“ The crime-ridden New York City of 1976 is not the billionaire playground it is today.”

Absolutely. I visited NYC multiple times during that period, and yes it was as bad as the city depicted in the film. Even tourists stopped going there. The Big Apple was dirty and dangerous, with lunatics and hustlers all over the place. You took your life in your hands to ride the subway. So where would the film be set today? Every major city has bad parts, but even Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and downtown are pretty nice. While growing up in Pittsburgh back in the 1970s, no one went downtown at night except to engage in the sex trade or buy drugs. Now it’s pretty nice too.

Maybe some things didn’t just mutate, they actually got better.