Defending the 'burgh from Hollywood
When 'Flashdance' came out 40 years ago, movie critics in LA and NYC couldn't believe it was filmed in Pittsburgh because the city wasn't under a pall of black smoke. I tried to set them straight.
Pittsburgh does its own dancing in ‘Flashdance’
Los Angeles Times
June 12, 1983
Pittsburgh played itself in "Flashdance," the good-natured box-office hit starring Jennifer Beals as western Pennsylvania's greatest dancing welder.
There was no double or stunt city, no special geographical effects. Yet several critics found the portrayal of Pittsburgh about as plausible as its plot — which is to say implausible.
The Times' Sheila Benson noted with disbelief that Pittsburgh was a lovable fairy-tale town more photogenic than Paris.
Janet Maslin of the New York Times thought "Flashdance" director Adrian Lyne never acquainted himself with the real Pittsburgh.
Time magazine's Richard Corliss hung quotes of sarcasm around this cinematic "Pittsburgh” of clean streets and well-tanned bar flies.
I'm a displaced but forever-loyal native of Pittsburgh, the capital city and cultural hub of Western Pennsylvania (capital W please).
As a regional chauvinist I can't help but notice that despite all the benefits of our Information Age the anachronistic stereotypical image of Pittsburgh as a grimy industrial hell — as America's "Smokey City" — won't die.
The real Pittsburgh — a leading corporate-headquarters town and 1950s pioneer of urban renewal and pollution control — remains a well-kept secret, especially, it seems, among movie critics.
I've never seen Paris except in the movies so I can't compare it to my hometown. But then Benson says she's never seen Pittsburgh, so we're even. (Maslin said on the phone that though she's never been there herself some of her best friends are from Pittsburgh. Corliss was in Cannes and couldn't be reached.)
Maslin and Corliss — I know where they're coming from: New York.
Life is pretty rotten in the Big Apple (I know. I've seen "Fort Apache the Bronx" and "Taxi Driver.") And because they're always cowering behind heavily bolted doors in "Honeymooners' "-style apartments, New Yorkers find it hard to believe that the streets in every city aren't dirty or dangerous, or that suntans are a possibility between Las Vegas and Jones Beach. The poor devils develop Woody Allen world views.
However, in spite of what some critics think and in spite of Hollywood's natural inclination to distort reality, Pittsburgh was much more accurately portrayed in "Flashdance" than Western Pennsylvania was in "The Deer Hunter."
George Anderson, entertainment editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, said local people are generally pleased with "Flashdance's" portrayal of Pittsburgh. He added, in all honesty, "That's the way Pittsburgh looks."
(Pittsburgh Mayor Richard Caliguiri skipped the local invitational preview screening of "Flashdance" but has seen it since. He enjoyed it, especially the music and dancing, but said it shows off only a few of Pittsburgh's many charms and hardly touches on the city's lifestyle at all.)
Anderson's read the reviews of "Flashdance" and thinks it's highly ironic that "The Deer Hunter," which was filmed around Western Pennsylvania and purported to represent local steelworkers who go to war in Vietnam, "was much more of a fantasy that people accepted as reality while 'Flashdance' is more accurate and people think it's a fantasy."
He thought "Deer Hunter" was "totally inaccurate," giving as one example that Robert De Niro and friends looked like bums and lived in near-shacks as low-paid workers, not $15-an-hour union men.
I remember hating "Deer Hunter" for similar reasons. When De Niro and his moronic, gun-waving, beer-spraying chums drove out of town to hunt deer on the craggy ridges of glacier-draped mountains I wanted to scream.
My homeland looked like Nepal. The last time a glacier crept across Pennsylvania was during the Pleistocene Epoch.
Nothing rang true, from the contrived camaraderie of the steelworkers to the virtual absence of Iron City beer and the overly conspicuous consumption of Rolling Rock.
"Flashdance" doesn't dwell on — or even touch upon — the grimmer, more depressing and less photogenic aspects of life in "The Steel City" (another nickname rapidly approaching misnomer).
There are no potholes or unemployment lines. No street crime. No shots of that notorious Venutian atmosphere. Not one dirty-faced coal miner, a la John Wayne in "Pittsburgh." Even a rusting steel mill was given a Disneyesque theme-park glow by Britisher Lyne.
But as everyone acknowledges, "Flashdance" is just Hollywood fluff. A 96-minute rock video. "Nightline" it's not.
Lyre doesn't misrepresent Pittsburgh geographically or culturally. The familiar rolling hills, three rivers, uncountable bridges, the inclined railway and the tunnels (“tubes,” as locals say) appear in "Flashdance," but are hardly exploited.
If Lyne had been a true tool of the Chamber of Commerce, the critics would be outraged, not merely incredulous. He could have had Beals bicycling along gas-lamp-lighted Grandview Avenue atop Mt Washington with aerial views of downtown twinkling in the background.
Lyne never used Point State Park, the triangle formed where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers converge to become the Ohio. And he never used the city skyline or the remarkable view of the Golden Triangle that explodes upon motorists emerging upon downtown from the Fort Pitt tunnels.
"Flashdance" at least contains a realistic ratio of Iron City beer drinkers, plenty of references to the Steelers and at least one typically odd-shaped Pittsburgh house. There's a real-life local hero, Vic Cianca, a just-retired cop whose part-Bernstein, part-Marceau style of traffic conducting debuted on "Candid Camera" years ago.
And that inclined railway that Beals rides is the Duquesne Incline, which we kids often rode on Saturday afternoons with my Aunt Gertrude, the same incline my kids have enjoyed.
Some elemental aspects of Western Pennsylvania life are missing.
The area's strange accent — which peppers 1968's "Night of the Living Dead" and helps to make local movie mogul George Romero's cult classic extra fun for Pittsburghers — is unheard.
No one is eating chipped ham sandwiches or Klondikes and nobody calls a radio sports talk show to criticize "them Steelwerz." The energized sound track includes nothing from indigenous rock 'n' rollers Donnie Iris, the Iron City House Rockers or the Granati Brothers.
I'm the first to agree with critic Maslin's presumption that no bar in Pittsburgh is as hipply high tech or home to such flashdancing nubility as Mawby's, which was actually an LA location.
But to me, the most unrealistic thing about "Flashdance" is that jerk that Beals falls for. Nobody in Pittsburgh owns a Porsche.
Correction: I haven’t seen ‘Flashdance’ in 40 years, but I suspect that I was wrong to say Beals was riding the Duquesne Incline. It was probably the Mon Incline. It was the only mistake I ever made in my newspaper career.