Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1100404
cruising the 12th Street side of the Federal Triangle in downtown Washington. III. THAT UBIQUITOUS DOME In creating feature films, Hollywood can go to extreme lengths to incorporate the touchstone Dome no matter where the action of the screenplay takes place. In Born Yesterday, for example, when the trash magnate Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford) is surveying his suite at the Statler Hotel on 16th and K Streets, NW (now the Cap- itol Hilton), it has a lovely close-up view of the Dome. But this is an obvious process shot, since the Capitol is impossible to view from that site. In Protocol (1984), a cocktail waitress-turned-State Department protocol officer played by Goldie Hawn is lying on a bed in e George Washington University Hospital, NW, when, on the phone with her mother, she says: "I can see the Capitol from the window!"—a clear impossibility. Just as impossible is the clear Dome view that an army colonel (Denzel Washington) sees from his room in the invented "Bethesda Arms" hotel in the military thriller Courage Under Fire (1995). Even when a master director like Alfred Hitchcock needs a shot of that singular Dome, he can't avoid mess- ing with it. In his classic thriller North By Northwest (1959) the single Washington sequence opens with a shiny refection of the Capitol in the nameplate of the "United States Intelligence Agency." e trouble is that, from the subsequent shot showing the Capitol's West Front from a large picture window, it appears the Agency is located smack on the Mall, about the level of 4th Street, an ideal spot for a super-secret spy operation. irty-five years later, that shot gets a wacky reprise in Forrest Gump (1994). As Forrest's life-long friend Jenny is showing him around the "joint" D.C. head- quarters of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers, a window again reveals a full-fron- tal view of the Capitol's West Front, placing both those radical bastions also in the middle of the Mall! IV. THE LIBRARY GETS ITS INNINGS As part of the legislative branch, the Library of Con- gress—in particular, the original, splendid Jefferson Building—has appeared periodically in commercial films. (e other two Library buildings, named for John Adams and James Madison, have not appeared in any Hollywood film production.) Some major early films featured the Jefferson, such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Born Yesterday, both of which showed their naïve leads discovering and being inspired by our Fig. 8. Perhaps the most sublime "goof " sequence in all D.C. movies comes in Being ere when the tiny figure of Chance the gardener (Peter Sellers) walks south on the median strip of North Capitol Street—a place where no one would actually walk—with traffic flying by and the Capitol Dome in view (1979). THE CAPITOL DOME 9