Movie locations and celebrity gossip add power and panache to tourism in USA. A t2 tour
Philadelphia has so many iconic sites. The Liberty Bell, the Love Park, the Rodin Museum, the City Hall, et al. But the moment you hop on to the open-top sightseeing bus, the guide goes “Rocky, Rocky, Rocky”! Don’t dare ask why. For, a major chunk of Sylvester Stallone’s cult classic was shot in this City of Brotherly Love. Most importantly, the legendary training sequence of Rocky, where Balboa the boxer sweats its out for superstardom, was shot on the flight of the 68 steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. So if you are in Philly, it’s a ritual to be photographed on those stairs. And now, to pull no (tourism) punches, a Rocky Statue has risen in the Benjamin Franklin Parkway next to the museum. No wonder almost everyone on the bus hopped off to be with Rocky.
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Staying with Philadelphia, let’s turn to the man who only shoots there. Manoj Night Shyamalan is to Philadelphia what Woody Allen is to New York. The Puducherry-born filmmaker, who shot to fame with the Bruce Willis-Haley Joel Osment-starrer The Sixth Sense, goes for regular streets and buildings as backdrops to his scenes rather than landmark buildings. So when the sightseeing bus trundled into an innocuous looking street called 23rd Street in Philadelphia, the guide had the good sense to chip in with: “This is where The Sixth Sense was shot... that’s Cole Sear’s (Osment) house.” Moral of the shoot-at-site story in the US of A: It’s not just about the big museums and skyscrapers, even the most obscure nook and corner may have a celluloid tale to tell.
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A half-an-hour ferry ride from San Francisco takes you to an island which houses the most famous prison on the planet — Alcatraz. One of the quotes about the jail which housed criminals like Al ‘Scarface’ Capone and George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly goes: “It’s just the same in here as being in your grave — only you miss the fun of being dead.” While the audio tour or the short film shown as part of the tour around the island doesn’t harp too much on the films that have shown Alcatraz, Hollywood is used as the hook. Posters of the Sean Connery-Nicolas Cage-starrer The Rock and the Clint Eastwood-starrer Escape from Alcatraz are strategically placed at the pier in San Fran from where the ferry leaves for Alcatraz. It promises the movie experience, not the sense of despair the cells exude.
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So many films have used Washington DC as a backdrop — given the immediate political context the city can create as a setting — that a twilight tour around the capital is not projected that much as a movie trek. But for a nation fed on films, the city of memorials and museums invariably becomes a jaunt across movie memory. So for American kids arriving at the Smithsonian Museum, the immediate association is Night at the Museum. Independence Day figures in their chatter every now and then. The pictures below are at the Lincoln Memorial from where you can see the towering Washington Monument. Here Nicolas Cage walks up the stairs — the same ones where Martin Luther King Jr had once stood and declared, “I have a dream” — in National Treasure. And if you are looking for something even more recent, well, Magneto and Professor X played chess on those steps for X-Men: First Class.
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Hollywood, the Mecca of movies, incredibly doesn’t dwell too much on movie locations. If you take a bus tour around the Hollywood Hills, starting from Kodak Theatre, the stress is on gossip. Yes, it’s about who lives where, who goes to which restaurant, who takes his dog out for a walk where.... Whew! “Look carefully to your right and you might just see Charlize Theron peeking out of the windows.” Sadly, she chose not to oblige. But what’s most fascinating is a slice of history. “We are passing by the Beverly Hills Hotel now... this is where John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe used to meet and play cards at night.... All right, do more than play cards!” As you stare at the boring orange walls of the hotel, you can almost picturise the card-playing (all right, more than that) capers of the most powerful man in the world and the most lusted-after woman in the world in one of those rooms 50 years back. Wow! And just for a $50 bus ride.
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Joel and Ethan Coen started Fargo with the title card: “This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.” The Coens were lying. The idea of Fargo — a husband getting his own wife kidnapped leading to bloody carnage over a bag full of cash — was hatched in their heads. But as the film became popular, thousands of people (mostly from America but some even from faraway Japan) flocked to Fargo, a modern city near the border of North Dakota and Minnesota, to try and unearth that bag containing a million dollars, which Steve Buscemi’s Carl had buried under the snow on the highway. Ironically, very few scenes of Fargo were actually shot in Fargo (the picture on the right is that of the popular Red River which is a big hit during summer), even though the city does get as cold in winter (minus 25 degree centigrade)! In fact, Fargo residents had even protested that they were not as brutal and cold-hearted as the film had portrayed them to be but they are well aware that the Coen yarn put them on the world map. That’s the magic of a movie and its impact on the location for you!
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