I’m mostly interested in the extremely large ones they build, like mock-ups of ships, mansions, office buildings, caves, temples, etc. These huge sets that take months if not a year to build and cost a million dollars or more.
If you’ve ever seen the “Making Of” of a particular movie, they show the craft that went into the sets and how long it took to make them.
What I’d like to know is if there is a set amount of time they keep these things;
-Are they kept longer depending on the success of the film
-Whether or not there may be a sequel/prequel
-Till they run out of room
-Till they need that particular stage again
-Does the cost of the original set matter
Finally, does Hollywood keep building new stages to accomodate these sets or do they have to re-use certain stages for a certain type/size of set?
Disclaimer: I’m not a Hollywood insider, just someone who watches the commentary on every DVD I get.
I believe it is generally considered cheaper to destroy and rebuild most large sets than to store them. During the filming of the Star Wars prequels, for instance, they would film all of their Anakin’s House sequences together and then dismantle the set to make room for Naboo Interior (or whatever).
Peter Jackson made special mention of the Bag End set: rather than see it destroyed, he purchased it. (I believe he paid New Line for it.)
Specially made props and costumes will likely be stored, and sometimes used by other productions. For instance, I believe the TV show ‘Firefly’ re-used the army costumes from Starship Troopers.
Long-running projects like Star Trek and its various TV incarnations are assigned a studio (or two). Their sets are made in pieces. The Enterprise bridge was made in a pie-shape so bits could be removed to make way for a camera. I don’t know about the hallways, but they could easily have been modular pieces re-assembled in different configurations depending on need.
Trek’s endlessly reused cave set was pretty much the same cave, every time, with different lighting and a few new rocks and set dressing here and there. That soundstage was dubbed “Planet Hell” by the cast.
The set design blueprints will be kept in case the set needs to be re-built. Sometimes this is easier said than done: the paint of the day is no longer available, or a color swatch is missing, a special piece of set dressing was missing, or — in the case of the Trek original TV set — the units of scale were not mentioned on the print.
Occasionally, sets are reused: the Three Stooges made two films on the sets of a Columbia costume drama before they were torn down (“Squareheads of the Round Table” is one).
The sets (and most of the concepts) of Dark City were reused by The Matrix.
In the heyday of the Hollywood studio system (and when LA real estate was not so valueable) they did have large sets semi-permanently available. They were re-used for different movies, possibly with some minor repainting, etc. Some people have fun trying to identify where the same southern mansion was used in different movies, etc.
Sometimes sets were destroyed, when it didn’t seem likely that they would be used again. Even then, the studios might get use out of them. I believe the set for the big log wall around the city in the original King Kong was painted on the back side with city scenes, and then burned as part of the sacking of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind.
Back in the day studios had large back lots with standing sets. If you saw one MGM picture with a scene on a city street, it was most likely shot on the same standing back lot set as the last scene you saw on a city street. It was more economical, with a shooting schedule of approximately a feature a week, than sending productions on location.
Robert Osborne in his intro to the DVD for That’s Entertainment! mentions that the MGM backlot was torn down and sold off for real estate development when MGM was curtailing its movie production operations. IIRC it was at about the same time that MGM auctioned off its vast storehouses of props and costumes (within about five years I think).
A number of years ago a friend of mine and I visited the Hollywood Entertainment Museum (which is actually worth a visit anytime you’re in that neighborhood, by the way), and they had a special exhibit of props and sets from Star Trek productions. There were about 20-25 feet of TNG hallway set (where we found that the captions on all the little panels, nearly invisible in the series, read things like “55,000 light-years per nanosecond isn’t just a good idea…it’s the LAW!”) which apparently was the whole thing. That’s all they ever used.
The Cheers set has taken up permanent residence there as well, and you can read all the crap that George Wendt and John Ratzenberger carved into the counter over the years.
This is all excellent information (keep it coming).
What got me thinking of this was the set for the movie ‘Pirates of the Carribean’, where they mocked up a ship, a cave, and the city itself. Are such things still in existence (five years later)?
Also, sets for Waterworld, Titanic, King-Kong, etc. that take up tons of space and are massive in size are the kinds of sets I’d be interested in hearing about (like where it takes a hundred craftsmen 6 months to build and millions of dollars), are these sets likely to last for a while?
