the Arriflex 35BL permits shooting sound sequences in confined quarters, thus eliminating the post-dubbing of dialogue that is usually necessary under such conditions.” A combination of Fouad Said's radical location skills and ARRI's groundbreaking technology allowed Shear's dream of a realistic backdrop for his story to be accomplished. A staggering 95% of the movie was shot at a total of 60 different interior and exterior locations in Harlem. Themes Racial tensions The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time when racial tensions ran deep, and often exploded into riots. In the summer of 1964, a riot erupted in Harlem after a white off-duty police officer shot and killed an armed black teenager in Yorkville, Manhattan. The “hot summer” of 1967 saw riots rip through the country, in major cities throughout the West and the North, as black communities responded in anger to poverty and police brutality. In 1968, just three years before the release of Across 110th Street, numerous businesses and storefronts in Harlem were set on fire as residents reacted in frustration and grief after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The 1970s were also a time when feelings of black power were everywhere in African-American communities across the United States. The black power ethos seeped even into the underworld of organized crime, as evident in Across 110th Street, where black gangsters like Doc Johnson are coming to believe that black people should control the organized crime circuits within their neighborhoods rather than the racist Mafia bosses. New York City in the 1970s Across 110th Street portrays New York City of the 1970s, a decade when crime, drug use and poverty was at an all-time high. The city economy was broke, its infrastructure crumbling and pimps and prostitutes filled Times Square. Harlem itself was a place of little opportunity. Middle class residents fled the neighborhood in large numbers, leaving the poor to abandoned buildings and empty storefronts. Burned out buildings were visible on nearly every block of Harlem's major avenues, 24% of the area's population was living on welfare, and between 1976 and 1978 the population of east and central Harlem fell by almost a third. In 1971, an estimated 60% of Harlem's economic activity depended on cash flow from gambling — the illegal “numbers” racket controlled by organized crime. During a potent scene in the film, Jim Harris explains to his girlfriend why he was forced