New York Stories

NEW YORK STORIES is a feature-length film consisting of three shorts directed by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Woody Allen. The stories are linked only by their New York City setting and show three very different facets of New York life. Scorsese's "Life Lessons" is the bittersweet tale of an aging Abstract Expressionist painter whose young live-in girlfriend and artistic protégée decides to leave him just as he's preparing for an important gallery opening. Tired of living in the shadow of her famous lover and disappointed in her own lack of artistic talent, the girl torments him with tantrums and brazen acts of infidelity as the painter furiously attempts to fill his canvases in time for his show. Coppola's "Life Without Zoe" is a candy-coated look at the life of a poor little rich girl who resides alone at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel under the care of a butler while her neglectful parents flit around the world. Zoe attends fanciful parties with other fabulously wealthy children and becomes involved in the search for a pair of missing diamond earrings that eventually reunites her with her parents. "Oedipus Wrecks" is Woody Allen's comic nightmare about a 50-year-old man still suffocated by his overbearing Jewish mother. When she disappears mysteriously one day, he thinks his troubles are over--until she reappears as a giant apparition looming in the sky above Manhattan. (official distributor synopsis)