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Passenger 57 (1992)

Passenger 57 poster
Image: Warner Bros.

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)

Matinee poster
Image: Universal

"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.

 
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