In the Heights: Finding Home is a joint venture with Lin-Manuel Miranda, screenwriter Quiara Alegría Hudes, and Jeremy McCarter – it combines never-before-seen photos and oral history style-storytelling to take readers onto the Washington Heights set, spilling all sorts of filming secrets.
Washington Heights is dense enough, and lively enough, to offer a distilled version of the New York paradox: Life is a nerve-fraying ordeal that you miss terribly as soon as it’s gone.
“The essence of a movie dictates where you shoot it,” explains Kevin McCormick, a Warner Bros.
Members of the production team, particularly Samson Jacobson, the location manager , and Karla Sayles, the director of public affairs at Warner Bros., met with community leaders to field questions and respond to concerns.
The producers vowed to do all they could to limit the physical footprint of the shoot.
The fascination seemed to be mutual: Actors got used to seeing whole families-little kids and their abuelitas-watching from their stoops at any time of the day or night.
Instead, they experienced a torment familiar to every New Yorker but with a twist: They weren’t waiting for the train to appear so they could ride it to work, they just needed the garbage train to pass by so they could go back to shooting their movie.
At this point, he reckons, he’s filmed in just about every corner of his hometown, always looking for ways to capture the authentic look and feel of a place-even when the movie is surreal.
Anthony remembers looking at the calendar before summer began, getting a feel for what lay ahead.
Many a movie executive had suggested over the years that there wasn’t enough plot in “Carnaval del Barrio” to justify a song that was very long and very crowded, which made it very expensive.
That community-fortifying aspect of the song is “essentially the DNA of In the Heights for me,” Quiara says.
To help ensure that the number would remain in the movie, she hooked it into the plot more securely, situating it as a farewell number for the salon ladies, who have been priced out of the neighborhood.
In the world of making movies, “day” is a flexible unit of time, especially for a scene that would be filmed outdoors- in this case, a courtyard between two apartment buildings around the corner from where Lin went to preschool.
But when she arrived for hair and makeup on “Carnaval” day-at 4:30 in the morning-even she was feeling nerves.
She began to hear a voice of doubt in her brain, one that’s encoded in a specific ugly memory.
She was born in the Dominican Republic and while growing up in Brooklyn used to make frequent trips to the Heights with her friends.
She decided to stop those doubts-for herself and the other salon ladies.
Christopher Scott, the film’s choreographer, tried to prepare them for what was coming, backed by his full team of associate choreographers: Emilio Dosal, Ebony Williams, and Dana Wilson, as well as associate Latin choreographer Eddie Torres, Jr., and assistant Latin choreographer Princess Serrano.
As the sun climbed higher that morning, the temperature rose to what one crew member estimated to be nine hundred degrees.
He had offered to help in any way he could, eventually recording a radio ad for the show.
As they got underway, he told Chris Scott and the choreography team, “I know I’m playing the dad, but the last thing I want to see is myself in the background, just waving my hands.
He could feel “a lightning bolt of energy” around the set, something he’d experienced only rarely in his long career.
Over the applause after one take, a voice rang out, ricocheting off the walls: “That s— was crazy! For our ancestors!” It was Anthony Ramos.
It meant taking a bus into Manhattan from a gig he was doing in New Jersey, going through round after round of auditions.
He thought he’d missed the one chance he would get to work with Lin, the writer who’d evoked Anthony’s own world, Latino New York, so beautifully on a Broadway stage.
In 2018, Stephanie Klemons, an original cast member of both In the Heights and Hamilton, directed a production of Heights at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
In a series of tweets, reproduced on this page, Lin commemorated how overwhelmed he was watching Anthony step into the role he once played.
Anthony had originated the role of Lin’s son in Hamilton, and now he was playing the role that Lin had originated, and somehow the two of them were singing a duet in Washington Heights.
Which meant that Lin wasn’t just singing with Anthony that day, he was harmonizing with himself at age twenty-eight, when every bit of what was happening around him would have seemed like a ludicrous dream.
By three p.m., when everybody had returned from their lunch break-blood sugar bolstered by the ice cream truck that Stephanie Beatriz had hired-time was growing shorter, the day hotter.
He joined in the clapping that broke out between scenes; he made silly faces; he pulled up his shirt and did belly rolls.
Jon is not the type to direct through a bullhorn, barking orders from the shade.
Anthony climbed onto a picnic table and faced the whole cast, rapping, “Can we sing so loud and raucous they can hear us across the bridge in East Secaucus?” Daphne stood near him, arms wide apart, raising them up, willing everybody to stand tall, to keep going.
In the movie version of the scene, the blackout ends when the song does, so a voice on the loudspeaker would announce, “The power’s on!” That’s how the actors knew the right moment to cheer that it was over.
He hadn’t planned what he was going to say-he hadn’t planned to speak at all.
It was for our kids, who look like us, to be able to see themselves on the big screen, to see us singing about our pride.
“It wasn’t like chanting, ‘Oh, I love New York,’ ” Anthony says later-meaning it wasn’t a casual thing someone would casually say.
Quiara, in the courtyard, guessed that people could hear them all chanting for blocks around.
The long months of preparation had yielded the thing that movie people dream of creating: the burst of real emotion, the flash of genuine spontaneity.
By fusing them with dozens of other artists making the same commitment, it gave them the feeling that Lin had wanted so badly for himself when he started writing the show: a sense of belonging, of being part of a group of people working toward a goal they all hold dear.
“Something that arises in ‘Carnaval’ is a feeling of, ‘There’s a place for us,’ ” says Quiara.
“People are like, ‘What is my place in the world?’ That question is actually part of your place in the world,” she says.
From the book IN THE HEIGHTS: Finding Home by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Quiara Alegría Hudes and Jeremy McCarter.