Hey y'all, it's Andrew with Free Tours By Foot New
Orleans. Today, we're doing a walk around film, TV, and book related sites in New Orleans. This
is a subject we don't get to do on our live tours, it's a little bit specific for getting
a big crowd together every single day, so we're stepping a little off
the beaten path subject-wise. We'll begin our tour right in this spot with a
short scene from James Bond: Live and Let Die. From here, we'll walk just around the corner
where I'll show you the exterior shot used for the Forensic Headquarters of NCIS: New Orleans.
Next we'll take a short walk where I'll show you a house used in the movie adaptation of Anne Rice's
'Interview With The Vampire,' and then we'll take a short stroll down Royal Street to the building
used to depict the LaLaurie Mansion in the series American Horror Story: Coven. From there, we'll
continue down to Royal Street to Esplanade Avenue, the border of the French Quarter, where I'll show
you the historical location of the slave auction house where Solomon Northup of 12 Years a Slave
fame was sold into slavery. After a short detour to show you the location of the Tru Tone bar
from NCIS, we'll head back to Jackson Square, where I'll show you homes associated with authors
William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. Our tour ends on Canal Street, where I'll show you a
wonderful little statue of Ignatius J. Riley, the main character from the novel 'Confederacy of
Dunces.' We'll leave links to some of the media mentioned in this video in the description below.
As usual, if you know our company, you know we do live walking tours on a regular basis, and as
our name suggests, all those tours? you don't pay anything to come on them, and at the end you
pay what you feel like it's worth. So if you like what you experienced today, please feel free to
throw us something. You'll see a Venmo contact, and thanks for your support for
keeping us and this operation afloat. So for starters, Jackson Square -- a lot of things
shoot out there, a lot of times when people shoot films and tv in New Orleans, it's because they
want you to know it's in New Orleans. We've got a special place in the American imagination
going back as long as film has existed, so there have been films set here and shot here
going back to the beginning -- but lesser-known, we also had a huge boom in the film and TV
industry here in the years following mostly around 2010, so big state tax incentives made sure that
things not set in New Orleans were shot here too. Less often are those things in the French Quarter,
so we're going to be focusing on stuff that is about New Orleans or at least has
a connection with New Orleans, and as one example, right here on this block we
had a scene from James Bond: Live and Let Die, and this was a block where they shot a jazz funeral
scene. This is one of our famous traditions where, as part of a funeral, a live brass band
escorts the mourners and does first a sad dirge procession -- slow and steady -- and then it
switches over to being an upbeat party, kind of a celebration of life, as it goes a little further.
These are really colorful New Orleans traditions, and this movie was basically what you could
call a "local color" movie. It was about taking as many bright, colorful local things -- down to
like, athletically jumping from one alligator to the next -- and stuck them all in one place;
not necessarily reflective of what daily life looks like here, but it's the kind of stuff that
can be fun to watch if you don't have much of an experience of the place already. So in that same
vein, we're going to see some stuff from NCIS: New Orleans which is also similarly over the top
in that style, pass as we do that over towards Royal Street. So right now we're on Charter
Street, we're going right towards Jackson Square, so there's our Cathedral, like I said. We also
got our Katrina and Mardi Gras museums right here, and the French Quarter is non-stop people
watching y'all -- and sometimes also dog watching -- so here is a
truck driven by a Chihuahua. Truly, y'all, the French Quarter supports
careers that would never happen any other way; it's like you can be a live meme and it lasts more
than a few seconds. So we're passing out towards Armstrong Park, which if you've watched our Music
Tour, you'll be familiar with that area, and we're going to be approaching one really innocuous
spot. As you can see from what we're passing by, French Quarter architecture stands out; you kind
of know when you're in this neighborhood, there's few places in America that look like it, but not
very much. And so normally when you shoot here, it's going to be stuff that really screams New
