Bus tours of classic movie location sites, and drives past stars’ home, are not new. Several tour operators have been giving ‘Homes of the Stars” tours in Los Angeles for decades. Movie bus tours have popped up in numerous U.S. cities. Americas love them.

I do, too. I am a big classic movie lover and so on Saturday, with my wife in tow, we took a TCM (Turner Classic Movies) bus tour of New York movie sites. It was a day on which the sun ducked in and out of the clouds and thousands of people surged through the streets of the city.

Turner Classic Movies has joined forces with On Location Tours to put together a thoroughly enjoyable ride through the history of New York films, from the locations for On the Town to King Kong, Ghostbusters and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It is not only a tour of movie sites, but an engaging tour of New York historical sites, such as Central Park, the Queens Borough Bridge and the Empire State Building, too,

The TCM tour buses are all equipped with TV monitors that show clips from famous old movies lensed in the Big Apple. A tour guide takes you through the city, sometimes whizzing down avenues and sometimes stuck in traffic, regaling you with anecdotes about the film locations, the making of movies, and lots of movieland hot gossip over the years.

Who takes the movie tours? Everybody. We expected a bus full of cinema elitists with movie magazines sticking out of their jacket pockets when we boarded the bright, red TCM bus, but found that all of the passengers were ordinary middle class folks who loved the movies.

“I would say that most of our passengers really know films pretty well, but even those who do not know a great deal about films enjoy the idea of traveling through New York and learning about them, and everybody has a favorite New York film,” said Jason Silverman, the thin, glib and unbelievably knowledgeable guide on our tour. “You expect older people to know a lot about 1930s films, but kids do, too, Last week, I had two ten year old kids on the trip and they knew the movies like I did. They cleaned up on the movie trivia quiz we run and were telling me things I didn’t know about particular films. And these kids were ten!”

The TCM movie tour buses do not only carry New Yorkers. Passengers are from all over the U.S. and foreign countries. “I’ve had people from Australia, South Africa and Japan and lots of people from California,” said Silverman, a movie buff himself who hails from Chicago. “Movies and movie history are universal.”

Silverman and all of the TCM bus guides go through a vigorous training program. They must once again see all of the 30 some classic films that they mention on the tour, re-read books on movie history, lead a half dozen or so practice tours and keep up with Hollywood news. “Every time I pass a film location in New York it triggers my memory and I tell people an extra anecdote. It’s fun for the passengers and fun for me, too.”

Fans favorite New York based movies? Silverman says they are King Kong, Ghostbusters, the Out of Towners, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and all the Woody Allen films.

The native New Yorkers who take the tour are sometimes more surprised about the locations than people from halfway around the globe. “I constantly get New Yorkers who used to live in a particular neighborhood. We’ll drive through the neighborhood and show clips from a famous old move made there. The New Yorkers will yell, ‘hey, I used to live there. I walked past that building for years’.”

The number of sites you drive past, and see clips for, is astonishing. Hollywood is the King in the move world, but New York is the Crown Prince. Thousands of movies have been made there. The Plaza Hotel, as an example, is the most featured building in Big Apple film history (remember Streisand and Redford embracing in the horse drawn carriage in front of it in The Way We Were?). Central Park has been a setting for over 240 films.

On the tour, you see buildings, parks, traffic circles, museums, libraries and even Zabar’s supermarket. There are businesses located in buildings today that served as famous film locations fifty years ago. A New York cleaners was used as the book store in one film.

The wonder of the tour is how the buses can line themselves up with locations to reflect the actual scenes you see on the TV monitor. At one point, the guide kept urging the driver to move just a little bit farther up the street until he had the bus perfectly lined up with a subway entrance. Then the clip rolled of the scene at the subway entrance. At another point, we saw that famous scene of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton talking on the bench near the romantically lighted Queens Borough bridge at night and, suddenly, in front of us was the bridge itself.

To me, the highlight of the trip was the movieland stories. Silverman loaded his narrative with wonderful anecdotes about films and the stars.

# Yoko Ono, wife of Beatles’ John Lennon, owns 20% of the sumptuous Dakota apartment building, where the late Lauren Bacall had a $26 million apartment.

# Dustin Hoffman, not sure he would get the part of Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, dressed himself as dirty street panhandler and asked film execs to meet him at a street corner. There, they were annoyed for fifteen minutes by a grubby beggar. Then Hoffman felt obligated to tell them the panhandler was him. He got the part.

# The townhouse where Breakfast at Tiffany’s was filmed at 169 E. 71st St. is for sale and the owners are asking about twice the prices of their neighbors s homes because of the movieland fame of the building.

# Hollywood execs were not happy with the actual filming of the fabled scene in which wind coming up from a subway grate raises Marilyn Monroe’s dress to scandalous heights in The Seven Year Itch, so they re-shot the scene in a Los Angeles film studio (the streets of New York never looked so clean).

# There is a scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s where Audrey Hepburn brazenly and loudly whistles for a cab and gets one. Actually, Hepburn did not know how to whistle and they used a horn while she parted her lips.

# My favorite was the story of Jules Munshin, who played Ozzie, the third sailor of On the Town with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. Munshin had an intense fear of heights and throughout a song number on the roof of a tall skyscraper he sang and danced with Sinatra and Kelly but had to hold on to their arms as they scurried around the roof to calm his fears (you see it all on the clip).

Among the sites and clips: the attack of the marshmallow man through Columbus Circle from Ghostbusters, dancing at the Tavern on the Green restaurant in The Eddie Duchin Story, the big gorilla on top of the Empire State Building in King Kong, the charge of Russians into Bloomingdale’s department store in Moscow on the Hudson, the always spooky Rosemary’s Baby at the Dakota, Annie Hall at Lincoln Center and a half million other film locations for Woody Allen’s movies (by the way, Woody just hated Manhattan, that won all those awards), the arrival of Broadway Danny Rose and his pals at the Waldorf.

And, of course, there is Tiffany’s, the world famous jeweler on Fifth Avenue. The clip shown on the bus is at the start of the movie. You see Audrey Hepburn walking towards the store and then the gorgeous music of Moon River kicks in.

There are movie site tours everywhere. We took a movie location tour of San Francisco a few years ago and were amazed at how many different movies and television series had been shot in the alabaster city by the bay and how wonderful they were – The Maltese Falcon, Streets of San Francisco and all the Alcatraz films.

We also took a tour of stars’ home in Hollywood about ten years ago and were fascinated by the stories the guide told of the different stars as we passed their houses. We learned what streets they walked their dogs down early in the morning and how delighted, or grumpy, they were when the tour bus drove by and everybody waved. We “oohed” and “aahed” at the size of the homes (Dr. Phil’s house was really big) and tight security around some stars homes.

There is a magic about the New York tour, and all of the others, too. The American people and Hollywood, all the way back to 1903, have enjoyed that magic and it will roll on, just like the tour buses do.

In addition to the TCM Tours in New York, On Location Tours also offers a TMZ-TV tour and others from Sex and the City, the Sopranos, Gossip Girl, New York Movie and TV Sites, and TCM tours of movie locations in Boston and Los Angeles. Check www.onlocationtours.com.