Cinderella Liberty (1973)
A sailor on leave in Seattle falls for a prostitute, then decides to be a father to her biracial son. That there’s grit and not sap to this low-key romantic comedy is testament to director Mark Rydell’s affectingly grubby sense of grace as well as the refreshing directness of James Caan, Oscar-nominated Marsha Mason, and young newcomer Kirk Calloway. Add one helluva seedy downtown.
“It was a city of enormous flavor,” Rydell now muses about Seattle in the early ’70s. “I guess it was a more ‘down’ flavor than it is now.”
Cinderella Liberty captured Seattle at a time when whole blocks of First Avenue gave off the grimy flash of dive bars, adult bookstores, and porno palaces. None of the scenes was shot on a stage. An abandoned factory not far from Pike Place Market became Mason’s shabby apartment. “You could look out the window and see the water and trucks going by,” Rydell notes with pride. “Every time you see someone by a window there was all kinds of stuff going on behind them outside that didn’t need to be faked.”
How It Defined Us: The city stopped looking merely pretty and began to show a soiled soul.
Streetwise (1984)
Life magazine sent writer Cheryl McCall and photographer Mary Ellen Mark to Seattle for a few weeks to find out if living could be hard in what was considered the nation’s most livable city. After their July 1983 story, “Streets of the Lost,” uncovered the daily distress of young hustlers, prostitutes, and runaways, Mark called her filmmaker husband Martin Bell to come document the action on Pike Street between First and Second avenues.
“It’s a story that you could still make today but it would look entirely different because cellphones have changed everything,” says Bell. “The kids used to hang around phones on the street. And there it was—in broad daylight—in one block.”
McCall and Mark established such a level of trust with their teenage subjects that Bell was able to wire a select few with body mikes as he followed them around. Others he filmed as they hopped in and out of cars while selling their bodies. “It’s very disturbing—but what am I going to do?” Bell says. “I can’t stop them. That’s how they were surviving.” He wasn’t able to remain completely detached. Anyone who watches the movie is haunted by Erin, aka “Tiny,” a 14-year-old with the Depression-era face of a Dorothea Lange portrait. Bell and Mark couldn’t shake her, either: They offered to take her back to New York with them on the condition that she go to school. She refused, yet the couple kept in contact with her, charting her life in several short films over the next two decades.
The movie earned an Oscar nomination for best documentary and stunned its subjects at the initial screening. “When they first started seeing themselves in the film, they laughed—they enjoyed seeing themselves on the street because they were like movie stars,” says Bell. “Then, as the film went on, it got very serious and quiet in the room. There were tears.”
One of the teens came up to Bell after that first viewing. “I want to hit somebody,” the kid said, “but I don’t know who to hit.”
How It Defined Us: The city revealed a real-life desperation hiding in plain sight.
Published: December 2009
I’ll add Fear and Mad Love.
Some nice Seattle scenes in those.
Nice article, I have worked in the movie industry in the northwest since 1983 and long for the good old days of 1-2 Hollywood produced movie a year coming to Seattle. Unfortunately those days are long gone, most of the “Seattle” movies are made in Vancouver and at best come “down” here for only a few days just to rip off enough shots to make the movie seem like it is Seattle. After falling way behind other states with tax breaks for productions in Washington the tide may be turning, however when combined with a declining crew base, and lack of infrastructure, not to mention the traffic gridlock it may never come back. It is a shame most of my work has been out of state where quite frankly movie making is embraced as the job creating, clean industry that it is. But thank you for not mentioning those Seattle rip off movies so many others do.
Ten Things I Hate About You?
Although not a big screen movie, The Night Strangler (1973) not only used Seattle really well, it actually got me to spend the money to go on the Underground Seattle tour.
Cool! You know, the independent Cap Hill video store On 15th Video has a whole Seattle section…bet if you browsed that you’d come up with even more…
I really do think that we can take Seattle to a new level in film making. I would personally like to be involved in promoting such. Jobert1234@aol.com. We recently made a movie “Poppies, Odyssey of an Opium Eater” based on a true story (and book of the same name) of Eric Detzer’s life as a opium addict. Eric lives in Seattle and wrote the book about his addiction to wild opium poppies, which truly do grow wild in the Pacific Northwest. Eric was a well respected (master’s degree) social worker who fought child abuse, while scouring the country-side for the poppies. It is a story of his “spiral down hill” !!! If you are interested, we have a web site with a trailer….. www.poppiesthemovie.com ….. We would love some feedback about how to promote and distribute the movie in the Northwest. Happy New Year to you all. Josephine
Thanks for the article. I would like to add Assassins and Disclosure since I was an extra in both movies. I was next to Sly in one of my scenes. Fond memories!