[ Post a Response | EVEN DeepER Blurting! ]
Posted by DexterBG on 3/17/2006, 2:20 am
I had a spare 90 minutes one evening. And so I watched Kolchak - The
Night Strangler again. I had to see where Al Lewis appeared, for one
thing. He was the drunk that ambushes Kolchak in the old Seattle
Underground tour. Anyway. Everyone was great, Hamilton, Brady,
Carridine, Oakland, Cox, and of course McGavin.
.
Near the very last minutes of the movie, just after Kolchak breaks
into the Richard's Clinic basement, and discovers the secret part
of the old underground that nobody else had found. The very first
view of this was somehow familar to me. It was multi-leveled and
all foggy. And there was this old looking elevator car. And then
that's when I recognized it. It was an interior shot of the old
Bradbury Building, used in movies and Tv shows for decades.
.
I haven't the faintest idea what the exterior of the Bradbury
Building looks like. It's probably a fairly standard design, and
very boring. But the interior is almost unbelieveable. And I've
seen it so many times, I feel like I must have lived there in a
past life. It's design concept was unique for its time. But now,
it's much like today's moderm enclosed shopping malls. There is
this public space on the inside, and all the levels are accessed
from it, via balconies, stairways, and elevators. And it's all
done in a kind of victorian mix of brick and cast iron. If there
is a website for it, you should locate and visit it. I wish that
there was one of those 3D view sites, like for expensive cars. Or
even better, a version of Doom/Gloom, that has it all mapped out.
.
As I said, the interior of this building (in L.A.?) has appeared
in a number of movie. Most notably, in "Blade Runner". Sabastian's
apartment building. But they really trashed it all up for the shot.
Believe me, it doesn't have pools of racid water everywhere, and
stuff. An earlier B&W movie featured it, called "Good Neighbor
Sam" (1964). And I'm sure there have been others I just can't
recall right now. Possibly an Hitchcock movie. Some Tv series have
also use this building's interiors. My favorite was the old B&W
"The Outer Limits" episode, "The Devil With the Glass Hand". They
ran all over the inside of that place. And some guy played a really
mean piano, the whole time, which seems to echo throughout it. I'd
love to have just that one episode on a DVD. It was so eerie. I
also vaguely remember an episode of "Quantum Leap" using it, where
Sam Becket is a Private Eye in the 1940s. And we get to see the one
elevator and the lobby.
.
This shot of it in The Night Strangler, looked a bit cropped off
or blocked out. Either they didn't want to show too much, or they
couldn't because of some shooting angle problem. A few minutes
latter, they're using some backlot scenes, filmed at night, and
a matte shot insert, to simulate distant olde town Seattle row
fronts. But still later, when the strangler is taking Kolchak
back to his laboratory. The foggy Bradbury elevator shot is used
again. I doubt that they even had electric elevators in the late
1800s, when Seattle was burned and built over top of. Or for that
matter, electric street lamps. In fact it was probably the use of
gas lighting that caused old Seattle's fire anyway. But here we
see lightbulbs in use. That's what is called an anachronism.
-Dex
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