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
Not a car, but in Mission Impossible 5 dude takes the metro to the Opera House in Vienna, but clearly gets on the train at the opposite platform, so goes exactly the wrong way.
Don’t get me started on the logistics of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.
The most amazing cover of that song by The Greenskeepers, unfortunately I think I’ve lost the free promo CD they sent me nearly 20 years ago; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMz4rNZU5Sg
Now I want a Lionel Ritchie Chia Pet.
Am I the only one who’d like to have that 356 as it is and DD it?
The opening scene of the X-Files movies purports to be set in Dallas and shows mountains in the background.
It was the drugs, and his search for a new one.
There are plenty of films shot in multiple locations, such that the characters find themselves transported scene-to-scene from somewhere in the States up to British Columbia and back, but I’m here to point out something much smaller in Jumanji (1995).
This scene here, specifically, in which Bebe Neuwirth stops her 6000 Safari at a traffic light for a stampede with the right of way:
https://vimeo.com/287275631
This intersection has never had and is very unlikely to ever have a traffic light: https://maps.app.goo.gl/YPSACT37gLmpDZA2A
It is, nonetheless, important to stop at the line and yield to charging animals, just in case.
[Edit: If you turn around there, you can also see that she was previously on a different road.]
Told you it was a small thing, but that’s close to where I grew up (as is Keene, downtown “Brantford”), so that’s what came to mind.
Not a geography mistake but relevant to this site, I was just reading one of the Joe Pickett books and it talked about how a Suburban was Chevy’s big SUV before they renamed it to Tahoe. I guess normal people don’t realize that those are two different, but related, vehicles and they both still exist to this day.
My favorite is Lethal Weapon 2 – the chase starts out on Mulholland Dr. in the Hollywood Hills and cuts to Mulholland Dr. near Paramount Ranch in Malibu, about 30 miles away. With Mel still hanging on to the roof of the tow truck.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned one of the more obvious ones: the car chase in Bullitt They go up Potrero Hill, reach the top, then go down hill in North Beach. In fact, they switch mid-hill between those two neighborhoods several times (I won’t get in to how many times they pass that green Beetle).
Background cars always pull me out of chase scenes; especially in modern movies. I get it that CHiPs had a limited budget, so you see the same vehicles in scenes across multiple episodes, but to see it in a movie really disrupts my focus.
The Blues Brothers is my absolute favorite movie of all time and I never had a clue the mall was so far away from where they were pulled over… But now I know this, so any future viewings will be marred by this travesty of knowledge, THANKS SO MUCH BISHOP.
Fry: “I hid my seven-leaf clover in this very record jacket so my brother Yancy wouldn’t get it.” … “It’s gone! The whole place has been cleaned out! Yancy stole my clover! That thief!”
Leela: “How do you know it didn’t disintegrate?”
Fry: “Everything else in here held up OK.”
Bender: “Except Sports by Huey Lewis.”
I actually think Huey is making reasonable choices: He knows he’s has a gig, but mixes up the location – he’s heading to his regular spot: Uncle Charlie’s, in Corte Madera. Huey played there a lot at the time, even using it to shoot a different music vid. Getting on the Larkspur ferry (Golden Gate Ferry only had two routes at the time, and the Sausalito service used a different boat) would avoid bridge traffic and get him close enough to get picked up. Once he uses the payphone at the terminal to call the band, however, he learns of his mistake and the road manager arranges the helicopter. Huey jumps on the return boat to the Ferry Building and the rest is history.
Striking Distance, a terrible Bruce Willis/Sarah Jessica Parker river cop movie*, was set & filmed in Pittsburgh. The river geography is better than you’d expect, but what the movie is famous for among locals is the opening car chase, featuring John Mahoney (aka Marty Crane) with the iconic line “take Bigelow”, which is, indeed, a fast, limited access route into Downtown. However, it takes about 3 minutes even if you don’t have a siren, yet they spend 5 minutes going back and forth on a 2 mile stretch of road. Then some random jumping across bridges, and a Kojak homage down a steep cobblestone street that’s in Duquesne, a mill town about 8 miles upriver.
https://youtu.be/iwC-K_hyq-c?si=ayMntIg0QLAQiD8h
*Pittsburgh does not have river cops
“Who’s the best cop now?”
I’d forgotten all about this one, but saw it streaming somewhere recently and gave it another watch for nostalgia’s sake. It hasn’t improved with age.
Yeah, I’m slogging my way through in lunch hours. Not sure I’ll stick with it.
Man, have not seen that film since it came out. There is no apparently no speed limit on Bigelow. I think it’s posted at 35, but traffic hauls at 60. I know this well as I once lived up in Bloomfield.
Pittsburgh Police do operate a number of small patrol boats, but no seperate river police force to my knowledge.
For awhile there was local company selling a THERE IS NO SPEED LIMIT ON BIGELOW t-shirts, and I kind of regret not getting one. Although I’d have to hide it from my cycling pals.
Yes there was an atrocious movie with Debra Winger and Nick Nolte filmed in the town I grew up in. The movie was called Everybody Wins. It has plenty of scenes of the characters travelling in the wrong direction for the places they wish to be.
Nothing to do with the article, and won’t make any sense in a few days, buy: the thumbnail for the current Autopian TV video looks awesome – “study suggests that lyrics have gotten simpler over time”. The colourful headphone on black background absolutely rocks, I wish I had a shirt with this image!
I think I found the source on Getty:
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/headphones-4k-loop-alpha-stock-footage/1247066413?slot=20
Excellent choice 🙂
“Are there any other examples of twisted filming location sequences you can think of? Let us know!”
Airwolf. LAX to Monument Valley in 5 minutes every. single. time.
The turbo boost on The Lady weren’t nothing on whatever Dominic had under the hood of that aggressively patriotic Jeep!
This is the type of hard-hitting journalism I come here for. Don’t let those 80’s artists get away with this kind of deception! The public has a right to know where Huey was really headed!
My 2005 Lexus LX470 came with a case of cassettes. “Sports” was one of them, and gets regularly played.
Every time I listen to Huey Lewis, I think “This is SO 80’s”. Then I sing the songs on repeat in my head all week long.
I think that cassette was government issued to everyone in the 80s
I will admit to owning, cassette, CD, and yes, there’s a Vinyl pressing I found at a yard sale. When I got my first Discman in 88 my dad included a copy of ‘Small World’. I really like Huey TBH. He’s been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.
We lived in Portland, Oregon during the entire run of the TV show Grimm, and the geography gaffes always made me cringe. Strangely, if they were discussing a location, they usually got it right, but the actual filming was all over the place. Sometimes accurate-ish, sometimes way off. I do give them credit for using the actual police station for exterior shots, though.
I think in Trading Places movie they used lots of Philadelphia EXCEPT the police station for some reason, they used one in NYC
I saw Rumble in the Bronx recently. Lots of mountains around for NYC. Filmed in Vancouver, I’m surprised the street signs aren’t half in French.