Times Square (1980)

In 1979, Allan Moyle took his cameras into Times Square before the city cleaned it up. What he captured - the grindhouses, the neon, the grime, the beautiful wreckage of a New York that was actively falling apart - turned out to be more valuable than anything in the script.

TIMES SQUARE (1980) was meant to be Robert Stigwood's follow-up to Saturday Night Fever. Stigwood had just proved you could bottle youth, music, and New York City and sell it to the world. He wanted to do it again.

What Moyle gave him was stranger and less manageable than that - a film about two girls, one a politician's daughter and one a feral runaway, who escape a hospital together and end up living on a derelict barge in the Hudson, broadcasting pirate radio (with the help of a charismatic DJ played by Tim Curry) , and becoming accidental punk icons.

Moyle's original cut leaned into their relationship with more explicit emotional and romantic content. Stigwood pushed it toward something more commercial. What survived is a film that feels fractured in interesting ways - rawer than it should be, softer than it wanted to be, and more honest than either version probably intended.

The soundtrack became legendary regardless: the Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, The Cure, XTC, Roxy Music. It documents a moment in New York music the way the film documents a moment in New York geography.
Both that moment and that city are gone. The film remains - part cult object, part time capsule, entirely itself.