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
I strongly suspect that that was a kit car. 356 kits were popular back then and music videos were still pretty low budget affairs, unless you were Michael Jackson.
Trainspotting magically teleports between Glasgow and Edinburgh. (It’s set in Edinburgh, but was mostly filmed in Glasgow).
Easily explained: construction detours.
The Porsche, Huey is driving, is a Roadster, the spiritual successor to the Speedster, distinguishable by it’s windscreen frame, bigger and more angular than the one on the Speedster, but smaller than the one on the “regular” Cabriolet.
The Roadster was bulit between 1959 and 1961. Some late ones might have been model year 1962 🙂
Snow capped mountain peaks in the distance watching the Dukes of Hazard – set in rural Georgia.
The Next Three Days and Jack Reacher both get Pittsburgh roads and geography completely wrong. Our zoo definitely does NOT exit onto a major highway.
There is no No-tell Motel anywhere near the 10th St Bridge on the South Side. The 10th Street Bridge does feed directly into the Armstrong Tunnel (fun fact: it’s curved) but that leads to an absosute mess of crossing intersections at 5th and 6th Avenues.
Reading this and laughing … in my porta-potty sized bungalow
Kenneth Brannagh made a movie called The Gingerbread Man where he played a lawyer based in Savannah, Georgia.
In the opening scene, he is driving back to Savannah from Jacksonville, Florida.
But the dramatic shot of him driving into downtown shows him crossing the Tallmadge Bridge.
Which crosses into Savannah from SOUTH CAROLINA.
In order to do that, he have to have driven up I-95 from Jacksonville, passed Savannah, crossed into SC, then turned around in Hilton Head, and driven back into Savannah.
Another famous San Francisco mistake: in The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman is supposed to be driving east from San Francisco to Berkeley, but the overhead shot shows him on the top deck of the Bay Bridge, which are the westbound lanes. Again, this is because it looks good–if he was driving the correct way, he’d be on the lower deck and not visible overhead at all.
That one … I’ll allow it. On camera, the top deck is going to look about a million times better.
I was going g to mention the graduate, but since you have already mentioned it, how about all the Bay Area tunnels merged into one tunnel in THX1138.
In my opinion George Lucas’s best SciFi film.
When Harry Met Sally: the title characters leave the University of Chicago (on the city’s South Side) for New York…but are then are next seen on Lake Shore Drive north of downtown, heading south. They basically would have had to drive the wrong direction for at least 20 minutes, then turn around.
The reason for this is the same as in the Huey Lewis video: that view of Chicago from North LSD is way more impressive than any you’d get going the right way.
To be fair to WHMS, when my wife and I started dating, before the days of GPS and the like, we would get talking and end up going hours north instead of south regularly on trips.
Maybe LSD was the new drug Huey was looking for.
Ah yes, being from Chicago, my favorite movies are all shot there, probably because I can relate, but they also drive me nuts because I know better.
Actually, with the right ramp and enough forward velocity, any car can be a flying car.
No Way Out has Kevin Costner catch a train at the Georgetown Metro stop. (There is no such stop on the DC Metro.)
Yes! I’m from DC and he takes an exit off the Parkway at one point that goes nowhere near where they end up (like Annapolis!!)
I wish to fuck there had been one in 1987 when I was alone and hammered at 1am in Georgetown and lived in Alexandria. Fun fact: I pissed in the elevator at the Pentagon that night.
You sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.
Wasn’t ever gonna happen. The hoity toities who called Georgetown home didn’t want the unwashed masses to have access to transit, when they were in the planning stages. Or, so I’d heard, when I lived there back in 1981.
In the 1993 rollerblading epic Airborne (featuring Seth Green, Edie McClurg, and a pre-Tenacious D Jack Black), the final race went from one side of Cincinnati to the other and teleported back up the hill to skate down it again.
You beat me to it. That race spanned the entire county and, given the elevations shown, we’d need about 1,000 feet of slope. I bet it all spirals from the suburbs into downtown.
You had me at “rollerblading EPIC”
Now let’s talk about Bob Newhart’s commute. https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/09/02/bob-newharts-bizarre-commute-home-to-edgewater-took-him-way-out-of-his-way/
Another IYKYK Chicago classic!
I haven’t seen it in many, many years, but if I remember it right, during his climactic drive from Berkeley to Santa Barbara in The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman drives his Alfa Spider through the tunnel on the 101 near Gaviota—which is on the northbound side of the highway. He’d only go through that tunnel if he was headed in the opposite direction from what he was supposedly doing.
…and they needed a “better actor”
Ah, it’s hip to be fool.
There’s an episode of Hardcastle and McCormick where the judge may be nominated to serve on the Supreme Court, so has to go to Washington. He of course tells McCormick he can’t come along, and catches a cab to LAX. At this point, Mark jumps in the Coyote and heads out.
