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: The War of the Worlds (1953)

The War of the Worlds (1953) directed by Byron Haskin

A meteor crash lands outside a small town in California. The residents are excited for a new road-side attraction. The local authorities bring in some scientists who happen to be fishing in the hills nearby. Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) knows enough to be cautious about an object that came skidding across a field rather than creating a crater. Something is fishy, he thinks. The meteorite is too hot to investigate and too radioactive to leave alone, so the local sheriff leaves three men to guard it while the scientist heads into town for square dancing with Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson), a local who quickly grows attached to Forrester. The dance is cut short when the power goes out, along with all other mechanical devices. The meteorite has opened up and stuff is starting to come out! At first, just a weird periscope sticks up, but soon enough ships emerge with heat rays and energy weapons to conquer the Earth.

The movie is more of a disaster flick with science-fictional causes. Scientists are called upon to discover what the Martians are like (everyone guesses they are from Mars since the red planet was so close to Earth in its solar orbit). The scientists are hampered by the ongoing attacks by the Martians, which are world-wide, and the utter lack of success on the military's part. Science doesn't really save the day against the Martians. The fact that neither science nor the military saves humanity is striking in a 1950s movie, an era when one or the other (sometimes both working hand-in-hand) would always win against the enemy. Humanity winds up fleeing in helplessness, often getting in their own way as riots break out.

The movie is a bit uneven. The special effects are all over the place. Some are excellent, like the Martian ships flying through the air and the little bit of their technology that viewers see. Some of the destruction looks a bit cheesy by today's standards. The acting is good for the most part. The script follows the spirit of the original novel while successfully moving the situation to the (then) modern day. Overall, there's more good than bad to this film.

Recommended.

Movie Reviews: Catching Up on Spielberg

I've been watching a bunch of Steven Spielberg's more recent movies that I missed in the cinema. Considering his career goes back to the 1970s, "recent" is a relative term. Here's some quick reviews:

War of the Worlds (2005) based on the novel by H. G. Wells

After an icon radio adaptation by Orson Welles and an iconic film adaptation produced by George Pal, Spielberg took on his first "aliens are evil" project (the other being the evil aliens who messed up the Indiana Jones franchise in 2008). The movie is remarkably faithful to the original novel, matching the mass flight from a major city (this time New York instead of the novel's London); the nefarious plans of the aliens (though in this movie they are never called Martians); the sequence of being trapped in a basement with a guy who plans to fight back; the "red weeds" that start growing where the aliens are active; the ultimate defeat of the aliens not by humans. Spielberg adds Tom Cruise as a divorced dad who has his kids for the weekend when the aliens show up. His plan is to make it from New York to Boston, where his ex-wife and her new husband have gone for the weekend. He's kind of a bad dad, which both his kids know, but he rises to the occasion when anarchy breaks loose.

The movie does not wax philosophical about the aliens and their menace, it's more of an immediate experience of how horrible the situation is. The story is very serious and relentlessly bleak with the humans occasionally behaving badly too. The cinematography looks very much like it was shot in the 1970s or early 1980s--it's a bit grainy and hand-held (though not overboard on the hand-held camera work, which is a pet peeve of mine (I'm looking at you, Monsoon Wedding)). At first I wondered if the film was supposed to be set in an earlier time but they have cell phones and Tivo, so the cinematography is just a style choice. It works well to communicate the immediacy and peril of the characters' situation. But there's very little depth about the aliens.

I enjoyed the film and am glad I watched it but probably won't watch it again.

Ready Player One (2018) based on the novel by Ernest Cline

In 2045, America is not the best place to live, at least not for Wade, who lives in a slum but spends all his time in the OASIS, a virtual reality that is extremely popular. The creator of the OASIS, James Halliday, has died and left three challenges inside the game. Whoever can beat those challenges first will inherit both Halliday's fortune and control of the OASIS. Some corporate baddies are trying to take over the game in the hopes of monetizing it, but true fans of video games and the OASIS are trying to win to keep it the way it is. Wade does some research and eventually figures out how to beat the first test. He then teams up with five other players (who call themselves "The High Five") to complete the challenges before the evil corporation can.

The movie looks amazing and has a bazillion pop culture references. The story struck me as very paint-by-numbers plotting. The performances are good. The movie has a totally bland message about spending less time in virtual reality and more time in actual reality.

This movie is a special effects summer popcorn blockbuster, and is satisfying at that level. Like War of the Worlds, it's not a film I feel the need to rewatch.

The Post (2018)

Washington Post owner Kay Graham (Meryl Streep) decides to sell shares of the paper on the New York Stock Exchange to raise money to keep the paper going. At the same time, the New York Times begins publishing articles about the Pentagon Papers, documents showing how all presidential administrations since Eisenhower had been deceiving the American public about the US relationship to Vietnam. Post editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) wants to publish too, though it may cause the paper and its people very serious legal and financial problems.

The movie is a well-executed drama though the script is uneven. Mrs. Graham's tricky situation is well fleshed out and Streep gives a great performance. On the other hand, Richard Nixon is the most one-dimensional villain ever--he had more character depth and nuance in Black Dynamite. Some of the speeches defending freedom of the press lack the conviction one would expect in this type of movie. In a time where there is conflict between the President and the press, I wanted more depth or nuance. The movie is entertaining but mediocre.

Book Review: The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells and others

H. G. Wells's classic novel is wedded to Orson Welles's classic radio broadcast in this two-for-one book. The book has the complete script of Welles's show and a CD with the show and some clips of Orson Welles commenting on the show (including a meeting between Wells and Welles!). The complete Wells novel includes the art that accompanied the serialization of the novel in Pearson's magazine back in 1897.

Both are well worth revisiting. H. G. Wells's story of an invasion from Mars at the end of the 19th century in England is an exciting tale of one man fleeing from the attack. He describes what he sees of the Martians, and more interestingly, what he sees of the locals' reactions. At first, people are mildly curious if not completely aloof. Once the Martians make it out of their crater and start causing mayhem, people flee and civilization starts to break down. A lot of time is spent describing people trying to escape from the trouble. The main character reflects on the superiority of the Martians and how humans are to them like ants are to us--easy to squash and in no way equals. He also hints that the British are a bit like the Martians in their attitudes towards the conquered. The science is outdated but is not the main point of the story anyway.

Welles's broadcast was more an experiment in entertainment that turned into a panic. The broadcast starts with a music program that is interrupted by news bulletins of the aliens invading New Jersey. Listeners took it seriously and many fled their homes. It's easy to say from nearly a hundred years later that it sounds too implausible to be believed, but even today people are falling for fake journalism that is much less well-intentioned. And this book chronicles many other subsequent imitation broadcasts in America and abroad, some of which did inspire local panics. This also is still relevant today.

Recommended.

The H. G. Wells novel is discussed on A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast #188.