Orleans. But when you're exploring as a visitor, it's easy for those things to fly under the
radar, because there's so many things that look kind of similar -- and then once in a while,
something gets shot at a really understated, innocuous place, and NCIS is a good example. So
a lot of people like this show, people come and ask me about it all the time, but they themselves
walk by the locations where it's shot all the time without realizing it, and we're about to head
over to where their headquarters is located. And it's located right between Royal and Bourbon
streets, so these are our -- again -- upscale residential street and our debauched
party street right next to each other, and both of those streets are super high traffic,
but the little cross streets in between can really fly under the radar; people just use them to
get from one thing to the next. So just over here past the Vampire Boutique -- which if
you're gonna notice one thing on the block, it's gonna be the Vampire Boutique
-- is a little innocuous gateway with a innocuous and frankly ugly
parking lot on the other side of it. But this is where, in countless episodes of NCIS, they're gonna pull their vehicles in and
head in to do some forensic analysis. So not a lot to see by itself, but what
this kind of points towards -- y'all can see some greenery over behind the fence and the
signs of other buildings off in the distance. So the blocks here are decently large and the
properties run really deep, so you've got these courtyards -- these enclosed green spaces back
behind with like palm trees and fountains -- and for all the extrovertedness of the quarter,
they're these really quiet, peaceful spaces, and they make beautiful use of that stuff
in NCIS. The actual indoor space of their headquarters is not actually located here. A great
deal of the time, when a film or a tv show shoots even on location in New Orleans, they're
going to use exteriors from the street and then they're going to do their interiors on sound
stages. So the soundstage facility is going to be a good distance off from here, not a thing you're
probably going to stumble across by accident. If y'all would like to see that or if
there's other things you'd like to see that are outside the French Quarter, films
or tv that you know about that would give you an in on something of your favorites, then let
us know -- maybe we'll shoot another video that covers some of that more far-flung stuff. I've
got the Vampire Boutique behind me again, and with that subject in mind, another show set in
New Orleans -- also a future Vampire Cafe -- there's a show that is set here and
definitely uses some New Orleans sites called The Originals, and talk about
fans of this stuff; there was a little while where I was meeting a lot of people
who were really into this show, and while it uses a lot of New Orleans tropes and certainly
leans heavy on vampires, it's almost entirely shot in Atlanta. And I mentioned we had a big
moment as kind of being the Hollywood center of the South? Atlanta was our rival for that for
all that time, and I say was because really they've pretty much completely won that fight.
So not as much shot here as there used to be, but Atlanta is a place where they've got -- had tax
incentives then that were about as strong as ours, and more so these days -- so even a show that was
set in New Orleans might want to shoot in Atlanta for totally not shooting related reasons, just
for financial reasons. So pretty much all you get in The Originals that actually reflects what
New Orleans looks like is what the industry calls "establishing shots," and so that's just
going to be like -- picture a quick pan across Jackson Square, and then they're going to go
to the actual scene -- so it's a few seconds worth of footage. How you doing? FAN: I love your
reporting on Youtube! TOUR GUIDE: Oh thank you! FAN: You do a great job! TOUR GUIDE:
Thanks man! FAN: I've only seen the ones for the Garden -- I know, you're the one. TOUR
GUIDE: You're good, but don't worry about it. FAN: Garden District, and the French Quarter,
you know during Covid. TOUR GUIDE: Yeah, yeah we're working -- this is going to be a like
a Film and TV locations one, so we're getting a little bit more specific, because you know
there's only so many neighborhoods that people out there have all heard of already, so thanks
for watching! FAN: What I love about it is that you do a walking thing, so it's slower. So y'all,
with The Original shooting pretty much exclusively in Atlanta, you just get establishing shots
here, so that's the industry term for like -- pan across Jackson Square and then go to a set in
a sound stage -- and the way you can tell the difference when you're watching the show is 1.
