Cinematic Seattle: Rose Red

Needless to say, all does not end well. However, Seattlest isn't here to review the film, except to say that it was an enjoyable way to spend a few hours.

As most of the film is set within the mansion, shots of Seattle are generally limited to establishing shots and a few locations around town in the first hour. The opening credits give us the expected shots of ferries on Elliott Bay and the skyline from Queen Anne Hill (Seattlest has a sneaking suspicion we'll be seeing those shots a lot as this series progresses). Ivar's Seafood Bar on the waterfront is featured, even getting their logo prominently displayed when one of the characters is working at Ivar's. Nothing like a little product placement to give a local business some exposure!

Other shots around town include three local houses used for exteriors, one of which has a nice -- if brief -- view of the I-90 floating bridge. There were also a few scenes filmed on the University of Washington campus, but they were fairly limited in scope, foregoing any of the gorgeous architecture for generic interior hallways and a few exterior shots of a doorway.

Of course, once the story moves to the house itself, things start to get far more interesting.

To start things off, the mansion is located at the top of Spring Street, just over the bridge over I-5 as you leave downtown. Here's how Ellen describes the site in 1907 in the film's companion novel, The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer:

The property...is nothing short of spectactular. It is crowned with a tall forest of cedar and pine, and workers have cleared nearly six of the forty acres to hold the house.... Though well out of the city, the house sits at the muddy end of Spring Street. From this location, one can see the entire city below. [...] The property is accessed from the west.

Obviously, there's no such mansion there in the real world. However, thanks to clever editing and digital trickery, the film does a fairly creditable job of replacing approximately twenty square blocks of lower First Hill with the immense building and its surrounding grounds. The single best overview of the mansion's location is a long arial shot that tracks up Spring Street to Rose Red, which we've assembled into a composite image here.

History buffs may enjoy one short sequence showing Seattle circa 1906, during Rose Red's construction. Two gorgeous recreations of early Seattle are featured, one of Main Street west of Occidental Avenue, and one looking up Spring Street towards the then under-construction mansion. To be sure, there are some anachronisms (nicely detailed by HistoryLink on slide 16 and slide 17 of their Rose Red Locations slideshow), but unless you're a serious nitpicker, they're not serious enough to detract from this look at what Seattle used to be like.

You don't have to be a serious nitpicker at all to find fault with one of the film's showacase images, however. This shot is used a few times over the course of the film, generally just before or after the fades for commercial breaks. In theory, it's a great shot, looking out across Seattle from the Rose Red's rooftop. Let's take a close look at that shot, however, shall we?

Seattlest must admit, when we first saw this, we not only laughed (out loud, even), but we paused the movie for a few moments to analyze the shot. Most Seattle residents will be able to pick out the major flaws with the shot quickly enough, but here's HistoryLink's analysis:

A view of the lake from the tallest part of the mansion over its many roof tops and chimney pots is used a few times in the film as an exit to commercials. This digital montage however looks down not from 7th and Spring but from the Capitol Hill bluff above the I-5 Freeway and Lakeview Avenue. By eliminating Fremont, Ballard and the Chittenden Locks, the scene joins Lake Union with Puget Sound. To cap this picturesque scene at its horizon, Mount Rainier is plopped on Port Townsend.

A nice shot, to be sure, but one that can't help but be rather jarring to anyone who's even slightly familiar with the local Washington landscape.

And there we have it, folks. A century-old haunted mansion overlooking downtown Seattle and wiping out much of lower First Hill in the process, entire neighborhoods gone missing, and an entire mountain transported hundreds of miles, all for the sake of a picturesque shot. Not bad!

A few last notes to wrap up:

• The mansion itself was portrayed by Tacoma's own Thornewood Castle, which was extensively renovated by the production team. It's now run as a Bed-and-Breakfast, so if you've got a hankering to spend a night in a pseudo-haunted house, it's just a short drive south. Seattlest is planning on doing just that one of these days, as soon as we have the spare time and funds to do so.

• After the miniseries was broadcast, many people thought that Rose Red was a real Seattle haunted house, and started looking for information on the mansion. Their searches led them to a spoof website for Beaumont University (the double for the University of Washington in the film), which in turn led them to the excellent Seattle-area history site HistoryLink. HistoryLink now has an entertaining collection of e-mail missives from people who refused to accept that this entire thing was fictional.

Next time on Cinematic Seattle: well, okay, we don't really know that yet. But we're getting some good suggestions in the comments to our introductory post, so we'll just have to see what we can find on the shelves next time we go out a-renting.

Until then, dear readers...