People who live in Philadelphia are used to coming across movie sets on their daily rounds. This blogger recalls scenes from Oprah Winfrey's Beloved being filmed at 18th and Delancey, two blocks from her Center City apartment. And for a brief time in the fall of 1999, I shared my evening yoga classes with Toni Collette, who was in town filming The Sixth Sense. Collette's more recent In Her Shoes is like a vast delightful in-joke for Center City dwellers, so grounded is its plot in the streets, shops, parks, and food of the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood; the same goes for the recent Rocky Balboa, much of which is filmed in south Philly's marvelous Victor Cafe. Other films set in Philadelphia include Tom Hanks' Philadelphia, Harrison Ford's Witness, Eddie Murphy's Trading Places, and, of course, the immortal Rocky.
But, as MPI founder and former Philly dweller Thor Halvorssen observes, the cinematic potential of Philadelphia has yet to be fully mined. In an interview with the Bulletin's Frank Diamond, Halvorssen applauded the decision of Pacifica Ventures to open a $75 million production facility in the area, but also noted that the real potential of the city is as a subject and setting for films about freedom:
"The entire American founding has yet to find itself in an epic picture," he told Diamond. "'National Treasure' was a wonderful, inspiring narrative that was a lot of fun. But there is so much cloth to cut in terms of the stories about the birth of the United States."And the most magnificent export of this magnificent country, he says, are films. It's ironic that movies seldom explain - and very often contradict - the notion of America's unique position in, and beneficent influence on, history.
Here's to more filmmakers turning this historic city into the occasion for cinematic meditations on freedom. Philly is rich material not only because of its past, but because its present--as a struggling, some say dying city caught uncomfortably between New York and Washington--evokes so strongly how faded, for many Americans, the sense of freedom is. As Bruce Springsteen puts it, "At night I could hear the blood in my veins / Just as black and whispering as the rain / On the streets of Philadelphia."