Movie Sets Under Siege
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
Anyone working on a high-profile movie or TV show these days dreads seeing two words in a script: Exterior shot. Filming a hot project at an outdoor location has become a swim in a giant, incredibly public fishbowl. Of all the battlefronts in the spoiler wars, location shoots are the places where filmmakers and show creators feel the most exposed, the most overtly under siege and maybe the most powerless to plug leaks.
Even so, interlopers crashed the party wherever Crystal Skull went. Somebody in a helicopter possibly just a lucky tourist on a joyride, who was passing through airspace the Skull crew couldn’t control snapped shots of a Hawaii-based jungle sequence from above. Plot spoiling amateur videos of a motorcycle-chase scene filmed in New Haven, Conn., also showed up online, thanks to onlookers posting footage.
No matter how distant the location, it seems, those pesky snappers find a way in. A few weeks into the shoot of Iron Man, in March 2007, work was about to start at an extremely remote desert canyon spot in a gated national park near Lone Pine, Calif. More than three hours’ drive outside Los Angeles.
Barren and desolate looking, this spot would stand in for Afghanistan in a sequence where Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr., gets kidnapped by terrorists. Somehow, photographers found the waiting set. They commandeered a vantage point in the hills above, and got telephoto-lens pictures of the faux terrorist encampment, including weapon containers marked Stark Industries. The images showed up on a fansite before any of the sequence had even been filmed.
Tags: amateur videos, battlefronts, chase scene, crystal skull, desert canyon, encampment, filmmakers, fishbowl, helicopter, iron man, joyride, lone pine, motorcycle chase, movie sets, new haven conn, onlookers, outdoor location, pace, robert downey, robert downey jr, stark industries, vantage point