On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more.
Last fall, a passerby snagged a photo that set the internet ablaze: Timothée Chalamet and Gwyneth Paltrow sharing a kiss in Central Park. This dalliance was not real, but rather one of many scenes from Marty Supreme that was filmed on the ground in the Big Apple. It’s the New York City movie of the year, and it’s all about table tennis and Chalamet’s titular, pompous hustler clawing his way to the top of that world.
Set primarily in Lower Manhattan in the 1950s, Marty Supreme follows Marty, at first a young and unibrowed shoe salesman, who will stop at nothing to pursue his dream of becoming a world-class table tennis player. He’s pompous, with a hustler mindset, and keeps getting himself into trouble. His childhood best friend and sometimes-lover, Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), gets swept up in his hijinks, as does his temperamental foil of a friend, Wally (Tyler the Creator).
Despite lacking notoriety in the US, table tennis was one of the biggest sports in the world at the time, and this story is loosely based on real table tennis player Marty Reisman. In order to get a glimpse of that world, which, as Marty tells another character during the film, “fills stadiums overseas,” we see him travel all over. From dingy midtown basements and old tenement buildings in New York, to Wembley Stadium, on tour with the Harlem Globetrotters, and all the way to Japan and back, table tennis takes Marty around the world. Seasoned production designer Jack Fiskshares the decisions and movie magic behind some of the most iconic locations in the film.
The Lower East Side
Fans first caught a glimpse of this film when onlookers spotted Chalamet running down a Lower East Side street in October of 2024. The movie opens at Norkin’s Shoe Shop on Orchard Street, where Marty is employed, and the first part of the film spends a good deal of time in the neighborhood. Katz’s Deli remains, but the area has changed dramatically since the 1950s, when it was still a hub for Jewish American life. The production and art departments did a great deal of research to recreate the era when this neighborhood was the heart of Jewish commerce, with delis, bakeries, and garment shops, sometimes with signage in Hebrew, lining the streets.