Sensitive Linda Seton (Katharine Hepburn) sits in the fourth floor playroom of her family's Fifth Avenue mansion in George Cukor's Holiday (1938), and troubled Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) cruises mean streets in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976).

New York is indeed the city of 8 million stories and their filmic interpretations through backstage musicals, sophisticated comedies, romantic dramas and gangster noirs, have been captivating us for a century. We have inhabited them since the American movie business — which was born in New York — began. New York mesmerizes us by its people, natives and transplants alike, casting its energy, intensity and magic against a backdrop unique in all the world — whether sparkling or sordid, shot in Manhattan or concocted on a Hollywood sound stage.

As James Sanders writes in his introduction to the superb Celluloid Skyline, New York is two places, the real and the dream city, "born of that most pervasive of dream media, the movies." We know what goes on there, Sanders reminds. "An actress twists her ankle, and gives the chorus girl a break.... Some sailors come to town and spend the day. A gorilla escapes from a theater and climbs a tall building."

As an architect, Sanders' knowledge of design and structure enhances Celluloid's nearly 500 pages. His keen eye and accessible style make us understand, say, the difference between Warner Bros.' concept of Broadway and MGM's, where "the theaters ... were typically streamlined art deco masterpieces."

Sanders is great about crediting art directors, production designers and cinematographers. He is especially keen at analyzing different directors' visual approaches to similar themes. Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) and King Vidor's The Crowd (1928) both look at the perils of individuals caught in the maw of giant corporations, and open with comparable shots of multi-windowed office buildings, endless rows of anonymous desks. "The Apartment had a distinct advantage:" Sanders writes, "it had the International Style, whose reliance on abstract, repetitive modules could not help but reinforce the most alienated impression of corporate life." Also fascinating are descriptions of how Wilder (for the Lost Weekend, 1945), Jules Dassin (for The Naked City, 1948) and others "stole" their location shots.

Many of the book's 328 sharp illustrations haven't been seen since they left studio files, and the Afterword and Acknowledgment section is a veritable study guide to Hollywood studio era methods of recording design aspects of production. The culmination of Sanders' 15 years of work has become a timely tribute to a skyline that, with and without the World Trade Center, can never be diminished.

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