If I toured the stages of Disney, MGM, WB, etc, would I see all the big budget sets from the last ten years or so?
Go to Universal Studios Hollywood sometime. You can take a tour of the backlot and see different sets from movies and television that are used and reused.
They have a huge permanent city set that is used over and over again in TV and movies. Different streets depict different time periods, genres, etc. A change of color, lighting and accoutrements means a street may appear in many productions and it changes from production to production.
You can see on the tour the original Bates Motel (and home) is walking distance from Speliberg’s 747 crash site, and both are just down the street from Wisteria Lane where Desperate Housewives is currently filmed.
As mentioned, with the sale of most of the backlots, gone went the sets for just about everything. Space and materials are too valuable to waste just sitting around. Reuse it, recycle it, tear it down and make way for the next movie. About the only thing that regularly gets stored is costumes, because they don’t take up as much space.
At least one is: the ship built for the Marlon Brando version of Mutiny on the Bountyis still afloat. I was able to go on board a couple of years ago.
Unless they are saved as a ride on the attraction, probably not. Remember – the sets are probably not as big as they appear on screen, and they are often made of cheap, light material (plastic instead of stone) that can be made to look like the real thing on camera.
Sometimes, however, sets do get reused. For example, the Oval Office set used in The West Wing was the same set as the Oval in The American President and Dave, only slightly redressed (the couches were changed, and the doors were altered from the real Oval.)
Not only are some sets made of cheap, impermanent material, some would not be put up for the public: they’re flat.
a) Flats can be used to represent the facade of a building, but really, it’s either flat plywood or painted canvas stretched over a frame. If it’s only filmed from the front there’s no point in wasting money on the back.
b) Matte paintings were sometimes used to fill out part of the set that was too expensive to build, notably the warehouse full of crates in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” They’re painted carefully on glass and set before the camera at just the right angle, and only a few feet across.
c) Backdrops can be substituted for distant skylines or star/sky fields. All you need is a big piece of cloth and some paint. Depending on the quality of the film stock and the focus you can get away with a two-dimensional piece of muslin instead of real buildings.
d) Computer animation can substitute for sets in modern films. Some new Star Wars sets were only built two meters tall and the rest filled in by computer.
The ship was the Lady Washington, a real working replica of a 1750s ship that is sometimes pressed into service for films.
I remember seeing a news story a few years ago that an enormous outdoor set from Cecil B. DeMille’s first film version of The Ten Commandments in 1923 had been unearthed on the southern California beach where it was, apparently, simply abandoned when the film crew was done with it.
They used the same technique in Gone With the Wind. The facade of Tara was built, but behind it, you could see a clear view of Culver City. They used a matte when they needed to film outdoor shots of the house.
They also used it in the scene in which all of the carriages drive up to Twelve Oaks for the barbecue. If you watch it carefully, you can see how the carraiges drive through the shadows without being touched by them.
The set of Tara stood for a while after the film was done, as I understand. (I remember seeing an article which had a photo of the dilapidated set, and the tone was one of mourning for allowing such a thing to crumble away.) Years later, it was dismantled and fans could buy bricks that had a small plaque attatched, identifying them as bricks from Tara. (A friend of mine told me her grandmother had one.)
Scarlett O’Hara’s green and white barbecue dress was apparently chopped into pieces and sold the same way. I’ve seen photographs of the swatches of material.
Most of the interior sets for Bruce Almighty were “donated” to my college (in particular the digital film department). They got a tax write-off for what they were going to toss out anyway; we took everything we could get on a flatbed semi (mostly the apartment set). The damn walls took twenty of us to unload, and came complete with working electrical outlets.
(I’m not sure how much is still around, as the school never had anyplace to put the stuff.)
I did tour US years ago, and saw the Bates Motel and mansion (from Psycho). Strange how the camera works-everything looked so small! I imagine that movie sets are not long for this world-in a few years, everything will be computer-generated; no need for sets at all!
My parents took me there as a kid, and I remember that I had a lot of fun. They have guys in cowboy costumes wandering around, doing rope tricks and the like, and every now and then they have a “gunfight” in the streets. Most of the buildings have shops or sets in them (IIRC, there was a jail and a saloon, among others.)
