Manhattan Adult Entertainment: The street shooters
By REED TUCKER
Last Updated:
1:04 PM, February 28, 2010
Posted:
12:58 AM, February 28, 2010
The police warning was as straight-forward as they come. If director Antoine Fuqua and the crew of “Brooklyn’s Finest” insisted on filming in Brownsville, Brooklyn, they would be on their own. The neighborhood, just east of Crown Heights, is among the city’s most crime-ridden: gang members reportedly control the streets, prostitutes work the corners, drug dealers infest the housing projects.
The neighborhood is so violent that a few years ago, the military created a training program at the local hospital because its emergency room most closely resembled that of a war zone. About half of the patients had either been stabbed or shot.
But Fuqua, who also made the Oscar-winning “Training Day,” wanted an authenticity for his police drama that could only be found in the Van Dyke projects, the run-down collection of public housing units that spawned Mike Tyson and members of the Wu-Tang Clan. So in the summer of 2008, Hollywood came to Brownsville — for what was among the first, and quite possibly one of the last, times.