Washington Square Park was not filled with beatniks and their bongo’s on Thursday when the cast and crew of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” arrived to shoot a scene for the Amazon Prime comedy.
Instead, two men in the park who had nothing to do with the location shoot got into a massive brawl adjacent to the set and drew in the “Maisel” crew.
One of the men, seen in the video below dressed in a black tank top, actually made his way to star Rachel Brosnahan and put his hands on her shoulders. A set insider told me, “We all shouted Noooo! and got Rachel away from him unscathed. She took it pretty well.”
Who didn’t take it well was director-show creator Amy Sherman Palladino, who was there with husband and co-creator-director Dan Palladino. “AMy was visibly shaken, she was crying, asking how did this happen?”
That’s a good question. “This is the only time I’ve ever worked on a location shoot without security or a hired cop,” says an observer. “The Maisel crew actually jumped into to protect everyone. It could have been much worse.”
The unit never finished the scene, in which Brosnahan’s Midge Maisel, a comedian, is going to a fake newsstand to pick up a review of her latest show. Observers saw the newsstand, made to look like it was from 1961, was full of stories about President Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. (This means “Mrs. Maisel” has only advanced three years in time since it started six years ago.)
Ironically, all this happened just two blocks or less away from the spot where the real life real estate developer brothers of actor Michael Zegen, who plays Joel Maisel, want to knock down two landmarked buildings and erect a 241 foot luxury tower on lower Fifth Avenue. The local Community Board has nixed the idea, and the Landmarks Commission is waffling on allowing such a monstrosity.
In the video, you’ll see a man in a white tank top, who was thought to be homeless and mentally unwell, pick up glass bottles from a Black Lives Matter shrine and smart smashing them. A woman who was also perhaps unwell was screaming at the “Maisel” cast calling them “prostitutes.”
Also ironically, the actor who plays the toughest “Maisel” character, Alex Borstein, was in her trailer and never got to see any action. Her character, Suzie, would have handled these guys with aplomb!
Kudos to the Hollywood Fix for getting the video, and a site called thethings.com first reported the story.
As Cindy Adams would say, Only in New York, kids, only in New York
