Sean Penn on a pre-Giuliani New York

"You wanna know how New York was back in the nineties, well I'll tell you whippersnappers what it was like. It was cold and grim, with the chance of extreme violence and genital mutilation, a lot like sharing a bed with my ex-wife Robin Wright after a drunken 2am booty call that ends prematurely. 


That's right, you just heard a white man say booty call. 

Well ... all this ethnically confused jibber jabber and nostalgic talk of the Big Apple takes me back to 1993 when I was shooting Carlito's Way, when me and some of the other cast members got a taste of what New York was really like. 

It started one day on the set up in Spanish Harlem. I was in 'the zone' as drug-addled mob lawyer David Kleinfeld, with my seventies nylon suits and candyfloss jewfro in tact. I was nervous just being around Penelope Ann Miller, and at any moment I expected Arnie to pop out from behind a door and scream "it's NOT a tumour!" in his steroid-tinged Nazified accent. 

Yeah I just dropped a KC reference. Deal with it.

Pacino was doing his usual Method acting schtick, which just meant he was shouting at inanimate objects with his trademark googly eyes darting around like two field mice on crank. De Palma starting throwing a hissy fit about the lighting, so we all broke for lunch. Guzman suggested we go get some hogies from a place he knew round the corner.

Bad move. We came down 115th and were set upon by some gangsters from the barrio dressed like rejects from a Furious Five video. No talking, no reasoning. This was just a straight up G.A.N.K. Pacino was off down the street quicker than a Vietnamese shopkeeper down to the track with a hot tip on the ponies.

Thankfully in my Kleinfeld guise they didn't recognise me as the star of acclaimed films such as Colors, State Of Grace or Shanghai Surprise, but they jumped on Guzman and beat him down hard for "killing Swayze in Ghost" then stomped my good friend John Leguizamo cowboy style and stabbed him in the cock for "ruining the Mario Brothers film".

I guess what I'm trying to say is that sometimes we look at the past with rose-tinted spectacles, sort of like the ones I wore as David Kleinfeld, but really there's no escaping the fact that New York was a fucking dump back then."