stabs."" However, it becomes clear, long before the story degenerates into a sleazy tale of suburban whoring, accompanied by B-movie clips of drunken strip-poker parties, that his Times Square story represents the cinematographic middle-class fantasies familiar from the (admittedly, unillustrated) montages of, for instance, Robert Coover. Still, O'Brien's staccato narrative is an energetic and most entertaining glimpse of a legendary area in New York that--for better or worse--exists no more. (Oct.)