they shoot a lot in cemeteries, and their fake tombs are big enough to like, walk inside of --
that's not how real tombs typically work here. 2. it's a lot much wider streets -- you can
see these aren't the hugest streets, not a good place for NCIS headquarters either, it's a
little too tight for cop cars to get around, and 3. when you're on the set in Atlanta, everybody
is like a 20-something year old fitness model; we have a lot to love about New Orleans, but that
is not how most of us look here, so you'll be able to tell the differences. But they use some really
iconic exteriors and for a long time in that show, these vampires are fighting over a house, and
voila! I guess uh, you know, human emotion dies, but property value is forever. So this is actually
an event venue, and the show shows some really big parties happening inside here, and people who
visit town occasionally actually get to go attend some kind of bash inside there, so some fans have
gotten a very inside experience at this place. So definitely worth watching for the
quick seconds of local footage there, something vampire related that did mostly
shoot here? Interview With The Vampire, and that is of course the kind of grandparent of all
vampire related stuff in New Orleans. Anne Rice, the novelist who wrote that? Primary film made
from her work, and we could show you all around town on the basis of that film, but we'll give
you one particular spot -- this house over here was used in a scene in that film
when a couple of the main characters uh, indulged in a little bit of mass murder and
they massacred the family that lived in this house -- and you get to see a shot of their bodies
being removed down those steps in coffins, so it's a quick little cameo, but by a really distinctive
house. This is also used in 12 Years a Slave, and it's one of the oldest houses in the city,
and a style that is typical of what they looked like in the 18th century and built entirely
of cypress wood without the use of nails. But that is not this tour so -- actually kind
of um -- kind of is this tour! So one cool things about this house -- I'm thinking about
the literary subject -- so this is the house, it's like official name is Madame John's Legacy.
So that is an unusual name, and it relates to the work of a writer -- one of the big late 19th
century writers here, not a household name today, but definitely a standout among New Orleans
writers -- this guy George Washington Cable -- kind of a contemporary Mark Twain's, a
little less on the humor side, but similar prose. So George Washington Cable writes local color,
it's the same kind of stuff in terms of just using a lot of the distinctiveness of New Orleans
life that you see in NCIS and James Bond and all that -- you know the NCIS doing kind of the "catch
a criminal by following a trail of beignet crumbs" school of what it looks like to solve a crime
here. Uh, George Washington Cable was doing, just like, slathering on the Creole folklife in
his stories. So he writes a story in which a woman receives a house as an inheritance from a Monsieur
John, and so the house in that story is Madame John's Legacy; it's the legacy that she receives.
So ultimately a lot of people end up starting to visit New Orleans who have never been here in
that era, New Orleans tourism really starts in the early 20th century, and they're coming here often
never having been exposed to the city by anything but George Washington Cable's stories, so they
want to know where his fictional stories happened in this real city -- and of course the answer
is nowhere, but people wrote these guidebooks taking you around the neighborhood through the
lens of George Washington Cable -- and so they identify this as Madame John's Legacy, not
because it has any connection with the story, but because it looks right; it's one of the few
houses in the style that belongs to that story. So it's an example of fiction having a really big
say in reality here, because of course fiction influences what visitors expect, and in a
neighborhood that's all about its visitors, you know their expectations have a pretty
huge say in reality. So at this point, we get the same thing happening with houses where
movies were shot -- you know, there's a house in the garden district we call the Benjamin Button
house, and that's not on any plaques yet, but give it time. So (Madame John's Legacy is) usually
open as a museum, something worth visiting if you want to get -- you're an architecture nerd and
you want to get an inside view of that stuff when you come around. Uh, we'll come back to the
literary subject a little later on. For now, I'm gonna make our way down Royal Street for a little
bit. So again, Royal Street -- this is where you'd walk if you're exploring the neighborhood through
the lens of like, cool houses, and it's big, over-the-top stuff, but again, in the ensemble
they all sort of blend together, so a lot of films and tv shows end up shooting on these blocks just
to get the overall vibe. So where we're about to turn onto, you'll see these are some of the the
more ostentatious houses in the French Quarter. We uh, we had -- let's see, Jack Reacher did a
-- they staged a Halloween parade on these blocks that we're coming into; American Horror Story:
