Author: Kevin Watterson

Exteriors

Part 3 of 5

Part 1: Photos

Part 2: Studio Tours

Part 4: Sound Stages

Part 5: Props, Etc

The Warner Bros studio tour takes you around their backlot, which you can see on Google Maps.  The streets with fake buildings are the exterior sets and what look like little barns are the sound stages. The lot is also home to the mixing stages where they put the sound and video together for shows and movies, employee offices and one of the world’s most advanced theaters.

The tour starts with a drive thru the exterior sets. Each one has a theme to mimic a city like New York or a setting like government buildings or apartments. Really, though, as you ride thru them all the differences start to fade.

Most of the houses are what the types call “functional sets.”  They’re wood buildings with exteriors made of wood or, if it is supposed to be concrete or brick, a fiberglass “skin.” You can walk right up to it and for all the world it looks like brick. Then you touch it and it is obviously not. Studios got by with that for a long time, but the advent of HD television forced them to start using the real thing for close-up shots. Why use skins in the first place? If they need to alter the way a building looks, fiberglass is a lot easier to take off and put back than brick.

The interior of a functional set feels like walking into an empty apartment. No furniture, nothing on the walls, empty kitchen. None of the walls are load bearing so they can be taken down or moved as a shot requires. When you look up, instead of a ceiling you see  the structures for hanging lights or, if need be, a temporary ceiling. None of them have power, so enormous tubes run through the building to pipe in air conditioning. The night before a shoot they will crank the temp down to the 50s. By the time the lights, equipment and people are on the set the temperature gets back to normal. Even still, if it is hot like the 97-degree day last week, they have to keep the air coming in between takes for it to be tolerable.

One of the things the tour guides emphasize is that everything on the property is built for being filmed. Offices have generic fronts that can be made to look like schools, hotels, even apartments. The building highlighted in this Google image has an entrance on either side of the street. One is built right on the curb so it can be shot as a hospital emergency entrance. The other is set back from the street like a hotel or convention center. Inside is an employee coffee shop, which they used for Alan Alda’s character in The West Wing finale. Everything is a set.

Some exterior sets aren’t there any more. The ambulance bay for ER is long gone. My family got to see it and the diner built outside of it. Like other skins, it was fiberglass instead of concrete. To the horror of many, our tour guide back then planted her white pants right on the wall and proceeded to rub her bum all over it. Even the dirt and grime on the walls was painted on. For the inauguration scene in The West Wing finale, they built over a parking lot. Years earlier the parking lot housed a full-size basketball court for Michael Jordan to practice on while he filmed Space Jam.

Walking around the exterior sets as the guide rattles off a small fraction of the things that used this building or that house, you wonder how they get away with using these same facades over and over again. There is a big difference between what you see with your eyes and what a camera sees thru its lenses.

Look at this screenshot from the Hardee’s ad again. You only see a small section of the exterior wall and a short part of the El track, all of which are slightly out of focus in the background. Or take the scene from Seinfeld. You’d never even think to take note of what’s in the background.

Studio Tours

Part 2 of 5.

Part 1 – Photos

Part 3 – Exteriors

Part 4 – Sound Stages

Part 5 – Props, Etc

Many of the biggest Hollywood studios offer the public a tour of their studio facilities. Sony, Paramount and Warner Bros have them as stand alone features, Universal includes it as part of its theme park attraction.

When our family took Christmas a trip to southern California in 2002 we did a two-hour tour of Warner Bros studios in Burbank. It was a fantastic experience during a time when great shows like Friends, ER and Everybody Loves Raymond filmed on the lot. No one was working over the holiday, so we got to go into sound stages and see the sets for Friends and ER that were normally closed. We also did the Universal tour, which consists of a tram ride through some recognizable areas of the studio’s backlot and some amusement stages showing fake earthquakes, fires, floods, etc. It’s neat to see places where they filmed Jaws and Back to the Future (which unfortunately burned down a few years ago), but you don’t get to leave the tram or enter any of the working stages. Warner and Universal have a separate, longer tour that goes into more areas of their lots. I took the Warner tour.

The day-long Warner Bros tour includes the same backlot tour and soundstage visit as the shorter tour, but the extra time allows them to stop the tour cart and let you wander around in the backlot to see some of the practical sets. They also take you into the set construction area, mixing stages and prop shops as well as feed you in Warner’s fine dining restaurant. Famed director Richard Donner sat down for lunch at the table next to ours. I was tempted to lean over and tell him his Superman 2 was better.

Taking a studio tour also gives you a different look at how the entertainment industry works. A majority of work at Warners’ lot right now is television because it is more profitable than movies. Its website describes what it all does far better than I could. Hollywood is a damn big business.

