At Home with the Tenenbaums

Wes Anderson’s vision of New York City in The Royal Tenenbaums may be a storybook one, but, as a new short video on the A.V. Club proves, it’s all based on reality. The entertaining three-and-a-half-minute piece—made as part of the site’s series Pop Pilgrims, in which intrepid journalists seek out locations made famous on film or TV—visits the movie’s stately Archer Avenue house, which is actually 339 Convent Avenue in Harlem, a building that holds both a private residence and an art gallery. Watch the video and read the accompanying text, which gives insight into not only how Anderson converted the interior into a candy-colored alternate world but also the steps he took to defamiliarize New York—obscuring the Statue of Liberty when shooting in Battery Park, for example.

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