Don't miss the June 11 premiere of the CNN Original Series "The Seventies," which examines the decade through its politics, culture and political events. For more information, visit The Seventies

Once upon a time there was Hollywood, there was New Hollywood and there was New York. Movies made in New York about New York by New Yorkers are a breed apart, distinct from the offerings of the aging Hollywood studio system and the new wave of such West Coast visionaries as Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. On June 9, Turner Classic Movies will air a program of films made in New York City throughout the 1970s, a decade of change, uncertainty, anxiety, rage and hard-edged humor that allowed frightened people to navigate troubled times while retaining their humanity and sanity. Escalating crime, racial strife, a dispiriting war in Vietnam and fiscal stagnation on a national level that sent catastrophic shockwaves into New York City are key to the makeup of Gordon Parks' Shaft (1971), Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) and Sidney Lumet's fact-based Dog Day Afternoon (1975)--crime films with more in mind than the struggle between order and chaos--while flight from the city and the aging of the Depression era generation that made New York the greatest city on earth inform Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) and Martin Brest's Going in Style (1979). TCM presents New York in the '70s in conjunction with the CNN Original Series, The Seventies, which premieres June 11, 9pm ET/PT. Executive produced by the Emmy® award-winning team of Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and Emmy® award-winning producer Mark Herzog, the 8-part The Seventies captures the tenor of those times in its myriad social upheavals, political scandals, revolutions, acts of terrorism, and the entertainment--the music, the movies, the television--that attempted to make sense of it all.

By Richard Harland Smith