In last week’s issue of the magazine, Tad Friend spoke to Dan Gilroy about his new film, “Nightcrawler,” in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays a man who sells footage of violent crimes to a Los Angeles TV station. Gilroy told Friend that he sees the character as a version of the photographer Weegee, who captured crime scenes and other jarring late-night incidents in New York in the nineteen-thirties and forties.
Weegee, whose real name was Arthur Fellig, lived across the street from a police headquarters, in Manhattan. He listened to his police scanner while lying in bed at night, and was known to arrive on the scene before the police did. After photographing incidents in what he referred to as “Rembrandt lighting” (“Even a drunk must be a masterpiece,” he once said of his approach), he would develop the film in a makeshift darkroom in the trunk of his car. His grim (and, at times, satirical) images—which were often the only photographic accounts of these after-hours occurrences—were widely published in New York papers, and continue to be exhibited today.
