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OUNG MAN
studio facilities
OUNG MAN
Barrandov Studios in the Czech Republic
financial sense to shoot here,” com- ments the studio’s marketing director Matous Forbelsky.
“But there is also the pull of the surrounding countryside that has locations with marvellous fairytale castles and rambling chateaux, forests and hills and towns that have not been modernised. It has resulted in a boost for period films like Plunkett and MacLeane, The Barber of Siberia, Billie August’s Les Miserables, The Affair of the Necklace. I think we can safely expect a lot more King Arthur films!”
One of which we saw recently was Young Arthur, the pilot for a prospec- tive NBC TV series. Shot on Fuji by Jon Joffin for director Mikael Salomon, it stars Julian Morris, James Fleet, Paul
Wasilewski and Laura Rees. Further location appeal is the wealth of old abandoned industrial buildings like breweries, train factories, railway sta- tions, hangars, bottling plants, flour mills and factories.
One of the real joys of Barrandov is, however, their Costumes and Props stores. Unlike their British counter- parts who frequently hire in, they have managed to keep all the props and costumes they ever used.
They have probably the biggest Props Department in Europe and enough priceless items that would fill many museums, from 17th Century books to rare bakelite wirelesses, 200 coaches and carriages to military accou- trements that could start or stop a war.
The Costume Department’s 240 000 items include the wedding dress used by Constanze Mozart in Amadeus, 20,000 items of footwear, a huge selection of German and Russian uniforms (naturally!) and 9000 wigs.
Their 40 acre back lot is so big they can rebuild a small town although the day I visited it there was just the remains of a disarmingly real Big Ben constructed for Jackie Chan to swing from the clock’s hands for a scene in the action comedy, Shanghai Knights.
Returning to Prague, someone else was shooting on the famous Charles Bridge that has become almost as familiar to film-goers as the Brooklyn Bridge and that night there were some famous Hollywood faces in well-known
Prague watering holes like Le Look in New Town and Radost in Old Town.
It can’t just be the pull of what some say is the world’s best beer that is getting Hollywood and European filmmakers to re-route to Barrandov. Maybe the Havel brothers’ dream of turning themselves into the Czech ver- sion of Warner Bros is starting to become a reality. ■
Footnote: The Czech contribution to cinema began before pictures were put in motion when Bohemian physiologist Evangelista Pukinje published his research on sensory phenomena and the persistence of vision in 1819.