Two years ago, I linked to a website — no longer working, alas — which showed a high-speed drive through Paris from two parallel points of view: one, the short film C’était un rendez-vous (1976), shot from within the speeding vehicle itself; and two, a growing line on a Google Map.
Now, I link to something more complicated in concept but simpler in execution. This site has tracked down all the places in San Francisco where the famous car chase from Bullitt (1968) was shot, and this site highlights all those locations on a Google Maps satellite image, like so:
It would seem the cars magically hopped all over the city in mid-chase. But this is nothing new, of course; the Thom Anderson documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) highlights a number of cases where films made and set in L.A. have thrown geographical specificity to the winds, and I remember getting a kick out of the bizarre path taken during a sort-of chase sequence in Ice Cube’s Are We There Yet? (2005), which begins on the Canadian border and continues all over downtown Vancouver.
At any rate, it’s fun to have all the real-life locations mapped out like this. And just for reference’s sake, here is the chase itself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKg27i5Y3T4
Click here if the video file above doesn’t play properly.
(Hat tip to Scott Von Doviak at The Screengrab.)
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