Early 1980s, I’m about fourteen, and I saw Death Race 2000 on KHJ Channel 9. At which point, as you might imagine, I said holy crap, this is the greatest movie ever made. Of course it was heavily edited, but a buddy of mine with Showtime told me it was going to be on Showtime, so I invited myself over to see the picture in all its uncut glory. When I got my driver’s license a year later, suffice it to say, Death Race 2000 had not been a good influence on me.
Anyway, the other day I was musing over how lucky 1970s filmmakers were to have 1970s architecture scattered about the landscape, with which to depict futuristic dystopiae. Yeah, I know, Get Carter and Clockwork Orange, but I mean specifically Southern California; consider Conquest of the Planet of the Apes making use of Century City and UC-Irvine, or Buck Rogers shooting at the Bonaventure. I decided to revisit Death Race 2000, because through the foggy veil of forty-some years, I recalled it contained some “let’s use Brutalism to depict the coming dystopia” lurking in there.
I was not disappointed. Death Race 2000 holds up as great unhinged trash cinema, and I was correct about brutalism-as-future in various DR2K scenes, e.g. the final act takes place at the Chet Holifield Federal Building in Laguna Niguel (as designed by Pereira, who designed Apes-era Irvine, so there you go). Plus there’s a bunch of other L.A. locations, like this scene shot at Pereira’s Union Oil just west of Bunker Hill.
What I hadn’t expected to see is some Bunker Hill!
This scene was shot in the fall of 1974, on South Grand Avenue, between First and Second.
Should you wish to view the Bunker Hill clip in its greater context (that is, by watching the Greatest Movie Ever Made) the movie is online here (though not of the greatest quality; I viewed it on Amazon Prime), and the Bunker Hilliness begins at about twenty-four minutes in.
Bunker Hill, Los Angeles 