8MM | The Clevelander, Ocean Drive — neon at the start of a dark picture

Principal photography on 8MM began in February 1998 in Florida, months before the production reached Hollywood, and among the Miami locations it used was the Clevelander at 1020 Ocean Drive. Miami New Times logged it in its running record of the city on film.

There is a strange comedy in that. The Clevelander is the loudest building on the Art Deco strip: a curved 1930s hotel with a pool bar cut into its front terrace, speakers going by mid-afternoon, spring-break energy on tap eleven months a year. A film about a man losing his footing in the darkest trade in America started shooting a few feet from a poolside cocktail queue. Miami has always been generous that way, renting out its brightness to pictures that need the contrast.

Ocean Drive between 10th and 11th is open to anyone with shoes on. Stand across the street after dark, when the neon on the parapet comes up green and the Atlantic is a black band at the end of the block, and you are looking at the exact quality Schumacher's crews chase everywhere: a city that photographs like a promise.

Photo: The Clevelander Hotel, Miami Beach, Wikimedia Commons.