Nancy Littlefield once grounded a helicopter circling the Chrysler Building because a machine-gunning maniac on the building’s top floor was making observers on the street below tetchy.

But that was one of the few episodes in which her stewardship of the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater, and Broadcasting did anything but make it easier to shoot a movie in New York City.

Littlefield, who died Thursday at 77, revitalized an office that was established under Mayor Lindsay in the late 1960s. Between 1978, when she was appointed by Mayor Koch, and 1983, when she left, the number of films and television shows shot annually in the city more than tripled to nearly 100. With the increase in raw numbers came a reassertion of New York’s status as an iconic city in films such as “Tootsie,” “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Manhattan,” and “Raging Bull.”

Also, with her office’s help, several major studio facilities opened or were refurbished, including Silvercup Studios in Long Island City and Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn. Vitagraph had been used as a high school in the decades after most of the film industry abandoned the city for the West Coast. When Mr. Koch appointed Littlefield, he said she was “soft and tough, soft and womanly enough to entice filmmakers here, tough enough to stand up for the movie industry against the city bureaucracy.”

Especially proud of her efforts to cut through red tape, Littlefield also wrung key concessions out of the Teamsters and other unions that cut costs to film in a city that had gained a reputation for expense and headaches. She liked to call such concerns “a myth” but conceded that she herself, while shooting a commercial in Washington Square Park, had been forced to pay off the police. A special police unit was subsequently created to prevent such abuses.

Among the first female members of the Directors Guild, Littlefield brought decades of film experience to her role in the New York limelight. A native of the Bronx, she had worked from New York in the 1950s as a casting agent for Screen Gems on the Hollywood-based shows “Father Knows Best” and “Rin Tin Tin.” In the 1960s, she worked on such TV series as “The Defenders” and “Naked City.” Later, she moved to Los Angeles and founded a production company. A documentary on single motherhood that she directed, “And Baby Makes Two,” won an Emmy in 1979.

The list of films produced in New York during her years in office is a lineup from a halcyon cinematic past, including “The King of Comedy,” “An Unmarried Woman,” “The Wiz,” “All That Jazz,” “The Verdict,” and on and on. Several films provoked protests, including “Cruising,” a peek into the sleazy Greenwich Village S&M demimonde, and “Fort Apache the Bronx,” a police drama depicting a burned-out city at its most pathological. In addition to critics, there were always irritated residents to contend with. “They shoot people jumping out of windows, an elephant walking down 57th Street, a woman coming out of a subway and getting shot,” Littlefield told Reuters in 1981. She nixed a herd of bulls that an advertiser wanted to stampede down Wall Street.

“What if the bulls went out of control?” she told the New York Times. “Can you imagine coming up out of the subway and being greeted by a 5,000-pound Brahma bull?”

Littlefield also led efforts to expand the city’s studio space, for decades a bottleneck to production. At Littlefield’s request, the Public Development Corporation underwrote the 1981 refurbishment of the Vitagraph Studios building in Flatbush. It was returned to being a studio for the first time since becoming Yeshiva University High School for Boys in 1964. The following year saw the transformation of the Silvercup bread bakery in Long Island City into a studio where Woody Allen shot scenes from “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”

Littlefield left the film office in 1983. She was mentioned as a candidate for the film office again under Mayor Dinkins, but nothing came of it.

In 1987, she became executive director of the fledgling Queens Public Television, where for two decades she oversaw public access programming and helped teach video production. She relished the ethnic mélange of Flushing, she told Newsday in 1996, because her mother was a Southern Baptist and her father was from an Orthodox Jewish family.

Nancy Littlefield

Born September 18, 1929, in the Bronx; died August 30 at her home in Delray Beach, Fla., of lung cancer; survived by her children, Joshua Littlefield and Amy Norton, and five grandchildren.