Warner is not tied to any broadcast network, so it can play host to shows from across the guide. ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars films there along with several CBS shows such as The Mentalist, Big Bang Theory and Mike & Molly. HBO’s True Blood was set to film an outdoor scene last week. NBC hits Friends, ER and The West Wing filmed there at the same time. In fact, if you look up a show on IMDB.com you can see all the studios involved in its production. The list for Criminal Minds shows how much work it takes to film, edit and distribute a primetime drama.

Next up, Part 3: Exteriors

Warner Bros Tour Photos

The first stop on the backlot is the Warner Bros. jungle. We couldn’t go in because True Blood was set up to shoot that evening.
The exterior sets may look like brick or concrete, but they’re really a fiberglass shell created to look like stone. Why? If they need a brick house to have wood siding, it’s a lot easier to take down and re-apply fiberglass than it would be to re-do real bricks.
The backlot is full of streets like this, built to appear as if they turn around a corner when in reality they simply end.
In the middle is a town square, this house used for the Growing Pains intro sits on the corner. It’s a practical set, meaning it can accommodate shooting inside as well. Most of the house structures are this way.
Looking out the bay windows of the Growing Pains house.
The inside of a functional set is like an empty apartment, but without ceilings. That tube funnels in air conditioning. The night before a shoot they will crank it down to the 50s. When the set is full of people and equipment, the rooms get very warm.
For shots that require a ceiling, they can drop a panel over the walls. None of the walls are load-bearing, meaning they can be moved or removed as needed.
All of the houses are built to look different from every angle. This looks like a different house, but it’s really a corner of the Growing Pains house.
This was Uncle Jessie’s house on Dukes of Hazzard. Boss Hog’s house was the other side of the same building.
The house exterior Ronald Reagan’s character lived in in Kings Row. Two doors down from the Seavers.
You wouldn’t recognize it, but this is where they shot the carjacking scene for the Seinfeld finale. How do you know? Look in the background of the inset screenshot. That’s the Growing Pains house.
This building on one side of the square was the courthouse in Dukes of Hazard. Right now it’s a high school for Pretty Little Liars on ABC Family.
This little building looks like a farmhouse and sits on one corner of the square.
Batman and Robin ran up these steps in every episode of the old TV show. They filmed it exactly once and replayed the same footage every time.
Warner Bros. is renovating several of the exterior sets to remove rotting wood.
This street set was used for the Hardee’s Man of Steel commercial. That fresh concrete filled in the hole the actors were working in. In the background you can see the El train built for ER.
This is where they filmed the upside down kiss with Toby McGuire and Kirsten Dunst. They had to stuff McGuire’s nose with cotton balls because the rain was going in his nose, in effect drowning him. Worth it for a kiss with Kirsten Dunst, I’d say.
The El train exterior built for ER. It’s not steel, and it wouldn’t support a golf cart much less a train car.
This used to be the home of a large build out for the entrance to County General on ER. I got to see it as that when my family toured the lot in 2002.
Stage 16 is one of the tallest sound stages in the world at 65 feet. It’s been home to countless memorable scenes, including the t-rex for Jurassic Park.
Friends is long gone, but they rebuilt the Central Perk set in a corner of the prop shop. In 2002, I got to see the real thing. Very cool.
Warner builds its sets on-site. First they’re constructed in the construction area, then they’re dismantled and rebuilt on their sound stage.
These lamps in the Warner Bros. Studios prop department are available for rent…for $25,000 each, per week.
It would cost $65,000 to rent this lamp for one week. Warner Bros. has two.
This lamp is one of only four remaining in the world, designed by a Russian czar. It’s worth $1.5 million. Warner Bros. has two.
Atop a cabinet in the massive prop shop are these skull masks used by Penguin’s bad guys in Batman Returns.
This is an exact replica of the Resolute Desk from the Oval Office, used for The West Wing.

I like to take full advantage of the web’s ability to accept lengthy blog posts, but this one grew longer than even I can stomach. Last week I spent a day touring the Warner Bros studio facility in Burbank, California.  I took a ton of photos and got a lot of cool information, so I will break it into several posts:

Here are all the best photos. I’ll refer back to these throughout the posts and talk about parts of the tour we weren’t allowed to photograph.

Man of Steel – Can’t We Do Better?

Editor’s note: This post contains spoilers. In accordance with the blog’s spoiler policy, it is a reader’s responsibility to avoid spoilers, not mine. 

I don’t watch enough movies to make writing about them a regular thing, but I love all things Superman. The latest attempt to resurrect him on the big screen left me so conflicted that the only way I could sort out my thoughts was to put them to monitor.

This is supposed to be the reboot of at least two new Superman movies. There have been five previous, plus multiple television shows and cartoons. The Superman S is one of the most recognizable symbols on Earth. Can we please be done with the origin story and the wandering Clark Kent? Movie goers of every age know that Superman is from planet Krypton. Why spend so much time in a new franchise showing the story all over again? That’s time that could be devoted to setting up a new story that can last for several movies. Suppose this and the sequel clock in at five hours, they will have spent 20 percent of that time rehashing old material. The same goes with Clark’s struggle to grow into his destiny. There can be a Superman story without Jonathan and Martha Kent and without Krypton. That would truly re-imagine Superman on the big screen.

