When 'On Location' Can Mean So Much More

By Katey Rich

Over the weekend, while doing other work, I had The Fugitive on in the background. It had been years since I'd seen it, and it was fun to see Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones at a younger age, still gruff and dashing. Interestingly, Ford seemed to age immensely immediately following the Indiana Jones trilogy, while Jones, only a few years younger, looked downright spry in the 1992 thriller. Now he's cast in nearly everything he does as a kind of Old Man of the Mountain figure.

Anyway. What struck me most about the movie is how many of the iconic locations-- the roadside where Dr. Kimble escapes the prison bus, the dam he jumps from, Chicago's St. Patrick's Day parade-- are places you rarely see in movies anymore. The Fugitive shares with another early-90s hit, The Silence of the Lambs, a sense of place rooted within Appalachian/Midwestern America that seems to have disappeared from modern movies. I was struck by the wet leaves Kimble rests in, the bare trees against the gray sky, and the tract housing of the outskirts of Chicago-- all reminiscent of much of America, but not reminiscent at all of the movies.

Movie productions have expanded across the country significantly in recent years, thanks to tax credits in states like Arizona, Rhode Island and Louisiana. But the one spot that seems to have eaten most of the productions is my own city, New York, which is host to just about every kind of romantic comedy, political drama or action movie that can come along. It wouldn't surprise me if the moviegoing world has come to think of New York City as a giant movie backlot, where the cameras are always running and something dramatic is always taking place. It's like a throwback to the old days of studio filmmaking, where everything was either on an L.A. backlot or, occasionally, a New York street. They weren't aiming for verisimilitude back then, but today we seem to accept that most of the stories worth telling are all happening on city streets.

Looking at the movies I've seen so far this year, a handful-- Snow Angels, The Foot Fist Way, Paranoid Park-- have made good use of American locations that don't fit in with the usual iconography. And as more Louisiana or South Carolina productions get underway, maybe we'll be seeing more of those out-of-the-way locations. But I hope that as location shooting continues to grow in popularity, we won't just be seeing Vancouver or Tucson standing in for New York, but movie productions making an actual effort to set stories there. The Fugitive is memorable not just for its top-notch cat-and-mouse plot or its performances, but because it has claimed so many of its locations and scenarios as its very own. We've seen dozens of climactic kisses in the shadow of the Empire State Building, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Can't a mountaintop in Tempe or a bayou in New Orleans be just as romantic?