Tinseltown on Thames : Where and Why

 

Long ago, before films became movies, I was a Marvel comics fan, so I went to see their self-satirising film Deadpool & Wolverine. Part of the attraction was the imagined parallel ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’, difficult to realise in a comic, and which in this viewing was a bleak and apocalyptic place. The screenplay comes second to the scenery for me, but this offered plenty of laughs and had an unexpected star in ‘Dogpool’, real name Peg, who had been named the ‘Ugliest Dog in Britain’.

Dogpool and Deadpool 

It seemed unlikely that they would ship Peg from Britain to Hollywood, so I went down the rabbit hole to discover that a large part of this Hollywood blockbuster had in fact been filmed at Bovingdon, an old airfield near Hemel and the M25 and which was no stranger to filmmakers. Years ago, Superman’s adopted family home was built there.

Smallville. Near Hemel. 

While most blockbuster films are conceived, written and acted by Americans, a surprising amount of the post-production work is undertaken elsewhere. Skilled craftsmen, technicians  tax breaks and what they fondly imagine is the same language, makes Britain a favourite venue. It also offers varied and characterful settings with historical depth, so London often becomes part of the story; Harry Potter goes shopping in Diagonal Alley and a speedboat is driven through the wall of the Vauxhall HQ of MI6 while a secret tunnel from Canary Wharf takes Men in Black to New York.   

Here, I am not interested in recognisable locations and buildings, but rather the bigger challenge of creating visions of future or alien worlds that challenge our imagination, in our own quotidian surroundings.  The clever and often counter-intuitive selection of locations for specific scenes is important but the hard grafting is usually done in the huge but often unnoticed sheds, pools and backlots of giant film studio complexes, scattered within jet-suit flying range of Heathrow.  

In order to avoid a very long single post I have split this into two. Here, I scan the scene as a whole while the next looks at some of the stand-out films and add some grittier details on the major studios themselves.  

While Hollywood provides the cinematic meat, the concepts, scripts and most of the stars, these studios shape the worlds, augmenting local settings and temporary buildings with real and virtual models and computer-generated imagery (CGI) integrated with Virtual Effects tools (VFX). 

CGI Studio / Green Screen 

You can do a lot with these, including scene–building, but amazing as they are to those old enough to remember the flat concrete floors and polystyrene rocks of the early Dr Who sets, the results can lack the fine-grained credibility of a built set and actors can't interact naturally with generated backgrounds. Those are problems when you are asking an audience to believe the unbelievable. . In real life you would be hard pressed finding a waterfall like the one in the pic below, but  you would also struggle to realistically integrate a climbing actor into the scene. 

There are other problems. Dune Part Two provides an example. Many liked it. I didn’t. Putting aside the frankly ludicrous plot, the CGI used did well to conjure up the monstrous sandworms but struggled to create the city of Arakeen and the massive armies where the detail and depth were totally unconvincing. This is sometimes called the ‘uncanny valley’ effect, the unnatural naturalism of a video game. 

Arakeen : The Army

Perhaps the best known studio hereabouts is Warner Brothers in Leavesden near Watford, where many of the Harry Potter films and Fantastic Beasts series were made and which now hosts the eponymous tours. It originally sprang into action with the making of James Bond’s ‘Goldeneye’ in the early 1990’s.

The studios give us apocalyptic nightmares, saccharine sweet arcadias, fairy story towns and megalomaniac cities, in worlds free from the grasping developers and rational compromises of Town Planners. It isn't just Potter or Obi-Won Kinobi who have found themselves looking for a decent pub in the desert that is Leavesden in the evenings. Who would have associated it with Barbieland, which was also created there. 

Barbieland in Leavesden,Watford!

You can see the list here: Films shot at Warner Bros, Leavesden

There are lots of others which you might have heard of; places like Pinewood, Elstree, Twickenham, Ealing and Shepperton. Others you might not know; Longcross, Bovingdon and Black Hangar. Many of which date back to the post-war classics like the 'Carry On' series. Here is a map of them all. Some of these are referenced in the following post. 

British Film Production Studios

The studios rent space out. Many seem to occupy the airfields and other military bases abandoned after the end of WW2, which came with large sheds and easy access to London and its labour pool. Others might have found it convenient to be placed near BBC empire around Shepherds Bush. 

Pinewood Studios

Pinewood is the daddy. This is a big, big business. They have 30 stages, and underwater stage, two large backlots and an array of post production facilities that look as futuristic as some of the films. You can get some idea of the scale from their website. Pinewood Studios

Shooting can take place in more than one studio and opportunistically use abandoned buildings and wasteland. The results can be entertaining. For instance, the illegal dinosaur breeding farm in Jurassic World Dominion is actually an RAF base in Cheddington near Leighton Buzzard while the dino-dealing was filmed in an unexceptional hire shop on Station Parade in Northolt. 

Jurassic Reptiles for Sale 

I want to briefly digress into the historical context of exercising creative muscles to imagine and create spectacular landscapes. Few early painters seemed inclined to stray beyond religious or classical mythological scenes. Maybe it was a lack of demand, it wasn't for lack of imagination; see my posts on early depictions of hell. But horizons started to expand in the romantic movement in the 1700s. The philosopher Edmund Burke wrote that 'the emotions generated by the vast and majestic in nature, when those causes work most forcefully, is amazement, and amazement is the condition of the psyche in which all its actions are halted, with a sense of dread'. His life ended in Beaconsfield, so he should know. 

Painters like de Loutherbourg and later Turner and John Martin depicted vast and sometimes terrifying scenes. All three continued to draw on the classics and scriptures, but they added a sense of awe and wonder at the immensity of the natural world. And in much the same way as the poet John Milton seemed to pay more attention to his vision of hell than heaven, they sprinkled a lot of fire, brimstone and damnation. 

de Lotherbourg : Flash of Lightening

Bills had to be paid so they were all were to some extent showmen.  Vast canvases, some now in Tate Britain, were unveiled with tricks of lighting and gasps of surprise to an audience and critics split between amazement and snooty disdain. Not for nothing was Von Loutherbough employed by the legendary theatrical manager David Garrick to design sets for Drury Lane Theatre, or Turner recruited to provide artwork for an edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

All three settled in West London and their work can be found at Tate Modern and on Wikimedia. De Loutherbourg in particular was an oddball, later involved in mysticism and alchemy, but he is perhaps the most relevant here because he was heavily involved in using scientific and mechanical trickery for those theatre sets. . 

John Martin : The Great Day of His Wrath

I can see a legacy of all three in some of today's film sets. I doubt that any inspiration is direct so perhaps it is just correlation and there is some continuity in people's imaginings but I find it easy to compare the dwarfing scale of John Martin’s ‘Fall of Ninevah’ with Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ from 1927 or Arakeen in Dune. 

John Martin : Fall of Ninevah

Fritz Lang : Metropolis

Arakeen 

Anyway, in the next post I return to the main theme, namely the rather surprising line-up of Hollywood blockbusters featuring stupendous imagined landscapes made around London. This is mainly about the studios themselves but I also wander around some of the unlikely outdoor settings that were used.