Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1433736
"Swimming" Jonathan was an avid swimmer and would often go to a local Y near his home to clear his head while working on a tune. The film version of tick, tick… BOOM! dramatizes this in the form of the musical number wimming, in which Larson has a creative breakthrough regarding an unfinished song needed for the impending workshop of Superbia. Location manager Ryan Smith and I had looked at countless public and private pools for this scene, and some were very striking, but when we visited the one on Clarkson Street in the West Village, we knew it was our top pick. It just had a great cinematic feeling, an appropriate grunginess, and its tiled markings seemed to match the lyrics of the song: "Red green stripesfifty feetsixty feet We'd discover not long after that, this was in fact the pool that Jonathan himself frequented! Serendipity! Of course, Lin was completely in love with the idea of shooting at Tony Dapolito and upon visiting was struck by the fact that the lane lines at the bottom of the pool were in groups of five, not unlike the sta of musical notation. This revelation would inspire one of the more striking images in the sequence: an overhead shot in which Jonathan oats amidst the notes of the song he is about to write. Times Square Even though it only was ever going to appear on-screen for a couple of seconds, the production always looked at recreating a stretch of Times Square as it was in 1990 as a keystone to the world building of tick, tick…BOOM!. No other neighborhood serves as a better yardstick of the city's evolution, and as it abuts the theatre district, it would provide A. TONY DAPOLITO RECREATION CENTER POOL LANES. THE FIVE LINES OF TILE THAT MAKE UP THE LANE LINES MIRRORED THE FIVE LINES OF THE MUSICAL STAFF. SET PHOTO. B. MUSICAL NUMBER "SWIMMING" STAGED AT THE TONY DAPOLITO POOL. PRODUCTION STILL. C. TIMES SQUARE STREET. CONCEPT ART OVER LOCATION. PHOTOS BY DAN POLLACK. D. TIMES SQUARE STREET. CONCEPT ART BY ALI KASHFI SHOWING INTENDED FINAL VERSION OF TIMES SQUARE AT NIGHT, INCLUDING SET EXTENSION DESIGNS TO BE USED BY VFX. A B C D