Tag Archives: warner bros

Main

Warner Bros. Studio (Part 2 of 2) (California Vacation)

After completing our tour of the back studio lot of Warner Bros., we moved to some of the television sets. The first set we toured was the set of the television show Sullivan and Son. We have not seen the television show Sullivan and Son yet, but it was one of two sets we were allowed to take photos on.

Here is a picture I found online of the show. Below are pictures of my kids in front of the set.

This is what is referred to as a “dollhouse” set. It’s called that because the set has three walls (the sides and back) while the front wall is missing. The audience sits across from the set in these seats. The shows are taped before a live studio audience and the laughter you hear is real (not a laugh track). If a joke is performed and no one laughs, production is halted and the writers quickly rework the joke and re-shoot it.

After touring the Sullivan & Son set we toured two more sets. The first was the set of Big Bang Theory. Big Bang Theory has currently wrapped for the season and so almost anything that would be recognizable was covered with plastic tarps. So even if I had taken any pictures on that set (which I didn’t) they would be of rooms full of tarps.

The next set we visited was for a show called “Pretty Little Liars.” It was not a dollhouse set but rather a “practical” set, in which the rooms all had four walls. Once you get inside the set it’s like a bizarre maze. The entrance to the set was of a school hallway, with stairs that led nowhere and doors that led to people’s bedrooms. It was very strange and disorienting and I was continually reminded of how things in studios look “fake” but end up looking like real locations on the small and large screen.

The reason we were able to visit so many television sets was due to this:

That’s our cart, which had a tire blow out. (I’m innocent; I was sitting in the back!) With our cart out of service we had enough to visit the one still existing set from Friends, Central Perk.

Central Perk was the coffee shop the character from the TV show Friends frequented. The set is still fully assembled 10 years later and a good opportunity for photos. I have no idea what Morgan is doing in this photo.

At this point we moved to the museum portion of the tour. This is a lot of pictures of things from TV shows and movies so I will go quickly. Here are costumes from:


Big Bang Theory


Friends


Batman


More Batman


Superman


The Hangover


Charlie Sheen’s urn from 2 1/2 Men


Sandra Bullock’s space suit from Gravity

If you are a fan of Harry Potter, the entire second floor of the museum was dedicated to costumes and props from those films.

The last thing I’ll leave you with are these original line cartoon drawings. There were several of these (under glass) along with some storyboards from original Bugs Bunny cartoons. I really enjoyed looking at these up close.

I know the last couple of posts have been pretty picture intensive, but we saw so many cool things that I wanted to share — and trust me, we saw many more cool things that I did not include! To anyone interested in film history, I highly recommend the Warner Bros. back lot tour. We were very glad we did it.

Main

Warner Bros. Studio (Part 1 of 2) (California Vacation)

The Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, California offers daily tours of its back lot. This is one of the things I was really looking forward to seeing on the vacation and it did not disappoint. The Warner Bros. back lot consists of almost 30 sound stages and lots of other sets both indoors and out. Some of them were instantly recognizable, some of them were recognizable with a bit of prodding, and some you wouldn’t recognize in a million years.

Our tour began with a brief movie showing clips from nearly 100 years worth of WB movies, television programs, and cartoons. Between the four of us I would say we recognized roughly 20% of the clips. Many of them were from old movies and new television shows we had not seen. Once the movie was over we headed outsite, climbed upon our 15-man golf cart, and hit the road!

This is the first location our guide pointed out to us:

“Why are we looking at a dirt road,” we all asked. Apparently, this is the dirt road that a T-Rex chased a jeep down in Jurassic Park.

The road was only about 30 feet long and our guide explained that they drove up and down the road many times to string together enough footage for the chase sequence.

Just past this road on the left was a small cabin.

“Has anybody here seen TRUE BLOOD?” our guide asked. Nobody on the train had seen True Blood. “Oh well, if you had, then you would recognize this cabin as Merlottes Bar and Grill!” We quickly learned that telling the guide that we had not seen a movie or did not watch a television show didn’t prevent her from showing us the location regardless.

The pond on the right hand side was much more interesting.

This pond has been a lot of things, including the sea in Poseidon. However, what I recognized it from was this:

If you look closely you’ll see Pee-Wee Herman swinging across that very same pond.

Actually if you want see what the back lot looks like (at least the outside of the sound stages), watch the chase scene from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Here’s a shot of the fake backdrop Pee-Wee places to fool the security guards chasing him:

…and here’s a shot of the back lot itself.

There were tons of little places that you might only see in a few seconds of a movie. Here are a small set of steps that lead to nowhere.

(Note the square around the tree. All the trees are actually potted plants and can be added or removed depending on what the shot calls for.)

In the movie Gremlins, these steps are in the heart of Chinatown, and lead down to a mysterious shop where a man looking for a Christmas present for his son purchases a Mogwai!

Right around the corner from this was a small alley.

You might recognize it as the dark alley in which a wet Pee-Wee Herman runs into a bunch of thugs shortly before discovering Madame Ruby the Fortune Teller…

…or you might recognize those steps as the ones the orphans sing on in the 1981 version of Annie.

It was also the place where Spider-Man’s famous “upside-down” kiss took place.

A block or so away is the front of Annie’s orphanage. Many of the locations were difficult to recognize because the fronts of many of the buildings are actually foam core and can be switched from brick to rock to wood easily. Also all of the door knobs, lights, trimmings, and everything else are designed to be easily changeable.

One other interesting thing we encountered was the Mystery Machine, getting some fuel at the lot’s onsite gas station.

In Part 2 of this post I’ll be sharing pictures from some of the television sets and inside the WB museum.