It is always a thrill to stumble upon a film crew in New York City (boroughs included), and fun just walking the streets and recognizing a spot that’s been in a famous movie. Manhattan is incredibly photogenic for the cinema, from its impressive and daunting skyline to its manicured parks. It’s always been amusing to me how certain street scenes in movies make the city look less grimy and dirty than it can be; I’m thinking of the West Side footage in Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail in particular. Yet, I’ve often been in the elaborate courtyard of the building The Apthorp, also featured in an Ephron-penned film, Heartburn, and it truly is as spotless as it appears there.

In the late 1970s, I was walking towards the East River one evening in the East 50s, when I saw a film crew in the distance surrounding a park bench overlooking the river and the Queensboro Bridge. There were Woody Allen and Diane Keaton doing a take for the movie Manhattan, which, when I saw it in the theater, felt as if Allen truly caught the day-to-day experience of living in the city at that time. In fact, I turned to my friend when coming out of the theater and said it was “like he’d followed us around for a month.” Filmed in glorious black and white, it’s a postcard of New York. Whenever I see the movie on television and they show the park bench scene, I’m amused to know I was standing behind them up the street. I’ve seen Woody Allen walking the streets of New York on several occasions, and actually did chance upon another set of his, this time on Madison Avenue, in the 1990s.

Brooklyn Heights is not a big neighborhood and I’ll never know how I didn’t see the film sets of three movies produced there in the 1980s and 1990s while I was living in Brooklyn. Moonstruck, Prizzi’s Honor, and The Age of Innocence were all filmed under my nose. I was especially upset that the late, great director John Huston was eating in all of my favorite restaurants and I kept missing him. It seemed like every waiter in the Heights was saying to me, “John Huston was here just the other day.”

I believe Martin Scorsese covered one street around the corner from me with fake snow to capture 19th century society in New York in The Age of Innocence. Of course Scorsese went on to film Gangs of New York and there’s plenty of grime and dirt in that movie—there’s more oil in Daniel Day-Lewis’s hair in that film than recently spilled in the Gulf of Mexico.

I was sitting on a bench near the Plaza Hotel right outside of Central Park, when just days after seeing Marathon Man, its star, Dustin Hoffman, jogged right by me wearing the exact jogging clothes he’d worn in the movie (moments later, the British rock and roll star Rod Stewart walked by me in English tweeds walking an enormous bulldog—it was a good day for star gazing). I’d heard that when Hoffman was filming his jogging scenes in Marathon Man, he would take long spells in mental and physical preparation to immerse in the role. The brilliant actor from Britain who plays opposite of Hoffman in the movie, Laurence Olivier, finally turned to Hoffman in his meditation and faux jogs and said, “Why don’t you try acting?”

I scored a double hit with the movie Scent of a Woman. I was working on Second Avenue just blocks from the United Nations and the limousine featured in the film that is driving Al Pacino around New York kept rolling by with the actor in the back seat. Pacino plays a blind man in this film and in one scene he is taken to an abandoned area in Brooklyn under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges to test his driving skills. That area was where I used to jog in the 1980s and he races past all my running places.

My best brush with movie greatness, however, occurred in London. Alfred Hitchcock is one of my favorite directors—I’ve seen over 30 of his movies. In 1978, I worked in a small Covent Garden building that had been featured in his 1972 movie Frenzy. Just recently, I came across the movie on television and when the characters are walking up the stairs of the townhouse, they pass by a large window. I realized that I had climbed that very stairway many times all those years ago, and had gazed out of the very window featured in the film. It was almost as if I was there again.

After The Witches of Eastwick was filmed, I saw its stars Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer at an art preview at Sotheby’s. I also saw Nicholson at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at a Van Gogh show. I was tempted to tell him the colors would be more vibrant without his sunglasses.

If I had to pick the pinnacle of New York in film, it would have to be King Kong atop the Empire State Building in the original version from the 1930s. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—I have not stumbled upon that particular star.