“THEY DON’T MAKE ’em like they used to” is a popular refrain, but applied to the sturdy Hollywood filmmaking of the 1990s, one movie stands out as emphatically representative: Jan de Bont’s 1994 summer action thrill ride, Speed.
You remember the plot. There’s a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes 50 miles an hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below 50, it blows up. “What do you do?” madman Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) quizzes LAPD officer Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) in a hair-raising second-act set-up. That moment, still embedded in the fabric of pop culture, follows a riveting first-act appetiser staged in a compromised elevator shaft and soon gives way to an equally gripping underground finale that quite literally explodes out onto Hollywood Boulevard.
Consider those bookending sequences. The elevator portion was, by many first-hand accounts, the hairiest ordeal of the entire production. The crew built a multi-story shaft and then precariously hung a lift in place for the harrowing rescue of a dozen passengers, putting actors and camera operators in the sort of danger that makes insurance companies cringe. To supplement that experience, an entire team built and photographed a scaled-down replicant of the elevator shaft almost solely for the film’s opening-credits overture.