Chicago Hotels Star In 'Dark Knight'

A handful of Chicago hotels make cameos in "The Dark Knight," the new Batman movie that has become the pop culture event of the year. At least five hotels get screen time: Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago, The Westin Chicago River North, Hotel 71, Hotel Monaco and Amalfi Hotel Chicago. 

The Westin and Amalfi appear only in establishing shots of the Chicago streetscape that stands in for Batman’s Gotham City, essentially as architectural extras. Ditto for Monaco; I missed this during my Friday night screening of the movie, but HotelChatter says the marquee of the Monaco was visible from the office of Gotham’s mayor.
 
Trump and Hotel 71 feature quite prominently in the movie, though.

Though I don’t recall seeing Hotel 71’s colorful marquee in the movie, a suite within the hotel is given the honor of playing the role of billionaire Bruce Wayne’s penthouse home. 

However, it is the partially completed Trump that gets the real starring role. The hotel tower’s concrete-and-steel skeleton is the scene of a climactic showdown between Batman and his arch-nemesis, The Joker. Because the building is unfinished in the film (heck, despite being open for several months, it’s still unfinished in real life), it’s likely the vast majority of moviegoers won’t recognize it as the Trump. But given the importance of the scene and the film’s destiny to become a cultural icon, it’s a safe bet that the Trump will become a landmark destination for generations of Bat-fans.

In my maddening failure to find a clip or photo of the movie’s 10-minute Trump scene, I did come across this Web site, which chronicles a now-defunct hotel-related viral marketing effort for the movie. The viral campaign involved the fictional Gotham Intercontinental Hotel, complete with, apparently, a mock hotel Web site. The site was pulled a few months ago, possibly due to copyright issues (I can’t imagine which hotel chain might have felt infringed; it’s not like there’s an InterContinental brand already out there or anything), but the site’s contents were preserved in a separate wiki entry. They really nailed the tone of a typical hotel Web site, I’d say.

"The Dark Knight," by the way, is fully deserving of all the hype and praise heaped on it. Along with Pixar’s instant classic "WALL-E," "The Dark Knight" is among the landmark films of the year.