Movies From My Hometown: Washington D.C.

Each month, one of our writers will be sharing movies that were set and/or shot near where they have lived as a personal lens into these films…

by A. Freedman, Staff Writer
I was born in Texas, but when I was still a baby my family moved to Silver Spring, MD, where my parents still live. It is a nice little (actually, it's quite sprawling) suburb in Montgomery County (yeah we have one of those too). Silver Spring and its surrounding areas–call it the D.C. Metropolitan area, call it the DMV, call it whatever you want–has always been my hometown.

Having gone to high school in the District, I never felt a big separation between the suburbs and the city. It all felt like some kind of home to me. It's not like North Jersey vs. New York City, the whole area weaves together pretty easily. D.C. is not a big city, it is actually the 20th largest city in the country. It's smaller than Columbus, OH and Jacksonville, FL.

D.C. has one and only job making industry: the federal government. Every other sub-industry revolves around it. There are many, many stories to be told about life in the District, but when it comes to the movies, it almost always sticks close to Government Work.

For decades, the essential D.C. film was the very Frank Capra tale of a lone man with conviction standing up against the system, in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Then after a decade of upheaval–beginning with the Kennedy assassination and ending with Watergate–a new kind of D.C. movie was born: the political thriller. Appropriately, the breakthrough in this category covered Watergate itself, All The President's Men. Based on the novel by Woodward and Bernstein, and starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford as them, it is not only one of the great D.C. films, but one of the great films. Director Alan J. Pakula does a fantastic job of bringing you into the ecosystem of the Washington Post newsroom, starting with a small thread, and pulling and pulling until a president is brought down. It is easily the best journalism film ever made, and it does display all sides of D.C., from the fancy riverside lunches to the shadowy parking garages where Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook) would tip them off, emphasizing the city as a place where appearances mean everything but secrets run the show.

You could loosely throw the film into the "70's conspiracy thriller" genre, movies like The Parallax View or The Boys From Brazil which fictionalized a lot of dark fantasies of institutional distrust, which no longer seemed that implausible. This new genre never really let up, even if the paranoia began to extend towards external threats. No Way Out stars Kevin Costner as a Navy lieutenant in a love triangle with a beautiful woman (Sean Young) and the Secretary of Defense (Gene Hackman) that turns deadly. For a while this is mostly a post-Chappaquiddick murder mystery. Perfectly serviceable, although it makes the unforgivable mistake of installing a fictional Metro stop in the Georgetown section (a colonial era neighborhood run on old money, they have famously kept the Metro far away, for reasons which you can imagine).

In the 90's, a pair of films brought the scars of the Kennedy assassination back into view- JFK and In The Line Of Fire. The majority of JFK takes place in New Orleans or in flashbacks to Dallas or Florida, but one show-stopping exposition dump between Costner (again, as New Orleans D.A. JIm Garrison) and "X" (Donald Sutherland) details Oliver Stone's whole theory behind why he was killed–filmed entirely against the backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument–ending with an anguished scene at the Arlington National Cemetery. The monuments had not been filmed to such dramatic use before, nor since..

In The Line Of Fire stars Clint Eastwood as a secret service agent who was there the day Kennedy was killed and is now trying to prevent his current boss from getting killed by a psycho played by John Malkovich. There are some good chase scenes around the Capitol Hill neighborhood, but the real pleasure is in Eastwood downing whiskey at downtown piano bars, flirting with Rene Russo and being a general rapscallion. He would return to D.C. a few years later in the ridiculous Clinton-paranoia conspiracy thriller Absolute Power, where once again Gene Hackman is a politician suspected of murdering a young woman he was having an affair with.

So few of these films actually stray outside the 10-20 block radius of the city that surrounds the White House. Of course, there is so much more of the city than that- the parts that make the city so lovable. D.C. Cab is an early 80's comedy from director Joel Schumacher, which actually portrays the city's working class unlike any other film has. It boasts quite a cast, Adam Baldwin, Mr. T, Gary Busey, Charlie Barnett and Paul Rodriguez, to name a few, as the rag tag group of cab drivers doing a classic slobs vs. snobs plot to try and win the day. Focusing on cab drivers is a great metaphor for the parts of D.C. that go unseen. Their clientele are all elite politicians or government employees, while the cabstand they return to has seen better days. That's actually how the city was in the 1980's, stretching into the 90's- a city that is now basically unrecognizable. D.C. has long been a black city, and a popular settling destination for immigrants from all over. Its incredible diversity is what makes it such a special place- and D.C. Cab stands apart nicely from its eighties peers in that the heroes aren't just a bunch of nerdy white guys who are fighting for their right to take advantage of people too.

The recent Wonder Woman 1984 was set in D.C. during the same era, and went to lengths to portray the genesis of the city's early punk scene, a storied one at that. Minor Threat posters are seen in the background, and a few teens run out of punk fashion store Commander Salamander (a real place). There are several documentaries that explore the history of the city's punk music scene, if you are looking for more of off-the-beaten-path D.C. Salad Days is one, in addition to the just released Punk The Capital: Building A Sound Movement (co-directed by a high school classmate of mine, hey Sam Lavine!). There is also Positive Force: More Than A Witness which focuses specifically on the group Positive Force, which played a major role in connecting punk shows to community service and social issues. If you are a big Fugazi fan, then don't miss Instrument, directed by Ian Mackaye's own high school buddy Jem Cohen (Museum Hours). It's as far as you could get from an episode of Behind The Music and is instead more of a visual/sound collage, letting the power and essence of the band speak for itself.

Washington D.C. is a beautiful city, but rarely is the city itself a character in films beyond the downtown monuments. There are so few films that capture the totality of the city in the way films set in New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago do. Considering what a shitshow the last few years have been, I am sure we will be getting a lot of D.C. set stories in the next decade, but I wouldn't expect the rest of the city to get much of a role. By now, if you're from the area, it is something you're pretty used to.