Logic had little place in most of the 1980s rock videos that we watched for countless hours of our lives. It’s one thing trying to decipher how a blind girl got into the studio to sculpt the head of her teacher in secret (but easy to see how she got it so wrong) or discern what exactly Billy Squier was going for here, quite another when the logistics of the adventure portrayed are so obviously wrong as in the video for the Huey Lewis song “I Want A New Drug.”
A track off the mega-successful Sports album, New Drug was infamously cited as being stolen for the theme of Ghostbusters. Huey Lewis sued and won, but then violated a gag order by talking about it years later.
Anyway, in the video, Huey awakens in the late afternoon from what appears to be an all-night bender and suddenly realizes he has a performance with his band The News that night at Sherwood Hall, which was (and still is) a concert venue in Salinas, California.
Huey quickly gets himself ready in about the most eighties garb imaginable, runs outside, and hops into his beat-to-crap 1962 Porsche 356B sporting nerf-bar bumpers and no hubcaps.
As with the example of Hank Moody’s battered 911 in the show Californication, the video demonstrates how a poor-condition air-cooled Porsche comes across as about a thousand percent cooler than any pristine example of the sort a seventy-year-old proctologist typically drives. No, I couldn’t drive a car that bashed-up either, but I’m less cool than most proctologists.
As he drives off, you can see that he’s leaving his apartment in the Potrero Hill area around San Bruno Avenue in San Francisco. Two things are notable: one, the street-parked cars of Frisco in the eighties included things like daily-driven Citroen DS sedans; and two he’s heading the wrong way.
Turn around Huey! Too bad it was decades before the dawn of GPS. You see, instead of just getting on the highway and letting that manic sewing machine engine scream for two hours, Huey’s going very much in the opposite direction for Salinas.
Still, it gets even stranger. For whatever reason, our hero then gets on a Golden Gate Ferry.
This is a bad idea, since no matter which one he takes, that boat is going to cross the San Francisco Bay and take him even further away from his destination.
Actually, in the next scenes he’s on a boat leaving from Angel Island or Tiburon so he either realized he made a mistake and rode the next ferry back from the wrong side of the bay or his car magically flew to the other side of the bay (I guess he could have taken the Golden Gate but he’d be stuck there for hours that time of day).
Now back in San Francisco, he needs to use a chopper to get to Salinas, which makes more sense.
No, it doesn’t! The helicopter ride to the concert lands near water, which is obviously at least ten miles from inland Sherwood Hall. Run, Huey, run!
It all ends well as the gig goes off seemingly without a hitch, and he encounters the lady he’s been inexplicably encountering all day, including on a boat in the bay where she must have been freezing.
Look, if you’re not from the Bay Area and are instead somewhere a Port-A-Potty-sized bungalow doesn’t cost five million dollars, you can totally miss this logistical nightmare. It’s not the first time it’s happened on film or television. Let’s face it; someone who isn’t from Chicagoland won’t wonder how the Blues Brothers get pulled over in Park Ridge then suddenly end up at a mall thirty-five miles away.
Are there any other examples of twisted filming location sequences you can think of? Let us know!
Top graphic images: Chrysalis Records
Huey clearly needs the new drug that gets him going in the right direction to the heliport at SFO – not the one in Marin.
Oh, and have you seen “Foul Play”, “The Game” or “Bullitt”
None of the driving scenes make any sense at all.
1998 – Deep Impact. Elijah Wood’s character rides a Yamaha XT350 from Missouri to Virginia to find his girlfriend and rescue her. He finds her family on a crowded freeway(!), then turns around and takes his girlfriend and her younger brother to a shelter in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in a matter of hours. Map that out; it’s insane – I’m not sure the writers had ever traveled outside of their hometown, much less ridden a dual-sport motorcycle any distance.
I haven’t seen it but everybody NOT Sleepless here in Seattle knows Meg Ryan can’t drive along the beach keeping pace with Tom Hanks in a boat from Alki to Lake Union.
I had this experience watching the third season of Reacher on Prime. Its set in Maine, and all of the geography is just wrong. I looked it up, and it was shot in Canada. But it did make me laugh that their vision of Portland was to just choose a quaint downtown and hang a banner that said Lobster and say, ehh, good enough…