Views of the City . . . and a Former Hizzoner

Woody Allen serenades his favorite town in “Annie Hall” and again in “Manhattan,” where George Gershwin and black-and-white cinematography harmonize in a softening homage that romanticizes even grime and cement as urban poetry.

TV portrayals of New York City, too, are sometimes nice to visit, the difference being you wouldn’t want to linger there.

The exceptions include NBC’s “Law & Order,” which makes Manhattan its sound stage, and “Seinfeld,” which many New Yorkers felt spoke to them in their own unique idiom (as in a subway nude sitting opposite Jerry in one episode) although it was shot mostly in Los Angeles.

More typical are WB’s “Felicity,” Fox’s new “Time of Your Life” and the just-ended CBS miniseries “Shake, Rattle & Roll,” where young, twinkly out-of-towners eye New York as a place to reinvent themselves or jump-start careers. Just as the big, bad city threatens to gobble them, voila! Then come a few stock exteriors of the famous skyline before the wrap, sort of like NBC’s “Today” hitting the street now and then to break the monotony and remind viewers it’s not in Peoria.

Premiering Sunday, meanwhile, are clashing views of Manhattan in smart, ravishing “New York: A Documentary Film”--10 hours on PBS from Ric Burns--and the two-part “Aftershock: Earthquake in New York,” a laboriously routine and sterile disaster flick on CBS that literally shakes, rattles and rolls.

All those explosions and flying chunks of stone scarring “Aftershock” ensure this skyscraper of mediocrity being the New York story of choice. But it’s Burns’ stunning, gorgeous-with-brains five-parter--tracing the city’s history from its 1609 origins as a Dutch colony to 1931--that deserves attention. A sixth installment covering the rest of the century is scheduled for spring.

Much less accessible than either of these, unfortunately, is a short film from Bennett Miller that airs Tuesday on cable’s Cinemax. It’s “The Cruise,” whose highly entertaining documentary subject is Timothy “Speed” Levitch, a Manhattan tour bus guide who launches seamless, torrentially witty and literate monologues (“The sun, another great New York City landmark, above you on the left”) from a double-decker.

And for Miller’s benefit, from the pavement. Dark shades resting on his beak of a nose, raggy hair flapping with the breeze, Levitch defines the “cruise” as “an understanding that living is the art of crafting moments.” And the “anti-cruise” as epitomized by the Manhattan grid system, which was created in 1811. It’s something the Burns film touts approvingly as imposing order “in a city where there is so much anarchy.”

Levitch sees it differently. “We’re forced to walk in these right angles,” he grouses, hands in parka pockets. “The grid is Puritan. It’s homogenizing in a city where there is no homogenization available. There is only total existence, total cacophony, a total flowing of human ethnicities and tribes and being and gradations of awareness and consciousness and cruising.”

Where Burns the filmmaker-historian is elegant, Levitch the street poet is elegantly raw, as in expressing to Miller his erotic awe of the terra cotta dressing so many New York buildings.

“When I see terra cotta like this it just makes me feel I’m senselessly running through a meadow or high grassland area nude, chasing a woman I’ve never met before, who’s entirely nude, and it’s just the most raw and primordial chase. . . . “ As the camera wanders up a building as if it had heaving breasts and genitalia, Levitch asks: “Can’t you feel the undulations of her curvature?”

This is not your usual TV-tailored Manhattanscape, for the city’s and Levitch’s erratic pulses beat in unison. He adores New York, he rages at it. As do the forces of nature in “Aftershock,” whose own undulating curvature matches the formulaic rhythms resonating across several decades of disaster movies.

It’s not enough that New Yorkers have the Yankees, now they have their own bigger earthquake, too. It and its aftermath are viewed through the lives of several sets of Manhattanites. There’s the prosperous couple with marital problems (Garwin Sanford and Sharon Lawrence), the struggling young ballerina (Jennifer Garner) with a rich father (Mitchell Ryan), the city’s feuding mayor (Charles S. Dutton) and fire chief (Tom Skerritt), the mayor’s public defender daughter (Lisa Nicole Carson), the mayor’s mother (Cicely Tyson) and the fire chief’s teenage daughter (Kim Warnat). All’s quiet. Then as if the city’s bowels were bursting. . . .

Let’s get ready to R-U-M-B-L-E!!!!!

As New York and the script collapse simultaneously, ordinary folks become heroes, heroes superheroes. With the mayor’s daughter trapped in the warrens of a demolished subway beside a wacko, and the fire chief’s daughter somewhere inside her destroyed high school, these formerly warring dads now become brothers in anguish. And as the ballerina hooks up with a just-arrived Russian immigrant, love blooms amid the rubble.

Is good story? No, is bad.

In fact, this could be the rubble of any large city with a subway, so generic is this two-part calamity directed by Mikael Salomon and written by Paul Eric Myers, David Stevens and Loren Boothby. Compare it with the New York that Burns (brother of documentarian Ken Burns) and his collaborator Lisa Ades present in their vibrant road map of metropolitan history. Opening with a slow-motion gridlock of Manhattan pedestrians not unlike the gridlock of machines on Los Angeles freeways, it’s a lyrical documentary that avoids truisms and employs Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” without rhapsodizing. It’s a film whose New York is at once cosmopolitan and provincial, and whose early turbulent, exploitative history is overseen here by Dutch colonists and their English successors. Both set in motion a process for change, says one historian Sunday, that keeps New York “endlessly in flux.”

And one hopes, viewers endlessly captivated, as Alexander Hamilton’s plan for a “commercial urban universe” begins shaping the city’s future across the 19th century en route to a concluding segment that grandly sets the stage for the present.

The year is 1919, the boys are back from “over there,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is assuring his fiancee, Zelda, that in New York “everything is possible,” and the city is eclipsing London as the center of the world. It’s a throbbing Times Square of energies and aspirations where his young man’s novel, “This Side of Paradise,” launches Fitzgerald, just as New York itself is being launched across the decade he calls “the greatest, gaudiest spring in history.”

New York is becoming what writer Peter Quinn calls “the factory of popular entertainment,” and Harlem its great, gushing fountain of culture as part of a remarkable mingling of black, Jewish and other influences.

Then, with all the fury of Sunday’s big quake on CBS, comes the Crash of 1929, with the stock market diving like some of its ruined investors will plunge to their deaths after losing everything.

New York’s history is made for metaphors, as the Burns film affirms. From the ashes of the Crash that year rises the world’s tallest structure, the new Empire State Building, Manhattan’s monument to rebirth and excess, a phallic tower just waiting to be embraced a few years later by King Kong while touching the clouds far above the soup lines and suffering masses below.

And they are masses. Despite numerous attributes, there’s something impersonal about “New York.” Lovely prose aside, what’s largely missing throughout are the city’s human girders, its people and the intimate stories about a city shaping their lives.

So go Gotham. But watching from Los Angeles, New York remains that other woman on the other coast, at once seductively voluptuous and alien.

* “New York: A Documentary Film” will be shown Sunday through Thursday at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV and KVCR. “Aftershock: Earthquake in New York” will be shown Sunday and Tuesday at 9 p.m. on CBS. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children). “The Cruise” will be shown Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. on Cinemax.

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached by e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.