Florida boosters have been swearing since the 1920s that the state would soon be home to the new Hollywood, a naive claim at best. However, Florida sites have occasionally turned up as locations for TV shows from Flipper to Miami Vice and movies such as Goldfinger and Robert Altman's Health.Tampa has rarely made appearances on film, and never so stunningly as in The Punisher. Setting can become a character in a film, as Tokyo is in Lost in Translation. While Tampa doesn't exactly muster up enough presence to qualify as a character in The Punisher, director Jonathan Hensleigh definitely lavishes a surprising amount of film on the place, even including soaring aerials of the skyline and downtown.
Interestingly, none of the landmarks the city loves to promote made it into the movie. You won't see Bayshore Boulevard or the University of Tampa — but you might see other places in a whole new light. The city looks fantastic, alternately gritty and glittery — perfect for that stark, dark comic-book effect The Punisher seeks to achieve.
Three buildings bring a special sense of place to the movie. The grit comes from that wonderful wedge-shaped brick building on Nebraska Avenue just north of Kennedy. In the film, it's a marvelously seedy tenement with exposed brick walls and a grand view of the city. That's where the hero ends up living along with other penniless misfits while licking his wounds and plotting revenge. It's a great building, and if it really has the view shown in the movie, someone should snatch it up and turn it into chic condos right quick. Another bonus to the location: The nearby bridge leading over the railroad tracks to Channelside provides a most picaresque and useful site for one of the many murders in the movie. I can't help thinking that the location inspired the mode of that particular death.
The glitter comes from the fabulous Harry Wolf building at the corner of Ashley and Kennedy. The six-story cubes at the base of the tower provide an incredible stage set to begin with. Dramatic lighting turns up the voltage and charisma of the place even more. Much of the action takes place inside the cubes, where a shimmering nightclub sets the night — and downtown — ablaze with electrifying energy. The movie's climax takes place right outside the cubes on the threshold of the Kiley garden. It looks ever so glamorous and would have been even more dazzling if the original reflecting pools were still there.
The third very present location is the AmSouth building, with its gothic-looking top. Mexican artist Graciela Iturbide created an elegant and witty photogravure of the building in collaboration with USF's Graphicstudio a few years ago. It's a composite photograph that plays on the building's ominous qualities with looming perspective, stark lighting and a backdrop of threatening clouds and circling buzzards.
The Punisher does something similar with it cinematically, and menacing music plays every time it appears in a shot. It is, appropriately, headquarters for the bad guys.
Another One Bites the Sand
Speaking of entertaining bad guys, those dreamers who thought The Surf on Treasure Island might one day make a great set for a movie based on a Tim Dorsey or Elmore Leonard novel can hang up their hopes for good now. The Surf has been demolished to make room for a hotel-condominium. Fans of the building traded condolences and pictures of the demolition on their listserve, treasureislandfriends@yahoogroups.com.
They called the photos gut-wrenching and painful. I still haven't been able to look at them. To me, The Surf was the Jackie Kennedy of beach motels — a delicate 1950s beauty dressed in pert yellow with crisp white trim and an asymmetrical arch perched like a pillbox hat over a pretty face. I couldn't stand to see it smashed to bits, but I understood the impulse to go and say goodbye. A place like that has a unique personality and a life of its own with memories and friends who share its past and mourn its passing.
News from Miami Beach does bring some hope that Floridians may come to value our special brand of 1950s modernist architecture before it's all gone. Activists there are having some success in their drive to save and promote the 1950s Miami Beach hotels and motels they've dubbed Miami Modern or MiMo. In May alone, stories on MiMo ran in The New York Times and two London papers, The Guardian and Financial Times, as well as the Miami Herald.
Financial Times architecture writer Edwin Heathcote characterized Miami architecture as brash, vulgar and outré, saying it has been left out of the written histories of modern architecture. Yet, he writes, "the city has produced an extraordinarily rich and influential range of styles." He goes on to trace the development of MiMo, calling it an inspiration and saying contemporary architects are already starting to imitate it. He praises the style in rhapsodic terms and encourages readers to go see the real thing before it's replaced by pale imitations. New York Times writer Abby Goodnough notes that a location scout persuaded producers of CSI Miami to feature MiMo buildings in the new television series, in hopes of branding MiMo the way Miami Vice branded tropical deco.
Maybe the success of Miami Beach will give Treasure Island activists some ammunition in their battle to convince local officials of the value of preserving what's left of their 1950s vacation architecture.
If not, here's hoping we'll always have Miami Beach.
Susan F. Edwards can be reached at susan.edwards15@verizon.net.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2004.
