Shot On Site - Let's Run Some Red Lights

This past Summer, Lars Karlsen came forth to help identify some of the few remaining Ghostbusters II filming locations. He even visited the Big Apple to take his own photos of these new locations, as well as the whole array of known locations. All of his photos will be shared this Summer during Spook Central's Revenge of Shot on Site Summer event, which will run down the filming locations of both original Ghostbusters movies in honor of their 35th and 30th anniversaries. In preparation for that, I'll present a few Shot on Site articles over the next few weeks looking at the new places Lars has found.

During the "We're Back" montage, Ray runs a red light and takes a hard left turn off of Hudson Street (turning west onto Barrow Street), as has been previously identified in another Shot on Site article. Peter and Egon exchange worried looks at each other.

This mini "scene" was lifted from a deleted scene, which took place after the Ghostbusters later visit the museum and examine the Vigo painting. Ray is possessed by Vigo, and on their way home, drives Ecto-1A erratically in an effort to kill them all. Ivan re-purposed this bit of the scene to make it appear that Ray is running the red light in an effort to get to their next job quickly.

Because the footage was re-purposed out of its original context, I always assumed that the close-up of the red light (seen below) and the shot of the car making the turn, were not immediately connected. I thought Ivan took them from different parts of the deleted scene and put them together in the montage to better sell the idea of Ray running the red light.


As it turns out (no pun intended), I was wrong. The red light - which I never thought could be identified - is at the same location as the car turning shot.

Let me see if I can explain this without making it more complicated than it is. I think a little annotated map is going to help.


For the shot of the red light, the movie camera was placed in the opposite direction it was for the shot of the car turning. It was placed in the same point-of-view as Ray, seeing the same red light he would have seen while he was driving. I put the camera on the map at the intersection of Hudson and Morton, which is where the car was driving away from. The arrow represents the path of the car, driving down Hudson and turning left onto Barrow. The buildings seen in the background/corner of the red light close-up are at Grove Street, and are noted on the map with a blue star. (Yes, it IS a star!) They appear closer than they are due to the camera's long lens, so here's a shot from Google Maps (photographed in November 2017) situated at Hudson and Barrow, looking towards the buildings at Grove Street, which better matches the movie shot.


I think that's enough to show the red light being at the same location as the car turning.

Credit goes to Lars Karlsen from the The Ghostbusters Archives for the identification, and Matthew Jordan for some additional assistance. For more photos and the such, check out Spook Central's Filming Locations page for this location.

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For more information about Ghostbusters filming locations, be sure to check out the rest of Spook Central's Shot On Site articles, Spook Central's Filming Locations page, and Chris Stewart's Shot On Site articles. Thanks Chris for letting me use your awesome title. Title graphic drawn by Paul Kinsella.