John Wayne Gives A Driving Tour of Seattle
John Wayne Gives A Driving Tour of Seattle is an awesome clip from the early 70s movie McQ, in which Wayne starts at the Amazon Headquarters on Beacon Hill (which was PacMed back then), drives around Chinatown and SoDo, then up to South Lake Union.
The interesting thing about it is that the path he takes is relatively logical. In a lot of movie car chases you see random things filmed here and there, and once edited together to make a single sequence, they aren’t actually following any path a real person could follow. This one is sort of real. There are a couple of things here and there that wouldn’t work, but basically he does drive Beacon Hill –> Chinatown –> SoDo –> Chinatown –> I-5 north to the Mercer exit (backed up with some traffic, as usual) –> South Lake Union. He takes the real freeway exits that one would have taken at the time (one no longer exists, on Dearborn), but occasionally drives on the wrong side of the street. And somehow managed to get a car wash (perhaps at Elephant, on 4th Ave. S.) in the middle of the car chase. đŸ˜‰
It is interesting to see what I-5 looked like before the Convention Center and Freeway Park lids.
Check out the movie Scorchy for an even more extensive old school
Seattle chase. Even more logical than the McQ chase and includes a senseless shooting of a motorcyclist, some kind of dunebuggy like roadster up a hill near the Dearborn exit, an (interminable) footchase
over waterfront rooftops and a helicopter over the kite hill in gasworks
park. Best of all, it features Connie Stevens. I’m thinking this movie was made with a mountain of coke.