Martin Scorsese’s Fran Lebowitz Netflix Series ‘Pretend It’s a City’ is ‘The Great Courses’ For DGAF New Yorkers

It may seem, at first, that Pretend It’s A City is just another portrait of an artist, but it’s not. Fran Lebowitz, America’s most celebrated talker, as presented by her longtime friend Martin Scorsese, is not simply a cranky, opinionated, urban-dwelling philosopher. This quintessentially frown-y, impatient, and razor-tongued New Yorker is (and never tell her I said this, because she specifically says she hates this term) a “wellness” expert. What she offers, with her zings and dissbombs, is a guide to life. If you follow Fran’s ways, you’ll learn how to truly not care what others think about you, and thus revel in that freedom and accompanying grace.

There’s that early scene in GoodFellas — you’ve seen the GIF — where Joe Pesci’s Tommy D. is holding court at a restaurant, telling stories. He isn’t just making his friends laugh, he’s making them howl. People at other tables are doubled-over. Yes, the sequence takes a dark turn for a minute when you think Tommy is going to kill Henry Hill for calling him “funny,” but it bounds back, the laughter twice as loud, into an eruption of elation and joy.

Now imagine seven half-hour episodes of that scene. Y’know, just without the threat of murder.

Lebowitz, a 70-year-old essayist who hasn’t actually written a new essay in decades, might not like being associated with the amoral killers of GoodFellas, but Pretend It’s A City shares some similarities. Like Scorsese’s previous film about Lebowitz, the 2010 HBO doc Public Speaking, the bulk is just Fran, at a restaurant, on an absolute tear. Whatever the Jewish-American intellectual’s equivalent of “spittin’ bars” is, it’s this. She’s ranting about taxi cabs, about the meaning of art, about a trip she took to Alaska to go see bears. And those sharing her table —in this case, producer Ted Griffin and Scorsese himself — are laughing as hard as Henry Hill ever did.

Lebowitz and Scorsese can’t exactly pinpoint how long they’ve known one another. It was before John Waters’s 50th birthday party, they know that, and Waters is 74. But it is clear that he absolutely adores her. Probably the first time they met he thought, my God, all I would need to do is put a camera on her and let her go.

Her career path to Netflix star has been an unusual one. She was born in 1950 to a middle class family in Morristown, New Jersey. That isn’t far from New York as the crow flies, but it might as well be a different galaxy. She got there at the end of the 1960s, an independently-minded gay woman, and quickly fell in with the Andy Warhol scene. She began writing for Interview magazine. (She even reviewed Scorsese’s early exploitation picture Boxcar Bertha.) She also worked crappy jobs, like driving a cab, but only enough to cover her rent. Her real job was being a New Yorker, going to shows, hanging out at bars, eating at restaurants. In 1978 she published her first collection of essays, Metropolitan Life, which was a massive success. She followed up in 1981 with Social Studies and since then? Well … she’s referred to her crippling writer’s block as “writer’s blockade.”

But that’s okay. She’s managed to make a career, somehow, out of just being herself. She’d appear on Letterman, she’d take a speaking gig at a university, moderate a Q & A with her bosom buddy Toni Morrison, and have a few lines on Law & Order as a judge. Just enough that she’d be able to continue her outsider’s life, roaming the streets of New York, observing, never doing anything because you were supposed to (she has no cell phone, she has no computer, she has no email), and, should someone ask her opinion, she’d give it, and not fear the consequences. Luckily, she’d also hilarious and smart.

Imagine telling Spike Lee, as she does in this series, that, no, an athlete is not an artist, not even Michael Jordan. (Other celebs pop up to talk to Fran, like Alec Baldwin and Olivia Wilde.) But just as she breaks his heart, she draws him in with another story. Muhammad Ali wasn’t an artist, either, but she loved him, and, guess what, she was at the Ali vs Frazier fight in 1974, and was there with Frank Sinatra, and listen to this…

So before you know it, one of the world’s most famous basketball fans, who just got denied at the net, is back in her thrall. Tell me more.

She even does this with Scorsese, her greatest champion. Imagine telling the director of Gangs of New York and The Age of Innocence that New York’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum is a dumb idea. He stands his ground (it’s important history!) and so does she (feh! she says, essentially) but because they are communicating, and because they are laughing, it is all okay. I say this now as a warning, because eventually, watching this series, she may very well drop a grenade that you feel is over your personal line (there will be complaints!) so perhaps it is good to prepare. 

She can talk this way because of her intellect, and she can elude criticism because of her confidence. It’s maybe not something everyone can have, or perhaps for some it only grows with age, but it’s almost a gangster’s way of living. Just over coffee instead of guns.

Pretend It’s A City debuts on Netflix on January 8, 2021.

Jordan Hoffman is a writer and critic in New York City. His work also appears in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and the Times of Israel. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and tweets about Phish and Star Trek at @JHoffman.

Watch Pretend It's A City on Netflix