And in this version, they wind up somewhere they couldn’t go onstage: at the public pool, where word about the winning ticket starts to spread like spray from a cannonball.
There’s a dream ballet trip from Cuba to America in the 1940s for the song “Paciencia Y Fe” and a Fred-and-Ginger moment in “Before the Sun Goes Down.” The “96,000” sequence, shot on location over three unseasonably cold days at New York’s public Highbridge Pool, is the moment when the movie most adopts the visual grammar of a classic Hollywood musical.
As with many elements of In the Heights, the lottery-ticket plotline came from Miranda’s own experiences while growing up close by, in Inwood.
The show started out as a rough collection of songs and scenes he wrote and performed as an undergrad at Wesleyan in 2000. In 2004, Hudes — a Puerto Rican playwright who had been working on a play about her own childhood neighborhood in North Philly — joined Miranda to write the show’s book, and in 2008 it premiered on Broadway.
It’s an opportunity, through fantasy play and banter, to touch on what people want out of their life.” Usnavi dreams about sorting out his affairs and heading off to the Dominican Republic, while Benny, ever practical, would want to use his winnings to pay for business school.
“For me, the number ‘96’ has a subconscious wealth line connotation, because I was so aware of the price of living on 94th Street, where I went to school, versus 200th Street, where I lived.
“So as I was getting a tour of Washington Heights, we got to the end of the block and I was like, ‘What’s that building?’” It was the entrance to the Olympic-sized Highbridge Pool.
He and Hudes started riffing about the possibilities of shooting an old Hollywood–style number at the facility, which is run by the NYC Parks Department, but the idea seemed impossible.
They imagined an overhead shot of Vanessa surrounded by synchronized swimmers that would typically be accomplished by putting a camera on a drone, but it’s illegal to pilot drones within New York City.
When the salon ladies relax on the steps by the pool, they pose with Caribbean-inflected dancehall moves developed by associate choreographer Ebony Williams. Since Vanessa’s dream involves getting the heck out of the neighborhood and pursuing a fashion career , Barrera walks down a ramp into the pool with balletic poise, with the pool railing acting as a barre.
If they wanted to get a shot of a dancer doing a jump and twist into the pool, that also meant calculating just how fast a camera could follow him — it would need to dunk into the water with enough force to overwhelm its natural buoyancy and fully submerge.
After all that prep, the In the Heights cast and crew arrived at the Highbridge Pool on what turned out to be some especially cold and rainy days.
They also couldn’t film if it was raining too hard — any dripping or disturbance on the pool surface would make it clear this wasn’t, in fact, the hottest day of the summer.
“Popping is so connected to your muscles and being able to understand the tension in your body, but when you’re freezing you can’t feel the tension,” says Scott, who also got in the pool.
When they tried to capture that big overhead shot of Vanessa posing in her inner tube while surrounded by rings of dancers, the tube kept moving whenever the ensemble splashed around her.
All of this had to be accomplished in three days, before the city opened the pool to the public.
It came while getting that big sweeping shot of the dancers leaping out of the pool and splashing in unison.
“For ‘96,000,’ we went, how do we get it the most hip-hop, the most dancehall, and the most reggaeton?” They brought in producers Mike Elizondo, who focused on the hip-hop elements, and Trooko, who focused on the reggaeton parts.
They added in eight more measures of music to heighten the song’s build, at Chu’s request, as well as some movement on the baseline, which starts to rise on the way to the film’s even-bigger button.
It wasn’t about a character choice.” The actors filming the “96,000” scene weren’t recorded live on set — as is pretty much standard for most movie musicals — but instead recorded temp tracks in advance, which were played at the pool, and then rerecorded more audio later to better match the footage.
Even with the time crunch on set, “96,000” came into the editing room with far more footage than they ever could have used.
The sequence starts out with bits of animation scrawled onscreen over the characters in a way that references the mixed-media magic of the original Mary Poppins or 1971’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
Before filming, the creative team debated how to pull them up — from cutting back and forth to Usnavi’s bodega as the winning numbers went up on the wall to having actors shape pool noodles into the digits.
The punchline after the reveal is that no one at the pool actually has the winning ticket; when the song ends, the mood deflates like a punctured beach ball.
“Then when I showed my wife, she was like, ‘You know our anniversary is the 27th, right? And the baby is due on the 27th.’ However, just a few weeks later, my baby was born on the 26th, so he had my back.” They named him Jonathan Heights Chu.