Coven actually used these blocks to create a 19th century scene in the French Quarter,
so they turned these into dirt roads and otherwise aged the whole neighborhood and shot
here for some, for some flashes back in time. So this is a pretty heavily used area, and it
also is -- hard to call something from the 1950s a historic film, but a vintage film that shot a
little bit up ahead that gives you a bit of a vibe of the French Quarter from a different time --
so this is a movie maybe less of us are familiar with, but it's definitely one worth checking out
if you like to get into cinematic history and it is maybe the most standout, iconic, and I will
just say "good" movies made by Elvis Presley. So Elvis shot a movie that was set in New Orleans
called King Creole, it's 1958 -- and this is when he's pretty early in his career,
he's just taken off like a rock star, and right around that time one of his big
influences is a New Orleans musician named Fats Domino -- who back in 1949 shot
-- made some of his first recordings just a little bit out away from us at the edge of
the French Quarter, and hearing that stuff determined a lot of Elvis's own musical
direction, and also it was the sound that your record executives wanted to make more
accessible -- painfully by putting a face like Elvis' onto it -- to white audiences. So his movie
career? It's the thing that Fats Domino didn't get to do, ends up taking him to the block of Royal
Street that we are on and it is right over here. So we have a balcony scene of Elvis singing down
from here, and it's uh, kind of a reference -- for people who are familiar with New Orleans -- to our
French Market. So if you visited the French Market in the 19th, early 20th century, maybe you would
have singing vendors, and they would be describing their goods through some catchy little song,
and singing vendors pass underneath this area and they're operatic in their sound, but then
one of them is selling crawfish and Elvis sings back down and they do it together. So you get
this transition from this kind of old operatic classical sound to his super contemporary sound
through this cute little song about crawfish. And like, if you listen to the song? Don't take any
culinary advice from it. Whoever wrote it has no idea how crawfish are cooked, but it's a it's a
cute song, it's a cute movie, um -- it was Elvis' favorite role that he did in the films, and it's
kind of a -- you know, young dissolute man has to choose between a life of, uh -- of crime and
violence or a life of virtue and live singing, as represented by two different romantic interests
at the same time, and uh -- and spoiler: one of them conveniently dies at the end, so he gets his
decision made for him. But uh, yeah -- worthwhile thing to check out, a lot of New Orleans scenery
in that one in black and white, as the quarter looked when tourism had started, but it hadn't
gotten so big yet. And that film actually has a huge influence on what people expect out of
New Orleans, because it associates rock and roll accurately with New Orleans -- one of the
places where it came from -- but it makes people come here and expect rock and roll to be performed
live, which there wasn't as much of then. So that really facilitates in the 50s a transformation
from Bourbon Street being more of a jazz strip to being gradually more and more of a rock and
roll strip -- it's a pretty big transformation, and you know, leads us ultimately to it being a
cover band strip today. One more that I want to show y'all on this strip of Royal, and then we'll
get out of the neighborhood for a little bit. So another, say, local color show -- and you notice a
horror theme between these -- was American Horror Story: Coven. So this was a show, two seasons
of American Horror Story that shot here, and you know -- we've had our share of stuff that wasn't
set here being shot here -- the fourth season of American Horror Story was set in Florida and shot
here; this show, American Horror Story: Coven uses some New Orleans characters and
some actual historic New Orleans events, amplifies them, definitely brightens
up the the awfulness of all of it, but one of them is the famous Delphine
LaLaurie. So a lot of folks who have done like, a ghost tour in the French Quarter, or just fans
of ghost stories, you might know the LaLaurie Mansion -- super famous spot. This is not it,
but this is what that show used to portray it. So one of the parts of the LaLaurie story -- and
we're gonna treat this more thoroughly in a ghost tour video that we'll do ultimately, y'all
-- and that's less my forte, so I'm gonna get some help with that one, but uh, we'll get -- we'll
hit the story in full there, but it basically is the story of a really dark episode of abuse
of enslaved people, even above and beyond how enslaved people were normally abused, that took
place in a house just down at the corner -- and that abuse was exposed in large part by a fire
which destroyed that house, along with demolition of what was left over afterwards. So while the
house itself is a mansion that stands out and is plenty creepy, uh -- it actually is not the place
where the story happened, that story happened in a house that looked a lot more like this one.
