Seattle is a beautiful city. We know that. In fact we probably take its beauty for granted as we go about the daily business of our lives. Not that we don't appreciate it, but we're kind of used to it.
On the other hand, lots of filmmakers who are smitten with our mountains and our water and our views and our trees get seduced by Seattle, or the surrounding area, to the point where they need to shoot their movies here.
Ask a stranger to name a movie set in Seattle, and I bet 99 percent of the time the answer you get is Sleepless In Seattle: Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, the Space Needle, a houseboat on Lake Union. A classic rom-com -- maybe not a masterpiece, but a film that a lot of people saw, which does show off our city.
The visuals of pre-Amazon downtown Seattle, still a little run down and funky, take me right back to the early 90s. (Okay, you don't have to say it -- downtown Seattle is a little run down and funky these days, too.) And the whole story line about a young idealistic Gen X urban planner pitching a mass transit system? WAY ahead of its time.
Those are both pretty well known examples of movies shot in Seattle, or at least set in Seattle. (We all know that Vancouver stands in for Seattle in a lot of films, and we can spot that trickery a mile away.)
But there are a ton of overlooked films that use Seattle (or other locations in our state) as backdrops, and I found a great list from Seattle Met that runs down a few you might want to stream, since this pandemic doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon.
A Big Seattle Movie Guide: What to Watch and What to Skip goes in all kinds of directions, from semi-classics like Say Anything, The Fabulous Baker Boys, and 10 Things I Hate About You, to more obscure titles: The Slender Thread, a black and white thriller from 1965 starring Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft with music by Seattle's Quincy Jones. Seattle Met likes the "handsome black and white cinematography of the city, from Pacific Science Center to Golden Gardens."
Or 50/50, from 2011, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, and Anna Kendrick, about a guy sorting things out with his friends as his body deteriorates from cancer. Believe it or not, it's a comedy.
Remember War Games, with Matthew Broderick as a high-school hacker who almost starts World War III? An Officer And A Gentleman, shot in Port Townsend with Richard Gere and Debra Winger? Or how about the cheesy, dated, but entertaining Disclosure, from 1994 -- MIchael Douglas as a tech exec who gets harassed by his boss, Demi Moore and spends a lot of time brooding on the Seattle-Bainbridge ferry. Oh yeah, and of course, Fifty Shades of Grey? All set in and around the Emerald City.
There are also some great titles on the list by Lynn Shelton, a fantastic Seattle filmmaker who died suddenly last year, and an indie film called Half Of It which I was suprised to discover was made by someone I used to work with at Microsoft in the mid-90s, a brilliant woman named Alice Wu who left the tech world to make films. I guess she did it!
I'm going to encourage you to scroll through the list yourself and I bet you'll find a film that you'll like, and -- bonus -- while you're watching it, you can shout out at your TV, "Hey?!! I know where that is!"