Almost Famous|The Plaza Hotel — The Room Where Penny Nearly Doesn't Wake Up

New York is where the film stops being funny. Penny Lane, traded and discarded and finally alone in a hotel room, takes too many Quaaludes. William — who has spent the entire film being the one who watches — has to stop watching. He gets her upright. He gets her walking. He gets help. The scene was shot at the Plaza, on the corner of Fifth Avenue at 59th Street.

The Plaza opened in 1907: nineteen storeys of French Renaissance stone facing Grand Army Plaza and the southeastern corner of Central Park. It is among the most photographed hotels in the world and one of the most filmed. Putting the worst hour of this story inside it is a deliberate piece of cruelty — the most beautiful room the production could get, and inside it the loneliest thing that happens to anybody in the film.

Much of the building is genuinely open. The Palm Court serves tea beneath its stained-glass ceiling, the food hall downstairs is a working lunch spot, and the Fifth Avenue lobby can be walked through by anyone. The guest floors are not, and there is no plaque anywhere marking a fictional overdose.

Stand outside with the Pulitzer Fountain at your back and look up at the ranks of windows. Any one of them will do. That is the shot.