The Washington Street shoot in Providence took two days, which is usually how long it takes to find an open parking space on Washington Street. The scene will appear in a Universal Studios moving picture called “R.I.P.D.” Surprisingly, the movie’s not about the Rhode Island Police Department. Instead, it’s an action-adventure film described as a cross between “Men in Black” and “Ghostbusters” in which Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds play “two undead police officers dispatched by the otherworldly Rest In Peace Department to protect the world from an increasingly destructive array of creatures who refuse to move peacefully to the other side.”
It’s a poorly kept secret that the undead have long romanced Providence, mainly because the city makes them feel at home. Lovecraft lived there. Poe pined for a lost love there. It’s a town friendly to ghosts, vampires and zombies, so the idea of partially filming a feature about undead policemen in Rhody’s capital city is, quite literally, a no-brainer.
And given the fact that Rhody has potholes that can send you into other dimensions, the choice of Providence for a pulp movie car chase has merit, too – although unless we’re talking about the scene from “Bullitt,” “The French Connection,” “Ronin,” “Vanishing Point,” “Gone in 60 Seconds,” “To Live and Die in L.A.,” “The Italian Job,” “Dirty Mary Crazy Larry,” “The Blues Brothers,” “Smokey and the Bandit,” “The Fast and the Furious,” “Cannonball Run” or “Against All Odds,” we’re bound to be disappointed in the careening chrome even as we admire Hollywood’s ability to elongate Washington Street into something closer to the Pacific Coast Highway.
Leading to this week’s question: What Rhode Island road is best suited for a Hollywood car chase?
Size reprise
Great size of Rhode Island reference in The Atlantic magazine, falling in the first paragraph under the headline, “The Beginning of the End for Suburban America.”
In the years following World War II, the United States experienced an unprecedented consumption boom. Anything you could measure was growing. A Rhode Island-sized chunk of land was bulldozed to make new suburbs every single year for decades. America rounded into its present-day shape.
Nice to know that more than 60 years of Rhode Island-sized sprawl turned America into what it is today. But how do we measure the sprawl that is actually in Rhode Island? In Quonochontaugs?
