How 994 s Speed Captured a Changing Los Angeles

Watch Speed on KCET on Friday, November 11 at 9:00 p.m., part of the classic film series, KCET Must See Movies.

Is this what they mean by pure cinema? New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane wrote in his review of Speed when the film came out in 1994. The phrase sometimes hovers around people like Tarkovsky and Ozu, and with good cause, but Hollywood occasionally throws a punch so clean that it breaks through to the same hallowed sanctum. Surprising praise, perhaps, for a blockbuster represented in poster form by an explosion, a runaway bus, and Keanu Reeves, but watch Speed again and you see much more: while it may not have gained intellectual depth with time, it has emerged, over the past couple of decades, as the standout Los Angeles action movie, one that makes fuller use of the citys distinctive size, shape, and built environment than any other.

That bus plays a part in only one of the three shorter Los Angeles action movies that Speeds nearly two-and-a-half hours comprise. The first, which takes place inside and on top of downtowns Gas Company Tower, announces itself with a shot of a police car not just driving up to the building but flying up to it, catching at least three feet of air as it roars over the hill in order to deliver the protagonist, Reeves young LAPD SWAT officer Jack Traven, and his partner, Jeff Daniels Harry Temple. Theyve shown up to rescue an elevator full of office workers, trapped there by a mad bomber threatening to blow it loose and drop them all the way down that still-new high-rises 52-story height (established by the opening credit sequence, a long upward climb through a model of its elevator shaft) unless he gets three million dollars in cash.

Traven and Temple ascend to the rooftop, finding a crane to hook onto the elevator car in order to keep it from falling -- temporarily, at least, as a well-constructed action movie demands that the solution to each crisis generate a crisis of its own. But when they get up there, we see Los Angeles seemingly endless cityscape stretch out below them, a smoggy horizontality of background that contrasts with the glossy, angular, Skidmore-Owings-and-Merrill verticality of the immediate setting. Though remarkably little about Speed dates it aesthetically, especially by fad-responsive Hollywood standards, a keen-eyed Los Angeles historian could, going by the amount of smog not yet cleared up and buildings not yet built, pin down almost the exact month of production from these shots alone.

Courtesy of Metro Transportation Library and Archive

Most of this first act plays out inside the Gas Company Towers elevator shafts, or rather a studio replica thereof. It reaches an unsurprising conclusion with not a hostage harmed, the bomber seemingly blown up himself, and the officers officially commended for their bravery (in City Halls City Council Chambers, a location recognizable from dozens of other films) before celebratory drinks at the Derby, built in 1928, the last of the storied Brown Derby restaurants, in Los Feliz. In his commentary track, director Jan de Bont describes how an action movie as ultimately preposterous as Speed must, above all else, keep up its momentum to maintain the audiences suspension of disbelief, and so the story allows Traven only the briefest possible break in terms of screen time. Another crisis must erupt.

It does so another day, all the way across town, as Traven picks up his morning coffee from the Firehouse in Venice, a former real firehouse located on the corner of Rose and Main. The film establishes the location not just with a close-up of that intersections street signs, but by including a place marker even more readily identifiable to locals: Jonathan Borofskys belovedly hideous Ballerina Clown, a sculpture mounted on the building opposite in 1989 which combines the head of a clown (in traditional hobo makeup) and the body of a ballerina, including a mechanism to make one of its legs kick at regular intervals. Or at least it sometimes does: noise complaints shut it down by the time of Speeds shoot, but the Ballerina Clown more recently begun kicking again.

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When a bus explodes just across the intersection, Speeds second Los Angeles action movie begins. As our hero rushes to the scene, a payphone (surely gone from the street today, if ever it really stood there) rings, and when he picks it up, he hears the premise: Pop quiz, hot shot. Theres a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes fifty miles an hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below fifty, it blows up. What do you do?

Those words come from the very same mad bomber thought dead by everyone except the audience at the end of the first act, an aggrieved former bomb squad officer named Howard Payne forced into psychotically bitter retirement by a disfigurement sustained on the job and played by no less a central a figure to Los Angeles cultural Dennis Hopper. Now, holding Traven personally responsible for the failure of his first ransom scheme, Payne demands even more money.

Whereas Speeds first act uses the generic verticality of downtown Los Angeles, its second uses the distinctive horizontality of greater Los Angeles, so vividly that the rest of the movie seems to have faded from popular memory. Homer Simpson once spoke of having seen a movie about a bus that had to speed around the city, keeping its speed over fifty, and if its speed dropped, it would explode! I think it was called The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down. No matter its title, the film, which for its central section drew inspiration from earlier pictures set on runaway trains in Alaska and Japan, couldnt have taken place in any other city, nor could it have used any other city to stand in for Los Angeles, a metropolis defined over the second half of the twentieth century by nothing so much as its region-spanning urban freeways.

Just as Speed couldnt have been

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