In every piece of local coverage for the latest star-studded production to grace Orlando during its studio heyday, there’s a line somewhere that wonders if this one is it, the movie that sells Hollywood West on Hollywood East. Some did in small ways, coaxing repeat filmmakers back for projects that fit the climate. But the sure-thing gold rush that inspired not one, but two massive studio complexes mired in the Central Florida swamps never came. Why didn’t it work? The reasons are too economical, too personal, and ultimately too fickle to run down in a list like this. For instance, National Treasure director John Turtletaub never came back after his 1999 thriller, Instinct, because of I-4 traffic, telling the Orlando Sentinel, “I’ve never seen five miles of highway with more accidents, more police cars, more stops.” While that complaint might’ve been lodged with tongue firmly in cheek, productions have slipped through the cracks for less, and In the Orlando studio boom of the late ’80s and early ’90s, every movie counted.
Ernest Saves Christmas (1988)
The studio half of Disney-MGM Studios opened for business in the summer of 1987, just in time for a looming Writers Guild strike to halt production across the country. Hollywood East would have to wait a little while longer to roll out the red carpet. No major productions would come to town until 1988, once the Guild reached an agreement with producers on compensation and creative control. Who better to lead the charge than Eisner’s own “discovery.”
So the legend goes, Ernest P. Worrell joined the Disney stable when he upstaged Michael Eisner at the Indianapolis 500. The CEO got shrugs for his introduction. The advertising icon got a standing ovation. As the arena shouted “Hey, Vern!” in delirious abandon for a fictional character Eisner had never seen before played by an actor he’d never heard of, he felt a franchise coming on.
Ernest Goes To Camp was the cheapest Touchstone Pictures release of 1987, shrinking behind star-studded comedies like Stakeout and Outrageous Fortune. Unlike those, however, Ernest Goes To Camp made almost eight times its budget. Ernest and the man who played him, the dearly missed Jim Varney, were no longer regional fixtures – they were movie stars.
Ernest Saves Christmas was lined up in short order and shot around Orlando the following year. Locals should recognize the old Orlando Science Center and Church Street Station, as well as plenty of lesser landmarks. Disney-MGM Studios guests should recognize something else – the stone-faced facade of Vern’s house, a permanent fixture on Residential Street until its destruction in 2003. In the earliest days of the Backlot Tour, Herbie would pop wheelies in the driveway for passing trams.
If Walt Disney World veterans never saw the house while it was still standing, they should still be able to spot Epcot Center Drive from a mile off. When Ernest picks up an incognito Santa Claus from the Orlando International Airport, he takes a wildly impractical shortcut across Disney property. The purple highway signs are unmistakable.
Parenthood (1989)
If Disney led their charge with a can’t-miss character, Universal led theirs with a can’t-miss director.
On December 1st, 1987, Ron Howard signed a long-term deal with Universal Studios to distribute all films from his production company, Imagine Entertainment, starting with Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs in 1989. Howard’s next directorial effort, Parenthood, would be the third film in the deal and the first ever filmed at Universal Studios Florida.
Admittedly, there’s little theme park history involved with this case. The production used Universal soundstages between January and April of 1989, a full year before the park was open and the street sets were ready. As co-writer Lowell Ganz described it to the Sun Sentinel, “It’s us and The New Leave It to Beaver and several men eating sandwiches and saying, ‘That’s where King Kong’s going to be.’”
But Parenthood was the biggest gamble yet for the budding film industry. Ernest let Orlando play itself. Parenthood turned it into St. Louis.
The Floridian features are harder to spot in this movie, but there are at least two locations it’s tough to miss. The Orlando Speed World racing complex makes an appearance spelled out in big letters along the track. More interesting to themed entertainment historians is a 40-second cameo from the long-gone Mystery Fun House. The haunted house facade still stands in an otherwise empty plaza across 435 from Universal property, but footage of the interior is harder to come by, let alone footage starring Steve Martin.
Parenthood ended up the ninth highest-grossing movie in the United States during the sequel-heavy summer of 1989. It lasted longer in theaters than Back to the Future Part II. It made only $12 million less than Ghostbusters II despite opening on 1,000 fewer screens.
The early souvenir booklets for Universal Studios Florida screamed “Nothing Compares To The #1 Studio!” Entire pages were dedicated to past and on-going productions, none more proudly showcased than Parenthood. In the biggest still, Steve Martin in ill-fitting cowboy get-up confers with Ron Howard.
