Universal Studios Hollywood: Inside the Sets of Classic Films

So right now, we are standing in the Court of Miracles on the world-famous Universal Studios backlot. This is literally the place where the horror movie was born. 1922, this was Paris for Hunchback of Notre Dame, and it's been used for countless movies since then. When you think about the Universal monster movies of the 20s, 30s, and 40s, the movie that you always think about is Frankenstein. And we made a lot of Frankenstein movies over the years, and almost every single one of them have a scene where there's a mob of angry villagers. They've got the torches and the pitchforks, and they're running through the town trying to find the monster. That was always this town. In fact, it was usually only just this block around us. Currently, this is home for The Good Place with Ted Danson, and essentially, this is the afterlife. This is heaven. You know, Desperate Housewives filmed on this lot on Colonial Street, just up around the corner from where we are right now, and that was used as Wisteria Lane on Desperate Housewives for years. Most people, when they watched that show, they probably didn't realize that they were looking at the Munsters' house, because the same house that was used for the Munsters back in the 1960s was also used for Desperate Housewives. Some movie scenes are so famous that actors are forever associated with them, and that's definitely true of Psycho. You think about Norman Bates and Anthony Perkins playing that role, but strangely enough, the scene that he is most associated with, which is the Psycho scene, he wasn't even there. By the time they filmed that scene, it was kind of late in the production, and Anthony Perkins had left, and he'd gone to New York to do a stage play, so when you see that shower curtain rip open and Mother Bates standing there with a knife, that's not actually Anthony Perkins. That's his double. So, the scene that Anthony Perkins is most famous for, he didn't even do. When you work at a movie studio, you kind of get used to everything being artificial or fake. You walk up to a brick wall, and it's not a real brick wall, it's usually a fiberglass panel or something like that, but sometimes we need to use the real thing, and a good example of that is Steven Spielberg's movie War of the Worlds. To create the plane crash set from that scene in that movie, they used a real plane. They got it from the desert, they brought it all the way out here, they dismantled it, so when you see Tom Cruise come out of the basement in that movie and walk into this suburban neighborhood that's been decimated by a crash 747, that's a real plane, and that's not the only time we've had to bring a real airplane out to the back lot for a particular scene in a movie. Only a couple of years ago, when Clint Eastwood was shooting Sully, there's a scene where obviously the plane crash lands into the Hudson, they couldn't shoot that in the Hudson River, so they filmed it at Falls Lake, which is an artificial lake out on our back lot, and then they matched that to plates of the real Hudson River in New York.