So the Gallier House was used in the show, where in an unusual moment of historical purism,
they decided to use this instead of that. I suspect also because the owner of the actual house
probably had no interest in letting them use his property, but the cool thing about it is if you're
a fan of the show -- and there are a lot of fans of the show that visit here -- it makes the city
much more dressed in black than it normally is, uh -- visiting here is a possibility on the inside
too, so you can explore this house via tours. It's called the Gallier House, and you can see the
interior, the furnishings, all of that of the era when Madame LaLaurie was alive, and if you
get to know the story via tour, that'll take you a little further down the block. It digs into
the mystery of who exactly was responsible for what happened to these poor people, and spoiler:
probably everybody. So that's the story here, y'all -- we're gonna jump a few blocks ahead down
to the edge of the French Quarter on Esplanade Avenue, we'll pick up there in just a second,
see you there. All right y'all, we just got to the edge of the French Quarter, we're on Esplanade
Avenue right now, which is the street that divides the French Quarter from what's called the Marigny;
this is the next neighborhood in the direction that we call downtown, and it leads to spots that
a few people who visit us go to see -- Frenchmen Street, our main music strip, is right over here
-- otherwise though, it's mostly a residential neighborhood, although most of the residents
have moved here in the last 15 odd years, so definitely still a reflection of tourism.
There's not as much that's shot down here, but there are some really important spots that relate
to Film, TV and Books that have been shot here, and one of those is a memorial marker relating to
the book and movie 12 Years a Slave. Movies often come from books, and in this case 12 Years a Slave
was the non-fiction memoir of a man -- if you're not familiar with the story -- Solomon Northup,
a free man of color -- meaning African extracted guy -- who lived in Saratoga, New York and who was
free for his entire life, but who was kidnapped and forced into 12 years of slavery in New
Orleans, and this is the location of the slave auction where he was sold. So this was one of the
really rare examples of an inside view of slavery from somebody who was literate, because the vast
majority of the time enslaved people were not able to be taught to read or write, so his ended up
being this very important anti-slavery account in the time we're building up to the
American Civil War, but when states like New York were huge consumers of the products
that slavery produced and also were legally bound to recapture and send enslaved people back to
Southern states if they escaped from them. So his return to Saratoga -- which he accomplished
ultimately -- was a really unusual story, normally if an enslaved person managed to get
out of that life it was by making it all the way to Canada, which of course from deep South
Louisiana is a pretty insane task. So that film was shot all over New Orleans, they actually even
used the French Quarter to simulate Saratoga -- a couple blocks of the neighborhood that look a
little less New Orleans than most ended up being disguised as 1840s New York. So we do have, like
I mentioned, those spots where New Orleans can be used to simulate other things even though
it's a really distinctive looking place. The Marigny, super distinctive neighborhood
-- y'all can see what some of our local, just regular family houses look like -- and this
ends up being -- right by Frenchmen Street right now -- so this ends up being the hub for things
that are wanting to set the action in New Orleans, but to focus on more of the the residential
story rather than stories about visitors. So Frenchmen ends up being one of the big shoot
locations, you can see it right over there; more of a view of that in our Music
Tour if you want to check that out, and that's where a lot of the show Treme ends
up shooting -- although mostly it's in the neighborhood called the Treme. Also in NCIS: New
Orleans, as we've seen other locations from that, we've got up ahead a place that they call Tru
Tone bar; so just like with their headquarters back there, they'll shoot exteriors on location
and then interiors are going to be done using a sound stage, so if you visited what's called
actually in real life the R Bar right up here, you wouldn't be seeing the interior that they
simulate, but still kind of a New Orleans dive bar vibe -- a couple degrees above dive, really, if
you like -- if they serve cocktails with Mezcal, I guess it's not a dive, but uh, think like --
Rose specials, but like ironic Rose specials -- a lot of beer; anyways, the R Bar is right up ahead
of us, and really for people who visit here, mostly it's either Bourbon Street if you're doing
like the kneejerk thing, or it's Frenchmen Street if you're going like one step off the beaten
path. R Bar is pretty close to both, but it's one of the things that most visitors don't notice,
and it's got a lodging you can stay in upstairs, so if you wanted to get a first-hand view of
the Marigny with a little bit of an insight into NCIS -- very limited insight into NCIS
-- this is one place you could check out. So R Bar here at the corner right now, with some
