Sam Raimi’s “Crimewave” (1985) awakens my inner Locations Manager
In my college years, I studied film. I was attracted to idiosyncratic expression—to satirical, slapstick, and evergreen humor—and to cartoonish stylization. After university, I worked in the film industry for a few years as another interest arose, which was everything having to do with the City of Detroit. The overlap of these interests made me an ideal locations scout and manager for a few of the productions filmed here in the late 2000s. I was still driving a car, and as the local person working with people largely visiting from New York and Los Angeles, I spent lots of time motoring around and taking pictures for potential film shoots.
Sam Raimi’s 1985 film “Crimewave", cowritten by the Coen Brothers and filmed almost entirely in Detroit, had completely eluded me until 2019, when friends Everett and Jeff turned me on to it. Apparently, it was Raimi’s first time working with a studio, and that didn’t go well. He used up the budget to film elaborate action sequences, then was surprised to learn that the studio was not at the ready with more funds for the rest of photography. This resulted in a very uneven film, with several brilliant sequences, and a lot of material that doesn’t always hold together. It is understandable, then, that Raimi and the studio, both, allowed the movie to bubble under and be forgotten.
For me, it was a revelation. There’s only so much visual documentation of the mid-80s in Detroit. Industry and people had been leaving for decades, and it would be decades still before any of it would improve. It was a time when people seemed to consider American downtowns as forever-beyond-repair, and investment had simply moved to the edges, to new suburbs where new houses could be built away from the impossible mess of the “inner city”. This is the context of the filming of “Crimewave” in Detroit.
So, in 2019 I went around town and photographed “Crimewave” filming locations. It wasn’t until 2024 that I got the image of the MacArthur Bridge to Belle Isle, where the villain battles the hero before falling from the bridge and being smashed by a car. I hope you enjoy my nerdy then-and-now tour of filming locations.