Too much of the rest of the movie is just plain stupid. Actually, it’s worse than stupid. It’s damn near plagiarism. Krypton’s birth pods are a blatant copy of The Matrix. The oil rig fire where we first see Clark is obviously intended to be the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

It gets worse.

Jonathan Kent sends people under a highway overpass to escape a tornado.  This is the WORST thing you can do! No responsible father in tornado alley would ever tell his wife and son to hide under an overpass. I don’t know what would be more unsettling: The brains behind the movie not knowing this is terrible advice or them knowing but deciding to do it anyway. It ruined what should have been the emotional payoff to Clark’s relationship with his father. Kevin Costner did his best to save it, but you can’t rescue something this bad.

Combine that with the incredible stupidity that washes over the human race when Superman is around. How many times do they need to see a flying woman in alien body armor get shot at before they learn that shooting at her won’t do a damn bit of good? We know bullets don’t hurt Superman, we know they won’t hurt other Kryptonians either. Guess what? You probably can’t shoot down a Kryptonian spaceship with your little missiles either. Re-imagine a movie without showing this nonsense.

The moment I gave up on this movie? That convinced me these movie makers don’t have the creative brains to make Superman anew? When they re-enacted Independence Day. You were given America’s favorite superhero. DO BETTER THAN RIPPING OFF A 90s ALIEN INVASION MOVIE. HOW FRICKING TERRIBLE AT STORYTELLING ARE YOU THAT YOU PILFER A SCENE FROM RANDY FLIPPING QUADE?!?

Then, to cap it off, after destroying Metropolis and sending its mindless citizens into rote movie panic, Superman kills General Zod by…breaking his neck. Yep, that’s right. Hollywood’s favorite method of murdering unsuspecting security guards is how Superman kills his enemy, who survived being thrown into and thru all types of solid structures. Why didn’t Clark break his neck sooner? Surely he could have done it and spared half of Metroplis. Did he reach some heightened level of strength that allowed him to overpower Zod’s neck? Was Zod weakened by the fight? Was Clark? Then why didn’t he break Clark’s neck?

I bought into your flying man in a blue suit so I’m willing to let a little bit go, but I’m sorry. Man of Steel asks us to let too much slip by.

What makes this so frustrating is that the movie had a lot of really good parts that show it could have been so much better. It eschews Clark Kent the reporter until the final scene, sparing us from having to endure another actor trying to replicate Christopher Reeve’s charm. Although Henry Cavil’s alternate look was not at all convincing, it shows that the producers have at least some sense of how to tell a Superman story differently.

Hand-in-hand with that change is the way it treats Superman’s great secret: It doesn’t dominate the movie. In fact they are quite reckless with it. Showing how unprotected his identity is (possibly foreshadowing the sequel?), the movie tracks Lois as she follows his trail thru eyewitnesses and contemporaries all the way to Martha Kent’s front door. Later she brings the cops to the Kent’s home. That would have been unheard of in past retellings when Clark’s identity was a major part of the story. We also then have Lois knowing Clark’s secret from the beginning. This is again good and evidence that there is at least some sliver of capability here.

Other bits that I could appreciate were smaller. The special effect that had Faora-Ul popping from position to position in fight scenes showed super speed better than I think it has ever appeared in a Superman movie. Why some of that creativity didn’t work its way into the other effects, who knows. And where was Non?

I liked that Lara-El had a stronger role. Jor-El trusted her with key parts of their escape plan for Kal. There’s nothing in Superman mythology that says she can only be a crying mom. The scene where she gives birth was really good at showing the painful anguish that she couldn’t have possibly known she was in store for, there hadn’t been a live birth on Krypton in centuries. If Man of Steel was a television show, I would be intrigued by the prospect of stories that involve Lara.

Young Clark’s scene in his classroom where his super powers become too much for him to bear is exactly how you’d expect a youngster to react. Jonathan and Clark talking after he lifts his sinking school bus out of a river digs into the moral dilemma of a father balancing his desire to protect his son with his humanity. His answer to Clark asking him if he was just supposed to let his classmates die to protect his secret elicited the only answer it could: “Maybe.” As much as I would prefer such background to be left out, it is still well done.

There’s also no Kryptonite, no Jimmy Olsen and no Lex Luthor (yet). All three are integral parts of Superman lore but leaving them out shows it is possible to conceive a Superman story without the comic book pillars.

