Cross Country Drives

Burbank, California – Day 2

To see the previous posts from this cross-country trip, click here Land Trips | Cruising “C Ghost”

We spent a good part of the day today taking the behind-the-scenes tour of the Warner Brothers Burbank Movie/TV studios. It was only a half mile from our hotel – a nice and easy 10 minute walk.

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Pretty sidewalks in Burbank on the way to the movie studios from our hotel.

After a short introductory film, we got in an open-air shuttle and were taken to the lots where hundreds of iconic movies and TV series were made. As we walked down the streets in the lot, you would swear you were in a real town.

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On this street, most of these buildings are just false facades with nothing behind them.

The building facades were not real brick or stone. They were either wood or fiberglass made to look just like the real thing. This way it was easy to convert a New York city street into a Chicago city street when one production ended and another began.

The buildings that did have interiors had only a ground floor, despite what it looks like from the outside. The upper areas inside these buildings were used to hang lighting and other tools of the trade for filming on the ground level.

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These buildings are called “practical’s”. They do have interiors, but they are all empty rooms (only on the ground floor) waiting to be customized for the next movie that will use them.

We also got to tour one of the many soundstages where most inside scenes are shot (no cameras allowed). It is amazing to see the enormity of work that goes into one of these productions.

Lastly, we went through a museum of sorts having a large collection of movie memorabilia from some of the more famous movies made by Warner Brothers.

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The 1989 Batmobile known as the “Keaton” Mobile. In the movie, the car was black.

Tom signed up for a “green screen” session to see what it’s like for the actors when doing dangerous high-speed action sequences.

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This instructional session resulted in a 9 second “movie”.

They had a large exhibit for Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts. These were not just mock-ups but the original sets.

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This was from a set for Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts. The letters seem to just hang in the air.

At the end of the tour, they let you hold an actual Academy Award statue.

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It’s much heavier than I thought it would be.

Later in the afternoon, Tom took a drive out to the famous Hollywood sign to get a good picture (featured pic for this post).

Tomorrow we leave on our last leg of this outbound journey. We should arrive in Folsom California sometime in the mid-afternoon where we will be staying (at Kyle and Glennis’s place) until Monday morning. Then we will make the relatively short drive to Lake Tahoe and check-in for the summer. We will post weekly from there just like we did last summer.

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