Great promotion undercut slightly by Martin’s take on the experience, as told to the Los Angeles Times: “Because it’s a tourist town, people are used to having access to everything. It’s not like New York or LA. There’s no etiquette. And you’re expected to be friendly all the time.”
Warm and fuzzy word-of-mouth back in Hollywood would have to wait.
Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990)
Psycho IV would have to wait, too.
The Bates Motel and obligatory house on the hill behind it was fully constructed and ready for cameras by the end of October 1988. The set alone was exciting enough to score a mention in the Chicago Tribune, promising an un-subtitled Psycho IV would premiere sometime the following year.
Universal delayed production until the rest of the park was finished. The 25-day shoot, helmed by Critters 2 director Mick Garris, would coincide with Universal Studios Florida’s first month of operation so the earliest visitors could get a glimpse of genuine movie magic. It also made the famously shy Anthony Perkins available for the opening day ceremonies of Alfred Hitchcock: The Art of Making Movies. At least in theory. According to the Tampa Bay Times, he was mostly a no-show.
For most Universal visitors, the entire production was a no-show. Psycho IV: The Beginning didn’t call for much exterior work, especially during park hours. Besides a handy placard that said it was shot there, the only sign of the film coming or going lives on in home videos from June 1990, when the Bates Motel and mansion were briefly painted in their pastel Sunday best before reverting to the iconically rundown look.
The same Tampa Bay Times story includes a quote from a publicist at Showtime, the network that premiered Psycho IV, stating that the sets would be moved across the park after the production wrapped. No mention is made of where they would’ve been relocated. It may have been a misunderstanding about the capability of moving them, having been built on stilts specifically for the option, but it turned out to be an omen in the end. The sets were never in the way of incoming productions so they stayed put until the theme park needed more real estate. The Bates Motel was destroyed in 1995 for A Day in the Park With Barney and the “Psycho House” followed suit in 1998 for Curious George Goes to Town.
Oscar (1991)
“He will come back…or he won’t.”
So hoped the Orlando Sentinel in a piece on surprise visitor John Landis, director of The Blues Brothers.
Ultimately, he did not come back to Orlando, but it wasn’t like he had a choice the first time around.
Oscar, Landis’s 1991 period farce, was days away from wrapping on the Universal Studios Hollywood lot when a disturbed security guard set fire to a scenic department paint shed. The ensuing blaze claimed just about every facade that could pass for 1930s Chicago, leaving the gangland comedy without a gangland.
Remembering an early construction tour of the site, Landis moved his production to the just-opened Universal Studios Florida and used the New York street sets with little necessary modification. Oscar, it’s worth noting, was a Disney production through Touchstone Pictures, like Ernest Saves Christmas before it. Landis hadn’t even acclimated to the humidity before receiving a panicked phone call from then-CEO Michael Eisner. It didn’t look good that such a high-profile project, starring Sylvester Stallone no less, was filming in broad daylight on the competition’s backlot. Landis, in turn, broke the news to him that the New York street sets at Disney-MGM Studios didn’t look good, either.
In the end, the production split the difference, shooting exteriors at Universal and interiors at Disney. In terms of paid publicity, though, the winner was clear – curtains were kept drawn in the soundstages so tourists on the walking tour never even knew Rocky Balboa was in the building.
Everyone knew he was in town, though. Plenty of ink was already spilled by the time Oscar came to town in mid-December 1990. The tone was simultaneously grateful and skeptical. It was the first A-list Hollywood picture to roll cameras while the parks were open, but even at Universal the director requested a closed set. That meant security and secrecy and absolutely no interaction with people in Woody Woodpecker hats.
Until it didn’t.
Today, you can find home videos uploaded to YouTube catching Stallone winking at the crowds. A smaller crew was allowed to shoot on the Oscar set for the 1991 souvenir video, Universal Studios Florida: Experience the Magic of Movies. Landis even broke a long media silence, since his contentious 1987 acquittal in the deaths of an actor and two children on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie, just to promote the film.
“I’m doing press on this movie because I really feel it needs all the help it can get.”
He didn’t realize he was telling a bad joke.
Oscar opened to paint-peeling reviews and quickly became late-show shorthand for box office failure. Any intended smile-and-wave rehabilitation didn’t help Landis’s reputation or his career. Stallone took one more swing at comedy in 1992’s Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot! before backing away from the genre entirely.
Though it didn’t kickstart the Hollywood East revolution, Oscar does show off the quality of Universal Studios Florida’s New York streets, most of which remain completely unchanged today. Viewers should keep their eyes open for any shots to the left of Stallone’s false-front estate and an obvious drive-by of Sting Alley.
