By Arun Kumar, IANS,
Washington : Bollywood is yet to discover it, but the sights and sounds of historic Washington, from the massive Lincoln Memorial to a statue of the frail Mahatma Gandhi, have made it one of the most filmed cities in the world.
The Capitol, where lawmakers of the world’s oldest democracy sit, has been featured in 92 films, the Washington monument built in memory of the nation’s first president has been shot 78 times, and at least 62 filmmakers have chosen to linger at the iconic Lincoln shrine.
But the 8 feet 8 inches high bronze statue of Gandhi in stride in front of the Indian embassy on Massachusetts Avenue – sculpted by Gautam Pal – has featured just once so far, in “The Visiting”, the story of a Washington psychiatrist who unearths the origin of an alien epidemic.
So let’s hop on to this bus to look at some of the famous and not so famous sites that we have seen on the big and small screens, and maybe we can zero in on a location for the next Bollywood blockbuster, tentatively titled “Love in DC”.
Our tour begins at the Union Station, where President Barack Obama and his deputy Joe Biden ended their historic re-enactment of Lincoln’s train ride to the capital for their inauguration, with Michael Montgomery, himself a small time actor, as our guide. Featured in “Hannibal”, “Mr Smith Goes to Washington”, “The Sentinel”, “Wedding Crashers”, “Minority Report” and “West Wing’ among others, the magnificent example of beaux-arts style was the world’s largest train station when it opened in 1908.
Our guide Mike keeps up a constant prattle, sometimes breaking into a song and asking us to join in singing TV theme numbers as we wend our way through the Mall, Dupont Circle and Georgetown and visit more than 30 locations from 50 movies and TV shows.
We go to the park used in “The Sentinel”, visit the bar used in “St. Elmo’s Fire”, stop in the furniture store used in “Dave”, take photos at the house used in “The American President” and shop at the mall where “No Way Out” and “True Lies” were filmed.
We go past the Watergate Hotel, featured in “All the President’s Men”, telling the story of how reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered the Watergate scandal that brought down then president Richard Nixon.
On to the old world charms of Georgetown, the colonial town founded in 1751 long before Washington came into being, to stare down the scary steps of “The Exorcist”, a 1973 US horror film dealing with the demonic possession of a young girl.
It is down these very steps that the possessed girl throws a priest trying to cure her, after hurling him through her bedroom window.
But the steps were well padded with thick rubber to soften the priest’s tumble, we are told and the horrible stuff that the girl keeps spewing was nothing but green pea soup.
Run by “On Location Tours” every Saturday, the tour takes one on a journey of the timeline of filming in DC from classic films of the seventies such as “The Godfather II” to the recent “Mission Impossible III”.
DC’s top ten Oscar winner movies range from “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” (1939), “Born Yesterday” (1950), “The Exorcist” (1973), “All the President’s Men” (1976) and “Independence Day” (1996) to “Traffic” (2000).
An HBO pilot for a set-in-Washington comedy, “The Washingtonienne”, is being filmed now in DC, and on the storyboard for production in 2010 is “Dirty Tricks”, a Paramount movie, starring and produced by Brad Pitt with Sharon Stone, Mike tells us.
Driving by the Gandhi statue, erected with Congressional approval under a law signed by then president Bill Clinton and dedicated by then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the presence of Clinton during his September 2000 state visit to the US, we head back to town.
Our tour ends at Willard Hotel, just a couple of blocks from the White House, where Lincoln stayed before his March 1861 inauguration, a favourite haunt of Bill Clinton, and still the hotel of choice for top dignitaries from India and the rest of the world.
Time to pack up, or shall we say “lights, camera, action” for that Bollywood blockbuster we went location hunting?
(Arun Kumar lives in Washington. He can be contacted at [email protected])