Martin Austermuhle
Can’t anyone get D.C. right?
Today the Post’s Reliable Source reports that Nicole Kidman’s newest thriller, The Invasion, makes a number of relatively amateur mistakes in trying to use the District as a backdrop, even though a good part of it was filmed here. Among those:
– Kidman, who plays a D.C. psychiatrist, buys magazines at one of those big sidewalk newsstand kiosks — the ones all over New York but not on any corner in this town.
– Her fabulous downtown office window looks out on a bunch of skyscrapers.
– While escaping her alien ex-husband, she runs past a Walgreens drugstore in Cleveland Park. Not there.
– On the Metro, the announcer says, “The subway doors are now closing.” Subway?
– To get from Georgetown to Cleveland Park, she drives through a tunnel. Seems like the long route. Oh, it’s also rush hour and there’s no traffic. In our dreams.
Obviously, the movie is supposed to be fiction, so a few creative additions here and there are permissible. And other than detail-obsessed District residents like ourselves, who else will actually notice or care? But after watching the summer blockbuster Live Free or Die Hard and its painful distortions of the District — including numerous skyscrapers, toll booths in D.C. tunnels and the Los Angeles Central Library and Aon Center in the background — we can’t help but wonder why our fair city is continually being misrepresented in movies. Why, for another example, does Aaron Sorkin insist you need to go through Dupont Circle to get from Capitol Hill to the White House in The American President? And there are so many more examples to choose from — Enemy of the State, Spy Games, St. Elmo’s Fire and The Exorcist, to name a few — but where else has the District’s geography and look been sacrificed for entertainment? Perhaps we’ll send your answers on to the producers of the next big blockbuster that will be filmed and set in the District, State of Play — which incidentally stars Brad Pitt and is set to begin shooting in late fall.
Update: This is apparently an issue of enough importance that both FreeRide and the City Paper are giving it coverage. Now we can all collectively admit it’s a slow news day.
