Universal Studios Backlot Tour

While at Universal Studios Hollywood, we took the hour-long backlot tour where they actually make movies and television shows. The tour has been going on for decades and predates the park. Some of the attractions are classics.

New entrance to an old favorite

The tour bus is open air and lets riders get a good view of the soundstages and lots where all sorts of things are filmed.

Ready for fun!

Soundstage 14

The guide explained that she would have to be quiet if any of the red lights were on at any of the stages, meaning they were filming and did not want any outside noise if possible. The buildings are not fully soundproof and her PA system did make her much louder.

Stage 19 in action!

The lot still has the small bungalows that were used by writers, directors, and actors as offices and places to relax during the day. They are still used for administrative work.

Bungalow

City streets are fairly common in films and shows so they have a large outdoor street that is mostly facades of buildings.

New York? Chicago? LA?

Could be a bank or a courthouse, maybe even a church

Actual trees!

One of the demonstrations of special effects was a ride through the King Kong Experience, with the tour bus surrounded by screens of Skull Island. Dinosaurs attack the bus and Kong defends it. The floor moved the tour bus around in sync with the images, so when a creature climbed across the top we would feel it happening. It is very similar to the Kong ride in the Florida amusement park, so a lot of fun.

Going into the Kong Experience

Back in the city, we saw people parked so they could walk to work, right behind the fake buildings. Of course, some buildings are more fake than others.

Cast and crew park behind the scenes

A very thin building

A graffiti artist decorated some of the walls with the classic Universal monsters.

Frankenstein's Monster and the Creature from the Black Lagoon

I recognized these decorations from Back to the Future.

Where Marty lived (and behind which he hid the DeLorean)

We passed by the Old West street several times.

Old west street

Old west vehicles

Part of the tour recreates Amity Island, the beach community terrorized by the shark in the original Jaws. They showed the original trails with the famous John Williams score and no reveal of the shark. The tour guide made a joke about the movie's rating, PG, which is the same rating as Despicable Me.

Famous billboard from the movie

Riding by the seaside town, a diver swims out to deal with the shark and gets dealt with. Then the shark tried to deal with us!

A bit of the water you shouldn't go into

The diver disappears!

A bit of destruction trying to get the shark

The shark coming for us!

The shark swims backwards as the attraction resets

We drove back toward the Old West where we saw another practical effect--a sudden flash flood that almost engulfed the tour bus.

Happy and unsuspecting

Disaster approaches!

The old west town is bigger than I thought it would be. They even have a church (or maybe it's the Alamo).

I can just see a rifleman falling from the upstairs balcony

Church/Bank/Alamo?

A quaint train station is set up like when it was used for the TV series The Good Place.

Good Place to get out of the Bad Place

Storing vehicles where they don't look right

Our next visit was another soundstage set up as a subway station. The station is also rigged to experience an earthquake.

Generic subway

Things falling apart in the subway

More flooding

A vintage tour bus

The lot has a lot of spare vehicles, including ones used in movies like the Fast and Furious franchise and The Flintstones.

Guess I should have also mentioned Jurassic Park/World

Fintstonesmobiles

Fast and Furious rides

Another famous stop on the ride is the Bates Motel from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. The house is there with someone on the porch.

12 rooms, 12 vacancies

Norman wants to make a point

The town where a jet crashed in Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds is still set up.

Plane wreckage

Neighborhood wreckage

The final bit of the tour took us by Jupiter's Claim, the wild west attraction from Jordan Peele's Nope.

Not sure we should go there

The tour is both informative and entertaining and a definite must for movie fans.

Movie Review: Psycho (1960)

 Psycho (1960) directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is a Phoenix office secretary whose boyfriend Sam (John Gavin) keeps visiting but doesn't think he can marry because he's got alimony to pay to an ex-wife and debts from his relatives. She wants to get married, to get out of her life. Her boss settles a real-estate deal with a rich Texan who wants to pay $40,000 in cash. The boss gives Marion the money to put in a safe deposit box for the weekend. He tells her to go home afterward. As she drives, she imagines the freedom she and Sam will have with that money. She drives out of town, struggling with her moral quandary. Her travels take her off the highway in a stormy night. She stops at the Bates Motel. Run by Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), the hotel has very little business since the highway moved. He offers to get some food for Marion since the nearest restaurant is ten miles away. His house is just up the hill. Marion hears Norman's mom berate him for offering food to Marion. Norman comes back with sandwiches and has an awkward conversation with Marion about his problems and her problems. She decides to go back to Phoenix in the morning and make things right. Unfortunately, the mother comes and kills her brutally in the shower (one of the most famous scenes in cinema history), shifting the story away from Marion and to the investigation of her disappearance. Norman is a dutiful son and covers up the evidence of the murder. The $40,000 (which he knows nothing about) is a powerful motivation for investigators to find Marion. Also, her sister Lila (Vera Miles) is concerned and wants to solve the mystery of her disappearance too.

The movie is a famous horror-shocker. The sudden shift from the Marion-morality tale to the messed-up relationship between Norman and his mother is jarring, though its not as effective as it was in 1960 before the secrets of the movie entered into pop culture. When viewers first see him, Norman seems very cowed and nebbish, very awkward and subservient to his mother. The investigators who come to the motel are indirect in their questions about Marion (they think he might be helping her by hiding her--only half true), ratcheting up the tension for Norman and for the viewers. Hitchcock does an interesting job balancing moments of intense terror with long bits that are very mundane and uninteresting, like Norman's clean up of the murder scene. Marion does a lot of driving in the beginning, giving her plenty of time to ruminate over possible outcomes of what she has done and possible futures she could have. The balancing act is almost perfect. The end has a long speech by a psychologist that explains what's going on with Norman in more detail than is necessary. The score by Bernard Herrmann is perfectly matched to the scenes and their emotions, enhancing the high levels of tension or providing a melancholic overtone to the mundane bits. Perkins gives a great performance, especially with a final speech (after the psychology-babble) that makes a disturbing and tragic ending.

Recommended, though it is very intense. Plenty of people stopped taking showers after seeing this film!