Movie-watching as space-time wormhole experience

So I'm at the gym yesterday, and I'm on the elliptical, because goddamnit, the cold weather really makes my whole hamstring issue more irritating, and I'm reasonably content, and on one of the gym's monitors TNT or whoever is screening Catch Me If You Can, which I'm fine with, because, you know, it's a really good and maybe even great movie. So. It's early in the picture and there's that scene where Frank Sr. and Frank Jr. try to pull that scam at the bank, and as their car goes around the corner to pull up at the bank I see that Duane Reade storefront and I wonder if it's actually period-accurate (the scene is set in the early '60s), and then it hits me; that Duane Reade is a real store and still there, because it's at the intersection of Court and Joralemon in Brooklyn, which means that the building I am in at the very moment I am watching that vintage car in a 2002 movie turn the corner of that intersection is just a hair outside of the frame on the left hand side, because my gym is pretty much two doors up from the corner of the south side of that intersection on Joralemon. 

The location holds for a subsequent shot of stars Christopher Walken and Leonardo DiCaprio:

So while I am on an elliptical machine in the year 2012, two floor down and less than a football field's length east of where I exercise, DiCaprio and Walken stand in the year 2002 enacting a scene recreating events of 1963. How freaky is that?

I was going to point this out to other denizens of the gym, but I've already got kind of a "that guy" rep over there. 

Comments

[Stephen Winer]

That Duane Reade store jumped out at me when I saw "Catch..." in the theater. I turned ten in '63 and I certainly have no memories of that store at the time or even many years later and remember thinking "Couldn't they have thrown a Rexall sign over that?".
So now with your post provoking me, I looked up DR in Wikipedia only to find that it was formed in 1960. Which I guess means that Spielberg can go "Nyah, nyah" at me should he want to. But I'm going to go out on a limb and bet the the original Duane Reade sign graphics would not have looked like that. I'm probably be wrong about that too.

[Stephen Winer]

That should be "I'll probably be wrong about that too". I wasn't going for comical dialect.

[Josh Z]

And in another corner of the Northeast a few hundred miles away, I was also at a gym, also on an elliptical machine, also watching the same movie at that very moment.

[Owain Wilson]

I love 'on this very spot' movie stuff. Nice post, Glenn.

[bill]

I once stayed at the Stratosphere in Vegas, which partially exploded in DOMINO. So that's pretty good too.

[Cadavra]

Something similar happened to me about 20 years ago at Paramount. Someone turned up a print of DAY OF THE LOCUST in a closet, so I decided to screen it to see what condition it was in. Needless to say, I almost fell out of my chair when I saw a scene taking place just outside the projection room!

And of course, it's not uncommon for Angelenos to be sitting in the Chinese or the Cinerama Dome and see that very theatre on-screen!

[ZS]

I wish my gym would play movies. All I seem to watch are those afternoon judge shows. Sadly, this feels more like a black-hole than a worm-hole.

[Andrew K.]

Hahaha. This is such an easy movie to watch, but that doesn't make a less fine film. Whenever I worry about Leo, I think about this performance. Not his best, but few actors I think could have nailed the dichotomy of Frank's youth and his adult tendencies.

AND, Christopher Walken is a bad-ass.

[David N]

There's a Multiplex cinema at Canary Wharf in London and I've been there on a few occasions to see movies where the building just across the street (perhaps forty metres away) is a prominent location. It plays a CIA base in London in one of the Bourne movies, which seems comical given the banality of the hotel it actually houses, but the best usage is in Layer Cake, where it - still under construction - is the building off which Daniel Craig is dangled by some gangsters.

[David Ehrenstein]

My favorite experience of this kind involves my favorite trashy made-for-TV move "Alexander: The Other Side of Dawn" This was a sequel to "Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway" and involved a male hustler in various misadventures in whcih we were encouraged to believe that he somehow kept is virtue even whil dropping trou. Leigh J. McKlosky played Alexander in a cast that also featured Earl ("Policewoman") Holliman and in her very last role the great Jean Hagen.

I was living in WeHo at that time, right at the edge of central Hollywood and while I never ran into the production they were apprently shooting a few blocks away from me constantly. In one scene Alexander tries working at my local Baskin-Robbins but drops out thanks to the lure of major money and Malibu pads.

What a story. Everything but the hound dogs yappin' at his rear end.

[Dan Coyle]

I have to say, I've become a hardcore Spielberg hater in my old age, but Catch Me If You Can, as they say, is the exception that proves the rule. A wonderful film.

[Betttencourt]

When I was 11, my favorite movie was Martin Ritt's PETE 'N' TILLIE (okay, I was an odd 11-year-old), and part of the appeal was probably not just that it was filmed partly in my home town of Mill Valley, but that at least one scene took place just around the corner from the Sequoia Theater (later the Sequoia Twin Cinema, where I worked throughout junior college) where I was watching the film in early 1973.

To second Cadavra, I saw the ITALIAN JOB remake at Grauman's Chinese and was amused that the finale took place right outside the theater I was watching it at.

Also, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN production designer Jeannine Oppewall is not only a first-rate designer but a really cool person (sorry for the name dropping), so I'll spot her any Duane Reade-related errors.

[That Fuzzy Bastard]

I've tried a little Google research, and can't tell if that sign is anachronistic or not. I *think* it's the post-1983 logo, but I'm not positive.

A number of Spielberg films have kinda been ruined for me by klutzy product placement---every time Tom Cruise pulled up his chronometer-or-whatever-it's-called in MINORITY REPORT, I kept thinking "At what point in the future does Bulgari get out of the luxury-goods market and into making hardware for local P.D.s?"

[andy]

When I was freshman at NYU we were sitting downstairs in one of the dorms watching The Freshman, which of course is about an NYU freshman, and at one point he is getting chased or something and runs past the dorm we were in. It felt like if you tore away the wall we were behind, you would see us there, looking confusedly from him to the TV and back to him again.

[brian p]

many lifetimes ago i was in the cinerama dome watching something called 8mm featuring nicholas cage. at just about the time i was inwardly cursing myself for buying a ticket to 8mm and pondering the hitherto nadir-laden filmography of j. schumaker, there was a shot of the cinerama dome. a gasp rose a couple rows behind me as the other person in the theater had his mind blown too.

[LondonLee]

When I saw AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON in, um, London there was a scene with the very movie theater I was sitting in in the background (no, not the porno theater).

Even odder, it was a scene of the doctor buying a newspaper the morning after David has killed a bunch of people and in real life there was no newsstand on that corner! Lord knows why they would go to the bother of setting up a fake one.

[Cadavra]

Brian: I also saw 8mm at the Dome and we all had the same reaction! (There were more than two of us, obviously.)

[Stacia]

With the exception of an indie film and subsequent documentary of said indie film made in the craphole town I went to high school in, films aren't shot in this location, so it's unlikely I'll have any similar experiences. But when it comes to disasters both natural and man-made, I am your go-to gal. When footage of those babies shows up on CNN, it's more than likely I will intimately recognize the areas flattened by tornado, explosion, and/or plague of frogs.

[Robert]

@Brian P @Cadavra: Me too. It was unintentionally meta, which somehow got me *more* into the movie, until, at last, I as uninterested again.

[Alex G.]

This is a pretty iteresting movie to watch. Nice post!