Jaunted - Tag: Tom Hanks

Set In Vatican City, Shot In LA

pbb — 2008-10-30T16:38:10-05:00

The trailer for the film "Angels and Demons" just came out, and you'd think they'd actually shot it in Vatican City. But Ron Howard's cast and crew were locked out of the Holy See because church officials didn't really care for "The Da Vinci Code."

Instead, a mock-up St. Peter's Square was built in LA for filming. Producers also got access to the super-swanky Royal Palace in Caserta, Italy to use as a stand-in for interior shots.

Real Vatican or not, there's no doubt that the film will inspire a new batch of movie tourists, eager to see the place that the Illuminati are supposedly trying to destroy with antimatter. The film opens May 15, 2009.

Related Stories:
· Vatican City Is Rebuilt in LA [Telegraph]
· Vatican Bans Da Vinci Code Sequel [Telegraph]
· Movie Travel coverage [Jaunted]

Rome: Not This Movie Set Travel: Church Blocks New Dan Brown Adaptation

egw — 2008-06-18T10:00:02-05:00

Hey, remember those awesome scenes in "The Da Vinci Code" where Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu went into a church and discovered "Jesus" could be her middle name? (It was something like that.) Well, hope you enjoyed those sweeping Ron Howard shots, because the Vatican is cracking down on filming requests for the Dan Brown prequel "Angels and Demons."

When the Catholic Church was unable to kill the best-selling thriller and the train of books that followed it, it struck back by blocking Tom Hanks and Howard from shooting inside two Rome churches, Santa Maria del Popolo and Santa Maria della Vittoria, which supposedly figure prominently into the plot of "Angels and Demons."

(We've never read it, but we assume it takes Langdon the symbologist from idyllic desert childhood to kill-happy atheist. It's a prequel, after all!)

Church cooperation or no, look for "Angels and Demons" to hit theaters sometime in 2009, with new costars Ewan McGregor as a Vatican hotshot and Ayelet Zurer ("Vantage Point," "Munich") as the requisite hot-lady scientist.

Related Stories:
· Movie Set Travel: "The Da Vinci Code" [Jaunted]
· Vatican Bans Tom Hanks from Filming in Churches [ICYDK]
· Celeb Travel coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: Defamer]

New York: Classic New York Movies: "You've Got Mail" and a Sweet UWS Apartment

egw — 2008-03-20T16:00:01-05:00

Visit our Classic NYC Movies Map to... hey, what's that sound? Sorry, we got distracted by our 1998 e-mail.

When "You've Got Mail" opened in theatres and made a jillion dollars, we were young, naive non-New Yorkers. Why wouldn't a children's book store owner (Meg Ryan) and a publishing magnate (Tom Hanks) meet on AOL and eventually fall in love?

We had a screen name, we were fairly sure how it worked. Well, the Internet has changed a lot since then, but this movie is still a prime Sunday-afternoon cable pick--and its sense of Upper West Side geography pretty sound.

Well, sound with one big exception, and it's not that the Upper West Side is full of pretty people living decent lives. The bookstore Kathleen owns, the Shop Around the Corner, doesn't exist. Why location scouts didn't bother to find another of the many, many independent children's books in the city (like Books of Wonder or the Bank Street Bookstore) is beyond us, but you can see the storefront which stood in for Kathleen's shop at 169 West 69th Street. (It sells cheese and antiques.)