Movie location supervisor Steve Woroniecki remembered getting misplaced within the vastness of the north blimp hangar in Tustin.
The World Battle II-era hangar had a approach of difficult folks’s sense of scale — it made a quarry dump truck appear to be a toy automobile; it diminished a blimp to a miniature mannequin of itself.
This excited Woroniecki and the manufacturing workforce for the 2009 “Star Trek” reboot, which wanted a constructing giant sufficient to pose as a futuristic hangar within the 12 months 2258 that might home Star Fleet area shuttles.
“Whenever you stroll in, it’s very ominous,” he stated, then recalled bending his neck to gawk on the towering picket arches. “It was good for what we needed to do.”
The hangar would have its Hollywood second in a scene the place Starfleet cadets, together with a younger James Kirk, launched from its gates on the USS Enterprise’s maiden voyage. Towards the movie’s conclusion, it’s contained in the hangar the place Spock meets his future self — the youthful character performed by Zachary Quinto, the elder performed by Leonard Nimoy — in a symbolic passing of the torch throughout the traditional sci-fi franchise.
On Tuesday, as flames tore on the north hangar’s core, not solely did a bit of wartime historical past fall to ash but in addition a landmark vital to cinema. And “Star Trek” wasn’t its first closeup.
The north hangar served as a movie location for a number of WWII interval dramas, together with “Pearl Harbor” in 2001 and “The Hindenburg” in 1975, in addition to “The Man’s Navy,” which was shot and launched in 1945 through the precise struggle, in response to army historian Mark Carlson’s e book “Flying on Movie: A Century of Aviation within the Motion pictures.” In “Pearl Harbor,” Air Drive Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, performed by Alec Baldwin, used the hangar and tarmac to coach his pilots, performed by Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, as they ready to fly B-25 bombers on a mission into Japan.
Different movies and TV reveals have been shot on the close by south hangar, positioned on the identical former U.S. air base that closed in 1999. The south hangar, which was untouched by Tuesday’s fireplace, is sort of equivalent in dimension and look. Its inside was reworked to turn into the floor of the moon for the 1998 HBO miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon.” In Season 6, Episode 12 of “The X-Information,” the south hangar reveals up because the assembly place between U.S. authorities leaders and extraterrestrial rebels. The episode aired in 1999.
That very same 12 months, “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” used the bottom to function a time machine within the form of a Volkswagen Beetle that might transport Mike Myers’ comedic character again to 1969. It’s unclear, nonetheless, which of the dual hangars will get to assert credit score for that scene.
“We within the movie trade are all the time very enthusiastic about cavernous, giant, historic areas like this,” stated manufacturing supervisor Scott Trimble, referring to each hangars. Trimble, a board member of the Location Managers Guild Worldwide, additionally was a location supervisor on “Star Trek” and just lately labored on “The E book of Boba Fett” and “Snowfall.” “As a result of they give the impression of being so unimaginable for filming,” he continued. “So any time we lose any form of place like this, it’s tragic and it makes it more durable to discover a filming place for the subsequent time.”
Crews began to dampen the fireplace round 1 a.m. Tuesday.
Becky Brake, who was the pinnacle location supervisor on “Star Trek,” stated she was unhappy all through the day as she learn articles concerning the fireplace and watched TV information broadcasts that confirmed flames engulfing the construction. She hoped no less than some parts of the constructing would survive.
“It’s such a disgrace that we’re shedding such an iconic constructing,” she stated.
By round 5 p.m., the blaze was introduced below management, in response to the O.C. Hearth Authority, which tweeted that firefighters would stay on-site in a single day. What stays of the construction will ultimately be demolished, fireplace officers stated.
Lately, the north hangar has lain dormant. In 2013 it was broken in a windstorm that made it too unstable to be used. It has remained off-limits to movie crews.
However that didn’t cease three folks from trespassing and scaling the constructing in 2019. Considered one of them, a teen, who was discovered unconscious, needed to be airlifted from the highest of the north hangar.
The south hangar stays energetic for shoots and has been used for quite a few automobile commercials, a Disneyland advert, automobile expos and different occasions equivalent to movie screenings.
Actual-life buildings just like the north and south hangars stand out in an period through which many large-scale buildings are sometimes computer-generated. Productions typically elect to shoot scenes in warehouses filled with inexperienced screens.
“There’s positively some realism in filming in an precise atmosphere,” Trimble stated, including that it improves the actors’ performances after they can “really feel all of the area round them,” as a substitute of simply “a inexperienced wall.”
And audiences are starting to note the distinction and are getting uninterested in the computerized shows, Brake stated.
“We’re positively in a time when the viewers is experiencing CGI fatigue,” she stated. “There’s one thing that reveals up onscreen [in real locations] — even simply the scent, the air, the motion, the vibration, the feel of it — it feels prefer it reveals up on movie in some way.”
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