FOR THE FIFTH TIME, here are some looks at recycled real estate around my town. This time, there’s more-or-less a theme: Places that had their moments in the movies.
Second Avenue in Belltown used to be Seattle’s “Film Row.” Movies were neither made nor publicly shown there, but the big studios had their regional distribution offices there. Many were in the Screen Services building at Second & Battery, long since razed for the Belltown Court condos. Still surviving across Battery are the ex-Paramount office (more recently housing the Catholic Seamen’s Club and the Milky World gallery) and the ex-MGM office (currently housing a card shop, a fabric store, and the Lush Life restaurant).
Across Second Avenue from the Lush Life is the Rendezvous Restaurant’s Jewel Box Theater, which had been a promotional screening room used by the local distribution branches of all the major film distributors. It’s where they’d promote their latest offerings to theater operators. The room itself was a miniature movie theater; the display showroom for a theater-design company operating in the same building. During the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, firms such as this would build and completely equip a movie house wherever you wanted one built, based on a complete prototype plan. Today’s strip-mall multiplexes are also often built from prototype plansÑjust much less beautiful plans.
Few feature films were shot in Seattle before the ’60s. One of the first was The Slender Thread (1965). The movie was constructed around the producers’ desire to cast Sidney Poitier with a white actress but with no romance (this was a couple years before Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?). So Poitier ended up playing a Crisis Clinic volunteer called by suicidal housewife Anne Bancroft. (The two characters never meet on screen.) Exteriors of Poitier’s office were shot at what was then the real Crisis Clinic HQ, in this lo-rise Eastlake Avenue building.
The Union Street side of Benaroya Hall used to be a temporary park (as seen in the film American Heart). Before that, it was a construction-staging area for the Metro bus tunnel. Before that, it was the original 211 Club, a billiard palace now relocated to Belltown. The old 211 served as the titular location in David Mamet’s 1987 movie House of Games, in which card shark Joe Mantegna plays a complex scam on psychiatrist Lindsay Crouse. Her office scenes were filmed at the old AFLN gallery building on Capitol Hill (the Madison Market grocery and condos are now on that site).
This site on Lenora Street has housed several different kinds of restaurants over the last decade (another’s soon to open). None of those real eateries was anything like the boistrious diner set there in Alan Rudolph’s 1985 film Trouble in Mind. Run by Genvieve Bujold, it was a classic checkerboard-floored, cuppa-joe joint the likes of which this town sees far too little of these days. The same film used what’s now the Seattle Asian Art Museum as the private mansion of a slimy crime lord (played in male dress by Divine), decorated completely by Seattle contemporary artists.
Singles, Hype!, and Kurt & Courtney depicted the “Seattle Music Scene” the kids know and love; but The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) depicted a “scene” Seattle civic officials would much rather promote–piano bars and lounge singers. Beau and Jeff Bridges are the ivory-ticklin’ boys; Michelle Pfeiffer’s the torch queen who rescues Jeff from an existence of sullen solitude and tawdry sex. We know about the latter because of a brief scene, shot in the apartments above the 2 Dagos From Texas restaurant, with Jeff and a character identified in the credits only as “Girl in Bed” (played by Terri Treas, later on TV’s Alien Nation).
TOMORROW: What to do with that leftover Y2K-survival stuff.
IN OTHER NEWS: Remember, Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t really the meek-and-mild dreamer of latter-day corporate PR….
ELSEWHERE:
