The Soreno Hotel

In downtown St. Petersburg, there's another one of those infuriating historical signs that, like the Vilano Beach Casino, tells us basically that "a really cool building used to be here, but they tore it down."

It makes it all the more a sore point to learn that the Soreno was demolished by a developer who couldn't develop: the super-important whatever-it-was project that the Soreno was blown up to make room for never came to fruition.

The producers of Lethal Weapon 3 (starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover) got wind of the building's impending destruction and got in on the action, working the explosion into the film and shooting numerous scenes on the hotel grounds prior to - and even during - the demolition blast.

It's fascinating to watch it go down on this recorded live footage from TV channel 13; note how evenly the building collapses neatly into its own footprint... which of course, as you know, only happens with deliberate controlled demolitions such as these. *cough*

Land O' Scissorhands

Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands was filmed on location in Land O' Lakes, Lutz, and Lakeland, Florida, and though most of the settings were artifically altered on a grand Hollywood-style scale (homes in the Carpenter's Run neighborhood were repainted and fitted with false facades to get the look Burton wanted) there's one location he didn't have to change a bit.

The Southgate Shopping Center had the perfect crazy off-kilter retro look Burton adores, and I was surprised to learn it really exists, and wasn't just something his team temporarily constructed for the film. It still stands today, if you want to go have your picture taken where Johnny Depp stood.

The giant gothic mansion where Edward lived, however, doesn't really exist and was assembled for shooting and then taken down. Which is a pity - if they'd left it standing, imagine the tourist attraction that could have been subsequently made of it.

Burton, who had never shot a movie in Florida before, got more than he bargained for. Sometimes the clouds of insects in the air made the film appear grainy and spoiled much footage that had to be reshot. And though the beautiful surreal sky of Florida was part of what made him choose it as a location, he hadn't reckoned with just how quickly Florida skies change. The sky can look completely different here at any given moment than it did just half an hour ago, and it made it difficult to preserve a sense of continuity in scenes. (Not that continuity and cohesiveness have ever been Burton's strong suit.)

Follow That Dream

There's an Elvis for everybody, it seems. There's the skinny Elvis, the fat Elvis, the spy Elvis, the cowboy Elvis, the military Elvis, the Hawaiian Elvis, the Arabian Elvis, etc. And of course, there's a Florida Elvis.

In July 1961 the movie Follow That Dream, set in Florida and starring Elvis Presley and Anne Helm, began shooting on location in Ocala, Tampa, Inverness, and the Inglis/Yankeetown area. And in a colossal juxtaposition of cosmic happenstance, it was here that Elvis met a young 11-year-old boy named Tom Petty, who, some say, went on to be a musician himself.

Follow That Dream was already the ninth in Elvis' mixed bag of 33 films, and the descent into mediocrity from early strong films like King Creole and Loving You had already begun. The plot concerns a family of vagabonds who run out of gas in a desolate stretch of an unfinished road along Florida's Nature Coast, and decide to just homestead there. From there it devolves into typical early-sixties hijinks with casino mobsters, government bureaucrats, and of course musical interludes.

The Follow That Dream Parkway in Inglis commemorates Elvis' time here. You can scope it on Google Maps here and plan your pilgrimage accordingly.

Overlooking Florida

It's entirely fitting that one of my favorite movies of all time, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, also involves Florida. If you have only a passing familiarity with the film, you may be unaware that in recent years it's been lauded as being a far deeper and complex movie than the 70's-slasher-flick it's generally thought of as. You can read some out-there analysis of it here and here, and you can find my own musings on the movie's puzzling evidence here, here, and also here.

In a nutshell, my take on the film is that the "haunted" Overlook Hotel in which the main characters reside is trapped in a sort of timespace warp in which everything is constantly shifting and rubbing up against parallel universes and alternate points on the time track. The multiple "mistakes" in the movie that some might ascribe to sloppy filmmaking are actually, I believe, deliberately placed as indicators that reality is constantly moving around in the hotel. Kubrick was infamous for his meticulous attention to detail, and that he could have had so many continuity errors in one of his works is inconceivable.

And, of course, this fits right in with the idea of Interzone, aka Florida, which I just happen to also posit as harboring a similar spacetime anomaly, but for real. So it's par for the course that the film's character Dick Halloran (played by the great Scatman Crothers, who I know as a great jazz-blues singer but you may know as the voice of Hong Kong Phooey) is from Florida. Halloran has psychic abilities (which he calls "shining", hence the title) and halfway through the picture we see him reclining in bed in his Miami home. He's watching Newswatch on Miami's WPLG-TV with anchorman Glenn Rinker, who was a real Miami newsman and not just something contrived for the film, which is a nice touch. Interestingly, Halloran's television set switches on by itself, yet Halloran is holding no remote. Among the imagery Halloran views on the TV is a lighthouse and a Pan-Am jet plane, which you may or may not find some meaningful symbolism in.

There are a lot of people running around Florida with psychic powers, extrasensory perceptics, remote-viewing savvy, and enhanced abilities, and I think the placement of Halloran here was a deliberate nod to this. Or maybe I've been sipping too many blue things. I dunno. Go watch the movie. Even if you've seen it before, look again.