OK, New York, wipe that frown of your face. We've got tourists to soak!

Our ever-resilient city, where a crisis lasts only as long as the stock
 market is closed, has found closure in the usual place: self-promotion.
 Even as our local tourist bureau, NYC & Company, was hyping the theater
 industry last week, the state's Empire State Development agency was
 crashing an unprecedented 60-second "I Love New York" commercial
 featuring the mayor, the governor, everyday New Yorkers, everyday
 celebrities and, our greatest selling point, loving portraits of city
 landmarks.

In other words, New York needs to get back to what it does best: selling
 itself. True, it couldn't come at a better time. The city's economic
 heartbeat -- always one corned beef sandwich away from a massive
 coronary -- is on life-support. Some top restaurants are so quiet that
 they're offering three-course meals for $10. Hotels have "vacancy" signs
 out front. Cabbies are so desperate for business that they'll even pick
 up people going to Harlem.

Usually, it would take a month to produce, shoot and edit a 60-second ad,
 but the new "I Love New York" ad is being completed in a week so it can
 begin airing on Oct. 8 in cities within driving distance of New York
 (those within FLYING distance will, understandably, not see the ad for a
 few more weeks).

"I feel good about this job," said director Mark Claywell, whose Highway
 61 production company is known for its stylish ads for the Florida
 Marlins, Top Flight golf balls and even Stren's fishing line (you
 should've seen the one that DIDN'T get away). "At least we're not
 selling sneakers."

Kicking off a two-day shooting spree that would take him from lower
 Manhattan to Times Square to Central Park to Yankee Stadium and back
 again (you gotta have the sun setting over the Brooklyn Bridge, right?),
 Claywell began Friday morning at Caffe Napoli, a picture-perfect Little
 Italy cafe. The first shot of the day consisted of manager Giovanni
 Varriale joyously opening the restaurant's doors while busboy Sixto
 Perez smilingly carried out a podium bearing the day's menu. The
 postcard image was so romantic that it would've made Woody Allen blush.

Although Caffe Napoli was picked because, Claywell admitted, "they were
 nice to us when we were location-scouting," the 62-year-old Varriale is
 ideal for an "I Love New York" commercial. He visited as a tourist 15
 years ago, got a job in a friend's restaurant and never left.

"It's a-funny," said Varriale in his thick Neapolitan accent. "I really
 DO a-love New York."

With the shot finished, Claywell was energized. Grabbing a hand-held
 camera, he headed down Mulberry Street towards Canal, which is not the
 obvious place to film a commercial about how beautiful New York can be.

Yet real life in this city IS beautiful: the sun gleaming off a tenement
 wall, the old guy with the smelly cigar, the Chinese guy with the
 hand-truck loaded eight-feet high, the Mexican man unloading vegetables,
 the infernal traffic, the biker with tattoos, the kid eating what
 appears to be chicken toenails, the Yugoslavian woman cleaning tables.

"Chinatown is the most stimulating place," Claywell said, quickly
 exhausting his film. 

Next, Claywell needed a shot of the New York Stock Exchange. Even under
 normal circumstances, getting a 30-person crew to the corner of Wall and
 Broad is not easy -- but a city-provided police escort got Claywell's
 team through all the checkpoints.

The advance unit had already filmed people going to work (the ones
 wearing gas masks and paper filters will, obviously, be edited out) and
 filmed financial reporter Maria "The Money Honey" Bartiromo reporting
 from the stock market floor.

Unlike other celebrity footage -- Ben Stiller coming out of a cab with
 shopping bags? Puh-leze! -- Bartiromo, an actual New Yorker doing her
 actual job, helped convey the commercial's central message: Hey, we're
 getting back to normal. You should, too.

Working like a guerilla film crew, Claywell quickly grabbed his last shot
 of the morning: the statue of George Washington at Federal Hall pointing
 to the famous sculpture on top of the stock exchange, that metaphoric
 representation of our indestructible national wealth.

"I needed that shot," Claywell said. "It says a lot aesthetically,
 politically, economically."

It says, more important, that we're back in business.

--30--