It’s tv’s worst montage, as it strongly insinuates he basically drove across the entire country in at most a day. Either that or what luck that none of the nefarious plot against Hardcastle went into effect until after McCormick got there.
As someone who has pulled an all nighter, woken up late, and lived in California it makes sense. Nothing solves that morning hangover drug super like a bunch of grease from in n out with a large sweet tea.
The ferry ride was just for fun. He starts off in SF, but then the shot before we first see the girl on the boat, is heading south from Sausalito. The helicopter departs from the wharf near the ferry dock in SF.
Even the helicopter shots are nonsense directionwise.
He takes off from the bay, loops over the city, comes back in the Golden Gate from the ocean, and loops around the city again.
But basically every sequence of someone traveling in a local area ends up being nonsense if you actually follow the route. Locations are filmed based on scenery more than reality.
I remember when TG/TGT where doing their SF/Bonneville drive. They were heading north on I-280 towards SF when they were ‘leaving’ SF. That section of 280 (the slope by the CA92 interchange) is scenic.
Thanks for clarifying Sausalito- wasn’t sure exactly which one it was but sure wasn’t SF.
Perhaps Huey also ran into Diesel there, “two hundred gallons from LA”.
Everyone know that Sausalito is a convenient rest stop between L.A. and S.F.
Being a local makes it easier to pick out exact locations around SF.
Sausalito is the best guess based on the background, but given that travel montages rarely make sense, they likely just rented the boat for the day and sailed around getting good shots, however nonsensical they were.
Huey clearly needs the new drug that gets him going in the right direction to the heliport at SFO – not the one in Oakland via Marin.
Oh, and have you seen “Foul Play”, “The Game” or “Bullitt”
None of the driving scenes make any sense at all.
Especially “The Game” where the mansion (Filoli) is not in Pacific Heights, but down in Woodside (San Mateo County)
Yeah, Foul Play is the only one I’ve seen, I’m pretty sure they just drive up and down the same streets
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.
Something I’ve seen from foreign visitors to the US is a complete lack of understanding of the scale. A fairly common thing is that we have customers that decide to leave after lunch to pop down to Disneyworld the next day for a visit. It’s 10 hours of driving, if you don’t stop and don’t hit traffic. And the route goes through Atlanta.
When I see movies like this, I figure that someone like a Brit is involved and hasn’t experienced how far things are apart from each other here.
It’s not just foreign visitors–lots of US east coasters have that issue understanding the scale of pretty much anywhere west of the Mississippi River.
Years ago, one of my aunts from PA was visiting my family in eastern Nebraska. While visiting, she decided that she was going to take a “day trip” to Mt. Rushmore and the Black Hills of South Dakota. Teenage me dug out a road atlas and showed her that her driving goal was very unrealistic. Even now, Google Maps calls that an eight hour/500-600 mile drive.. back in the 80s, it was have been far more time in the saddle.
She ultimately DID make that trip… by air… and yes, did it in one day. Crazy.
To me the eye opening part of being on the left side of the map of the US is how you have to plan around weather in ways you don’t on the right side.
The first indication was when I was in San Bernardino and everyone freaked out because it was going to rain one winter day. The manager gave me a choice of stopping work for 3 days or paying for hotel rooms for the staff for 3 days. I asked why and they told me that the crew came from another town, about 20 miles away. I looked up the weather. 60 and raining in San Bernardino, 50 and raining at this other town. Big hairy deal. I missed the mountain pass between these two towns that got over 2 feet of snow and was closed for days for road clearing.
I ended up in Eastern Washington for a year. That winter, if you wanted to go to Seattle, first thing you did was check Snoqualmie Pass conditions. Next was to check the weather forecast. I had coworkers that drove out to Seattle on Friday and didn’t come back until Wednesday because a storm hit on Sunday when they went to come back. Once those passes are closed, they are closed for a while, and the resulting traffic snarl can be insane.
While we’re on the Blues Brothers, the final bridge scene where the Illinois bad guys chasing the Blues Brothers in the Pinto wagon flew off the then-unfinished I-794 bridge in Milwaukee, WI, landing just off DuSable Lake Shore Drive and the Chicago River, a 90-mile flight.
At about 15,000 feet too
I’m just surprised the Pinto wagon didn’t magically transform into an MPC 1/25 scale model of same as soon as it got airborne.
It’s an act of god, clearly.
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…
Canada is a BIG one for that since they’re very welcoming and cheap; just was in Vancouver and they were filming The Last Of Us downtown. However, it’s pretty bad when they try to use it as “New York” and you see mountains behind. Yeah, the Catskills aint that close.
I see someone remembers “Rumble In The Bronx”
In the books, Reacher has reasonable geography (at least to my level of knowledge), but the cars are all wrong. In a book set in the late 1990s, someone was driving a manual Econoline. I want to hear the story of that transmission swap. https://opposite-lock.com/topic/57316/1990s-cars-of-jack-reacher-thriller-novels
The single most Autopian response in the comments so far. I’m so proud of you!