Dissolving in Rain

As long as I can remember, I’ve loved rain. I literally moved to a rain forest when I graduated from high school and have been living near its edges, at least, ever since. Conversely, the filming community is in Hollywood because it was raining in Phoenix (and to escape Thomas Edison’s agents in New Jersey), and they’ve been avoiding rain ever since. It’s hard not to notice the conflict, when you’re strongly attuned to the weather and don’t think “sunny day” is the same as “good weather.”

Of course, part of the issue is that the industry is in Sunny Southern California. In order for there to be rain in a Hollywood movie, you need fancy special rigs. It’s expensive and complicated and never looks quite right, and it’s better to just let it be sunny all the time. Rain is used, when it is used, to convey emotion. Rainy funerals. Rainy breakups. Jon Cusack in a phone booth in the rain yelling about how the woman he loves gave him a pen.

Wait. That last one is set in Seattle. Some of it was filmed there—you don’t have to know a ton about the region to pick out a few landmarks in a few scenes—but the most famous scene in it was filmed in LA. There’s a Rockford Files episode where he goes to Seattle but it’s obviously not Seattle rain because there’s thunder, and Seattle doesn’t get thunder much. But even films set here—even films filmed here—don’t use rain as often as we get rain. Does it ever rain in 10 Things I Hate About You?

The fact is, rain is complicated to film even when it’s real rain. It is, obviously, a natural phenomenon. In the time I’ve been working on this article, the level has been fairly consistent, but it’s not unusual for rain to go from a drizzle to a downpour to a steady fall in just a few minutes, and sometimes it’s sunny and raining at the same time because of how far rain falls. And we know that, because we’ve lived it, but it’s still weird on camera. We expect the rate to be more consistent than it is, and weather isn’t obliging.

Despite its not-entirely-wrong quote that it rains nine months of the year in Seattle, it almost never rains in Sleepless in Seattle. There isn’t even much Western Washington Gloom. It’s all right for a noir, where you need the streetlights to shine off wet streets even if your movie is set in LA, but the movies want sun. It made sense back in the old days, when you needed a ton of light to see anything on film, but our brains have now all been programmed for it. Even those of us who would rather listen to the sound of raindrops.