Above: “Craigville Beach, Cape Cod, Massachusetts” by Edward Fielding. Fine art prints available.
Always on the lookout for new places to explore and photograph, I’ve been keenly paying attention to TV shows and movies of late.
Growing up in the late 60s, 70s
Occasionally you’d get a show filmed in Hawaii, like “Magnum, PI” or “Hawaii 5-0”. Then later big cities like New York City and Chicago started to be used more for
A lot has to do with the tax incentives given by the states. Canada, for example, gives Hollywood a lot of incentives to film in places like Toronto which can be a
A lot of these old TV shows were filmed around Los Angeles of course. You can still see old movie sets on tours such as Universal Studios, but others are simply gone.
Some of the old “movie ranches” as they are called have succumbed to forest fires. Other sets created in the desert were simply buried under the sand, such as one of the most expensive sets of its time, the set of the Ten Commandments.
Buried in the sands of California lay an 800-foot-long temple, 35-foot-tall statues of Rameses II and a promenade guarded by five-ton sphinxes. This lost metropolis isn’t a bizarre Egyptian colony, though. The ruins are all that remains of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments set, one of largest and most expensive in Hollywood history.
Smithsonianmag.com
On some of my recent trips out to the American Southwest, I’ve tracked down some of the old movie sets from the heyday of western movies and TV shows from the 1930s, 40s, 50s,
Westerns may have peaked in the 50s but there has been a come back of late with the TV show Deadwood filmed just outside of Los Angles at the at Melody Ranch, a film studio about 35 miles north of Los Angeles. The town had real streets,
Early Westerns were mostly filmed in the studio, just like other early Hollywood films, but when location shooting became more common from the 1930s, producers of Westerns used desolate corners of Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, or Wyoming. These settings gave filmmakers the ability to depict vast plains, looming mountains,
Wikipediaand epic canyons. Productions were also filmed on location at movie ranches.
In Kanab, Utah we checked out the Little Hollywood Museum which collects parts of old movie sets from westerns filmed in the area. These sets are rather fragile and are not designed to last more than the time it takes to film the movie so
Over one hundred movies and many television series filmed in and around Kanab, Utah over the years such as Clint Eastwood’s Outlaw Josey Wales set and a homestead set from One Little Indian starring James Garner.
Not too far from Kanab, is the crumbling set of the longest running show on TV, “Gunsmoke”. Gunsmoke was filmed in Hollywood and in Kanab. Inside shots could be filmed on the duplicate set back in Hollywood, but when they needed expansive outdoor scenes, they filmed in Kanab. Now the remaims sit rotting on the edge of a private ranch but they are visible from the road.
Over near Zion National
Other well known western movie sets can be found in the Tucson, Arizona area – Old Tucson is an American movie studio and theme park just west of Tucson, Arizona.
The Valley of Fire State Park outside of Las Vegas, Nevada has had several films made using the inhospitable terrain.
It is a popular location for shooting automobile commercials and other commercial photography as well as following films and television shows:
- Viva Las Vegas starring Elvis Presley had multiple shots filmed in the park during the racing scenes for the film’s finale in 1963.
- The Professionals with Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, and Claudia Cardinale was filmed in 1966. Valley of Fire was one of three locations used in the film. All that remains of the set is a portion of a rock wall of a hacienda.[
- The outside Mars scenes from Total Recall, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, were almost totally shot in Valley of Fire.[
- The scenes from planet Veridian III from Star Trek Generations were filmed here in 1994. The Silica Dome is particularly highlighted for Star Trek fans as the site of iconic starship captain James T. Kirk’s death and burial.
Today’s movies and TV series once again seek to bring the viewer to exotic locales and exciting landscapes to tell their stories. Cable shows like “Breaking Bad” used the expansive landscape around Albuquerque, New Mexico. “The Walking Dead” shows us corners of Georgia we’ve never really seen in the past. Streaming shows like “Bloodline” use locations like the Florida keys as an important element of the story.
Georgia has become the new Hollywood lately, as tax incentives have increase the filming around the state so much so that more productions occur in Georgia than in California these days.
Seems like places like Iceland and Scotland are used more and more in shows like “Into the Badlands”, “Game of Thrones” and “Outlander”. No longer are exotic locations reserved for the latest James Bond film. Even new network TV shows like “Whiskey Cavalier ” are being shot on location around Europe.
With more and more shows and movies being shot in some amazing landscapes around the world it only fuels a wanderlust to track down some of these filming locations and to check them out.