Blade Runner

Thursday, October 28, 2004, at 09:54AM

By Eric Richardson

We watched the film Blade Runner in my speculative cinema class today. Oddly I hadn't ever seen it before. I liked it.

What fascinated me, though, was the footage in the Bradbury Building. On its own this is an amazing building, but seeing it put so artfully on film is amazing. I was particularly captivated by the shots through the roof showing the advertsing blimp overhead. You can see a great example of that shot on the linked site. I can't begin to fathom the lengths they had to go to in order to film with so much water and yet preserve the interior of the building. It's interesting too that they chose to keep the Bradbury name on the building -- making it the Bradbury Apartments and totally redoing the exterior -- and also chose to keep the Million Dollar Theater across the street.

I also correctly identified the police headquarters as the closed off wing of Union Station, and the tunnel as 2nd Street.