Passenger 57 (1992)
Though Universal had the better backlot, Disney-MGM Studios often won out in the margins. The office space and post-production accommodations routinely attracted more soundstage work, even if the stages were under greater public scrutiny. Then again, that’s a small price to pay for an airplane.
As part of its role as “The Official Airline of Walt Disney World,” Delta Air Lines provided the Studios with a decommissioned prototype of the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar. 60 feet of fuselage was chopped up, rewired, and turned into the most production-friendly airplane set of its time. The cockpit was removable for close-ups. The passenger section split right down the middle for profile shots. The in-flight entertainment screen could even be jerry-rigged as an additional camera monitor.
It got plenty of mileage before its retirement in 1999 to the Delta Flight Museum, but no production used it quite as well as Passenger 57.
For Orlando-born star Wesley Snipes, to borrow the most threadbare tagline in action cinema history, it was personal. His mother and grandma occasionally took over catering duties to supply home-cooked soul food for cast and crew. Snipes invited all students with at least a 3.0 grade point average from his nearby alma mater, Jones High School, for a closer look at the production as paid extras. “If you came from a place, you give respect to the people who got you through that. You give a little something to those who are coming up,” said Snipes in an E! News Behind The Scenes featurette, on set at a mock carnival outside Sanford. At lunch, he sat down with the honor roll and talked about his experience as a Black leading man in Hollywood.
Though the critics wrote it off as the latest store-brand Die Hard, Passenger 57 turned Wesley Snipes into a bonafide action hero. No mean feat, considering the controversy he later laid bare in an interview with Entertainment Weekly: “You rarely see a Black man with a gun shooting white people for the good of society.”
For better or worse, the film gave Snipes an immortal one-liner – “Always bet on black” – and proved Hollywood East had everything a blockbuster action movie could ever need.
Quick Change, Bill Murray’s criminally overlooked directorial debut, was the first major production to shoot in the deconstructed TriStar, not long after the Disney-MGM Studios opened to the public. In that case, though, it was only used for the film’s closing scene.
Matinee (1993)
“Everyone makes movies in Florida now – it has become a major filmmaking center,” said Gremlins director Joe Dante in a February 1993 interview with the Sun Sentinel. “…but I wanted to do something different.”
Though his assessment may sound hyperbolic in hindsight, Dante did do something different – he shot a movie in Florida that faked Florida with Florida.
Though something different could apply to most of Joe Dante’s filmography, Matinee is easily his most personal film. Set in Key West on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the movie mixes duck-and-cover Cold War paranoia with the atomic thrills of bad B-movie masterpieces like the fictional Mant! The demanding 1960s setting called for creative geography. The production shot as much as possible on location in Key West, but relied on the quieter coastal town of Cocoa Beach for the bulk. Additional scenes were shot in Maitland, a suburb of Orange County near Winter Park.
Interiors and select exteriors were constructed and housed at Universal Studios Florida. Though many of the outdoor sets were designed to match seamlessly with the existing locations, one sequence in particular made use of the same streets as Oscar.
In an autobiographical jab at the family-friendly entertainment aimed at kids back then, the adolescent hero and his younger brother roll their eyes through The Shook-Up Shopping Cart, a surgically precise parody of early ‘60s Disney comedies that more often than not starred Fred MacMurray or Dean Jones.
The color is too bright. The leading man is too square. Every mugger wears a little black mask and pronounces “hurt” with a Y in the middle. A man’s soul is imprisoned in an inanimate object through a wacky mix of slapstick and black magic. It’s a house style not often skewered, but luckily the New York streets at Universal Studios Florida passed for the right vintage.
Even if Universal fans haven’t seen the movie, they may have unknowingly taken pictures with pieces of it. A recreation of the neon marquee from Key West’s historic Strand Theater used to sit in a far corner of The Boneyard, over a ruined Cadillac also seen in the film.
More productions would make use of the parks throughout the following decade, settling into primarily soundstage-bound television, before the Florida tax incentives that wooed so many of these projects dried up. The artifacts of Matinee rusted away, a memorial to the gilded possibility of Hollywood East, until the Boneyard was cleaned out in 2008 to be replaced by the Universal Music Plaza Stage. Once again, the theme park needed more space. So much for the movies.
Eventually Florida bounced back as a major filmmaking center, as Dante deemed it. Until a few years ago, when legislators let the latest tax incentives run out, the state ranked as the third largest production hub in the country behind Los Angeles and New York City. Too bad there aren’t any tours left to tell the people in Woody Woodpecker hats.
