Warchild wrote:Kasper F. Nielsen wrote:If your western takes place in a city at all, then you need to build the city yourself and that's no cheap task. Period pieces are always more expensive, just look at the tv-series "Rome" which, even though it was a huge success, got cancelled because of its gigantic budget.
I though they already had movies sets set up, just for westerns, i mean like old towns to shoot westerns, do they always take it down once a movie is done and then set up again once another movie is ready to shoot?
In the 1950s when Westerns were *the* genre, a lot of sets were semi-permanent and were reused from film to film. Some of them still survive on studio backlots around Hollywood. But as studios outsourced more stuff to wherever was cheapest and moved the rest on to soundstages, sets became a use-once-throw-away affair. many of the old sets were torn down in the 1970s when no one thought Westerns would ever make a come-back.
There are a few Western sets still standing; if you ever get to the lovely town of Tucson AZ, you're quite close to the Old Tucson Studios which were humming in the 1950s but are now mainly a tourist attraction. Though having said that I *THINK* HBO's 'Deadwood' was filmed at on sets at Santa Clarita in Northern LA.
Mind you, if you want a real Western town; drive North from LA through the Mojave to Owens Valley; keep going past Mammoth Mountain and the Inyo Volcanoes, past spooky Mono Lake and hang a right into the heart of the desert - and you end up at Bodie. Go at sunset as the sky turns indigo and the desert and old wood begin to glow the most unearthly orange and you can just imagine the possibilities:
http://www.bodie.com/.
But don't stay too late - after the sun goes down it gets pretty creepy to be the only living person in a town that once held 10,000!
M.