As I was letting these thoughts sink in I decided to re-watch Superman Returns. I came to revile that movie as much as everyone else did, but I gained a new appreciation for it in light of Man of Steel. Returns had the John Williams score and recycled scenes with Marlon Brando to make it feel like more of a sanctioned reboot than Man of Steel. Returns’ story even picked up roughly five years after the Reeve movies left off.

What I realized about Returns is what bothered me about Man of Steel. Returns embraced and rejoiced in the inherent cheesiness that comes in a comic book movie. I’m not going to make apologies for its story, but I will defend that it never tried to be anything more than a comic book movie. Can we say the same about Man of Steel?

I don’t believe we can. The excessive attempts to destroy Zod’s army and pathetic copycat moments would land much better in a movie that accepted its place. Instead, I think Man of Steel tried to shoehorn them into its attempt at a Batman style modern superhero epic. As is almost always the case, a mishmash of styles ends up as a mess that leaves you regretful for what could have been.

That’s exactly how I feel about Man of Steel.

Cliffhangers, cult followers and Stan’s Soviet mole

I’m a lot better at season finale cliffhangers than I used to be. I’ll credit Lost for that. After all of those agonizing waits between seasons I learned to let a show recede from my memory. Besides, how could any show ever leave us hanging as hard as Lost did every May? Cliffhangers now are a cakewalk in comparison!

I also stopped watching previews for future episodes of the shows I watch. Those are done by marketing departments, not story writers, and are designed to leave you feeling anticipation for the next episode. If the show is good, you’ll want to watch the next episode. If not, you won’t. Ain’t nobody got time for marketing departments.

Here are some quick thoughts on a few shows I watched that ended with life-and-death cliffhangers. On The Americans we know that the Keri Russell character is not going to die. The Following gave us three life-and-deathers: Joe Carroll, Ryan Hardy and Claire Matthews. Carroll might actually be dead, but we can be pretty sure Hardy and Matthews are not. Is the point of a cliffhanger then to really leave us wondering if a character will survive? Most of the times not. Instead it usually leaves us wondering, “How will they get out of this one?”

The Following

I liked The Following from its beginning but was apprehensive about what would happen when the shock value from its brutal violence wore off. If you remember the first season of American Horror Story, The Following was similarly messed up in psychology but with a startling level of violence. The disturbing apex of that quality featured escaped serial killer Joe Carroll honor killing one of his cult members, followed by Carroll – covered in blood – having sex with a follower as two other followers achieved the mood by choking each other.

The show did lag in parts of its 13-episode first season, but overall The Following remained very strong. It has a similar feel to the early episodes of Revenge, a story fitting together so perfectly that it almost has to be being told in review. Former college professor, failed author and Edgar Allan Poe worshiper Joe Carroll is writing a new story  about the FBI agent who put him in prison and stole his wife.

The continuing revelations of more followers is something I will grant, for now. If they show up too conveniently too often they will cross the line from being part of the story to being a “hand of God” to bail it out. It got dangerously close to that point when people kept appearing out of the woods to help break out of the farmhouse.

How will the story change? Joe is dead, I will buy that for now yet not be surprised if he isn’t. He’s too good to remove from the show entirely, so some flashbacks wouldn’t be out of the ream of possibility. The scene of the girl in the restaurant reacting to news of his death might indicate some sleeper cells.

The Americans

I wasn’t wild about the pilot. I can’t quite put my finger on the uneasy feeling it left me with, maybe I thought it was a little forced. Having Stan suspect his neighbors of being spies to the point that he would break into their garage seemed too convenient to me. We can’t expect television to always portray realistic situations, but that felt like it went too far. In any case I wasn’t sure I would stick with the show and put it on the DVR level. An article detailing how the series creator had a background in intelligence convinced me to give it a chance. After a couple episodes I was not just enjoying the show, I was loving the drama. Most times a show generates its drama with action, but not The Americans. It carried drama throughout its episodes by placing the characters’ dialogue gently on top of its already tense Cold War setting. Very nicely done.

I didn’t like the choice of making Stan’s Soviet mole as someone so obviously sexy, I felt it undercut Stan’s reason for falling for her in the first place. He didn’t carry on an affair with her because she is gorgeous and he is horny. He couldn’t stop himself because spending years under deep cover with a white supremacist group cleaved his marriage. His wife hoped his new assignment in Washington would give her back the Stan Beeman she fell in love with. It hasn’t. Stan is as preoccupied with his work as ever, barely knows his teenage son and his wife dangerously close to leaving him.

He sees Nina as someone vulnerable who understands what it is like to live a lie, something his wife just cannot do for him. Had they cast someone less drool-inducingly sexy I think that would have played better.

(Stan’s wife is played by the perfectly beautiful Susan Misner, leading me to quip, “Yeah, I’d cheat on my wife Susan Misner. Sure I would, right after I spy for the Soviets.” Meaning of course that I would never.)

Otherwise I thought the show was pretty well done.