festive street art covering up its windows. Near guarantee you nothing you get here is going to
be served in a martini glass, but... off chance Alright y'all, next thing -- we're going to
get back over towards the Jackson Square area where we started. We're going to get literary
for a little bit, that's going to bring us to the short-term residence of William
Faulkner, to start with, in Pirates Alley, right next to St. Louis Cathedral. So
we'll see you back there in just a minute! Okay y'all, we've gotten back to Jackson
Square, for reference we're right next to St. Louis Cathedral right now in Pirates Alley -- and
we visited this spot on our French Quarter Tour, so maybe you've seen this before -- but this was a
space where some of our literary history in a way kind of began. I mean like, I mentioned George
Washington Cable? We've had great writers here well back into the 19th century, but as
far as the French Quarter really being the place that that stuff came from,
it begins in the 20s more or less, and that happens to time out with William
Faulkner living here in what's now Faulkner House Books -- a bookstore, and he's here for a
hot minute from 1924 to 1925, but he begins his novel writing career there. So he writes a couple
of novels, uh first of them is a book called Soldiers' Pay, and that has the critical role of
getting him his publisher, and the -- you know, the first little modicum of his reputation -- even
though it's not one of the most read ones, and then the second one is a book called Mosquitoes,
which was basically -- it's a long inside joke, kind of a story about a disastrous boating trip
that he and a bunch of his friends and associates took, and it's full of characters who are
parodies or pastiches of the people he knew, and based on his portrayal, probably a lot of his
friends turned into associates after that, so not the best book -- considered his worst by
people who know -- but he also wrote a lot of short stuff, plenty of writers are gonna
begin their career with stuff of a more modest scale -- and he wrote for the newspapers
here which is how plenty of fiction writers got their start. So he is writing short stuff in the
way of like, sketches of French Quarter life, fictional but pulled from reality, so if through
a literary lens you want to get a picture of the French Quarter in the 20s when it wasn't quite
as self-conscious about what it looked like to visitors just yet, but still super colorful
and super intense, that's a great source of literature to look into, and Faulkner House Books
sells it as a book called New Orleans Sketches. So colorful life as well, you know, Faulkner had
a lot of fun, they played rooftop tag together and uh, shot passers-by with BB guns, and kept score
on what kinds of people they hit, so definitely mischief-making types too but they started --
he and his less famous contemporaries -- here, a trend of this being an artsy neighborhood
in literature and in other media too, and that ultimately ends up bringing us to a
more well-known time. So just over here right outside of the French Quarter -- or right outside
of Jackson Square -- we have a uh, a theater, for one thing, called Le Petit Theater, and we have
just a little along the block from it, a former residence of Tennessee Williams, who is maybe
the single most famous writer associated with us. And Tennessee Williams was not from New Orleans,
but he came and went a lot, he lived here several times and -- added up to quite a bit of time
-- several of his plays portray New Orleans, but of course most famously, Streetcar (Named
Desire) and he actually wrote that while he lived right there in the exposed brick top floor
of the red building just down from us, and of course Streetcar ultimately becomes
a movie, and that movie is barely shot in New Orleans at all -- mostly it's in Burbank,
California -- and they, like The Originals, one of the few comparisons you can make between
the two, end up building sets that look like New Orleans -- even New Orleans exteriors -- so you're
not really looking at the city then, but of course it's a great work of art, it's a combination of
incredible very locally informed writing as well as great design and directing and performances and
the same director of that -- Elia Kazan -- gave us a movie that was set in and genuinely
shot in New Orleans, less famous, but shot right before that and giving you
very much the New Orleans of a certain era; so this is a movie called Panic in the Streets,
and basically it feels like a mystery story, but instead of a criminal that they're tracing
down, what they have is somebody who's been exposed to a deadly disease; and instead of a
detective, you have a public health official; and instead of a trail of evidence, they're
doing contact tracing; so it's very dramatic, considering the particular subject matter that
it's about, and you get these incredible chase scenes that happen in like the riverfront Banana
Warehouses that the French Quarter used to be full of, and in that way when I say you're seeing the
New Orleans of a different time, a lot of stuff that's in that film is gone, so it's giving you a
very mid-century, very noir, very industrial feel for the New Orleans of its day, and one full of
sailors in a way that you don't see quite so much anymore. So if we teach you one film, Panic in
the Streets is one to check out, and whether it's that or the Elvis film that I mentioned before,
