2 Fast 2 Furious | Olympia Theater — The 1926 Marquee the Race Blew Past

The race leaves the start line and pours onto Flagler Street, and for a few frames the camera catches a marquee that has been lighting this block since 1926. The Olympia stands at 174 East Flagler Street: Miami's first air-conditioned building, an atmospheric theater with a plaster Mediterranean courtyard inside and a ceiling wired with hundreds of stars. The production used the pavement outside it for the road-closed dressing that funnels the cars through. It is a two-second shot. It is also the oldest thing in the movie by seventy-odd years.

Go inside if a show is running, because the auditorium is the whole point — a false night sky over a false Spanish plaza, clouds that drift across it, a Wurlitzer still sitting in the pit. Outside, Flagler Street has been rebuilt with wider sidewalks and new paving, so the exact curb line the camera car used is gone.

The vertical blade sign is not gone. Look up at it from the north side of the street and the scale lands at once: a 1920s movie palace watching a 2000s street race go by, both of them selling exactly the same thing to the same city.

Photo: Olympia Theater and Office Building by Wally Gobetz (Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).