King Creole, you can find clips of this stuff on this very channel or on this very medium
Youtube where you're watching me right now, so definitely give those things an additional search
-- don't let this be the end of your Youtube rabbit hole today. We're going to do one more
little adventure y'all, and it's going to bring us over to Canal Street -- the other flank of the
French Quarter -- opposite side from Esplanade around the business districts and all the
hotels, so we'll see you there, one last thing. All right y'all, last thing -- I mentioned at the
beginning that we have a spot that connects with a famous literary character and a cursed movie
character, and they are in fact the same person. So right now we're on Canal Street, this is the
widest street in our city. You can see the Canal Streetcar over there, the St. Charles Streetcar
finishes right here. So it's the edge of the French Quarter, right next to our business
district -- again hotels and so on in this area is the main attraction, but this used to be a big
department store strip -- and so right next to us, we're going to walk by in a second, there's
an old store called D.H. Holmes, and it was a huge department store in mid-century New Orleans
when the book Confederacy of Dunces was written, and that book starts with its protagonist Ignatius
J. Riley standing in front of D.H. Holmes waiting for his mother to get out, and with a very
specific wardrobe on, so there's a statue of him dressed exactly the way he's described
in the book standing right over there, I'm gonna walk by and get a glimpse of that. If you
don't know this book, so -- it's maybe the single most famous book about New Orleans, and he is
definitely a character who represents the kind of hugeness of people from New Orleans, that there
are these really over-the-top types -- um, and everybody else in it, too -- it's
a real like, character-driven novel, and it's also considered this really true document
of what New Orleans was like at the time -- again gets you a French Quarter of a different era --
and here's your guy. And this is actually modeled on a stage actor who did a play of this, based on
this, not something that lends itself super well to adaptation, but it has been done; it's not, not
a whole lot of plot in it, per se. Spud McConnell, this local actor, is actually who that statue
is modeled on, but it's regarded as a cursed book when it comes to turning it into films.
Multiple actors slated to play Ignatius Riley have died while the thing was in pre-production
-- so John Belushi, others -- and also, even since then, without deaths
attached to it, you had a long, long effort by Stephen Soderbergh to get a film
version of this off the ground. Similarly, even the publication of it could be said to have been
cursed; the guy who wrote this was a young man, not a-a published novelist prior to writing this,
so he didn't have any industry connections. He was an English professor here in town,
and he had written this book in his 20s, advocated for it, even worked with a
publisher for a while doing revisions -- and it's not really about a whole lot, like I said --
so this publisher ultimately ended up dropping it, but for the writer -- John Kennedy Toole is
his name -- uh, the disappointment of that rejection was so extreme that he ultimately killed
himself, so he never saw the book published. But his mother, to whom he was everything, spent the
next 11 years advocating for its publishing and ultimately managed to get it in front of Walker
Percy, one of the famous Louisiana novelists, and that guy -- through him, his advocacy
-- and through that it became published and became this kind of, you know, known
literary masterpiece of New Orleans life, so one to check out. And y'all I've tipped you
off hopefully to some movies or some tv to watch or some books to read today, but if you follow
none of those trails, one thing to do is please, please, please -- maybe even before this video
is all the way done -- wait till this video is done -- go up and search in Youtube for Thelma
Toole -- Thelma is her first name, T-H-E-L-M-A, Toole, T-O-O-L-E. this is John Kennedy Toole's
mother, and you will see when you watch the first result from that search -- as of when I checked
on it right before making this video -- the kinds of people who inspired this book, who inspired
Tennessee Williams, these over-the-top Southern women, truly like something you have to see to
believe, and it seems like something that is pure imagination, this straight-up reality that these
people lived, and so check that out at the very, very least -- you're going to see a one-of-a-kind
spectacle. That's our show today y'all, thank you for watching! We've got lots of other videos,
whether or not you decide to search for those other things that I mentioned in other cities,
other stuff here in New Orleans. So if you want to see more here in the French Quarter, Garden
District, lots and lots of other parts of town, go looking for the rest of those. We're gonna
come out with more soon, so if there's more that you'd like to see, let us know down in the
comments. Please like, let us know what you think, and subscribe, and we'll get those new things to
you ASAP -- and again, if you'd like to support what we're doing here, you'll see the Venmo
link. Thanks so much for your time, see you soon!
