Anyone been to the Plaza bar where Grant gets taken?
It's sometimes closed for renovation since it went condo, but the carriage painting above the table where he meets his friends is still there. Bit of old, vanishing NY.
shareI went there in the mid-eighties and had a drink right there beneath the carriage painting where Grant drinks with his cronies.
It was a great feeling.
But, years later, I read that Hitchocck didn't really film there.
He DID film at the real Plaza Hotel the shot of Grant striding across the lobby and the hall to the Oak Bar (Grant actually kept a room at the Plaza to live in when necessary.)
But -- I read -- Hitchcock had the Oak Bar itself meticulously RE-BUILT in Hollywood on the MGM lot. Evidently so he could get his carefully angled shots on the drinkers and their huge cocktail glasses -- and so he could record the dialogue. Even the carriage painting was a duplicate.
So evidently I drank at the REAL Oak Bar beneath the REAL carriage painting...but that's not where Cary Grant sat. He sat in a fake set on the MGM soundstages.
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I understand that, the year before NXNW, Hitchcock had the "Ernie's" restaurant in San Francisco ALSO rebuilt in Hollywood, on the Paramount lot. The scenes were not shot in the real Ernies.
Hitchcock used to get the big budgets to do this sort of thing.
Maybe it was saved by MGM . . . ?
shareInteresting though that Hitchcock didn't go as far as to recreate Grand Central Station as he did Penn Station in 1945 for Spellbound. 1959 was an era of a mix of location and recreated sets.g
shareInteresting though that Hitchcock didn't go as far as to recreate Grand Central Station as he did Penn Station in 1945 for Spellbound. 1959 was an era of a mix of location and recreated sets.
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I think in the forties, producers and directors really had to fight to film "on location." Travel of thousands of miles, trying to make old-fashioned cameras and lights work there, trying to record dialogue -- plus the movie moguls didn't want their filmmakers far away from them.
But with TV as the competition in the fifties...locales became all the rage.
Hitch had "faked" Rio in Notorious, but came the fifties, off his cameras travelled to Monaco, Morocco, London...Vermont, San Francisco...
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The big budget North by Northwest has at least four "mix and matches" of location to soundstage:
The Plaza Hotel lobby/The Oak bar interior
The Glen Cove mansion/interior library
The UN building/interior "public lounge" where knifing takes place.
Mount Rushmore cafeteria and tourism center/interior of cafeteria.
Almost inevitably, Hitchcock does his interiors on a soundstage so as to get his recordings crisp and his angles angled.
And, famously, the footage of Grant walking into the UN building was grabbed by a hidden camera hidden in a van across the street(the UN was allowing no movis on the premises back then, inside or out.)
I wonder if there was any legal trouble once the film was released and the footage of the UN building was public.
shareMaybe it was saved by MGM . . . ?
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If you mean the "fake" Oak Bar...I doubt it exists all these years later, but from what I can gather on a couple of other Hitchcock movies of the time, their interior sets got used " a bit" before being torn down.
For instance, though the exterior Bates mansion has been on the Universal lot for decades(re-built somewhat for the sequels and rumored to no longer have a board left from the 1960 original)..you can see the INTERIOR of the Bates Mansion in a few "Boris Karloff Thriller" shows of the early sixties.
And I'm pretty sure I saw the indoor-outdoor set for the area in front of the Brenner house from The Birds "re-dressed" for a Hitchcock episode.
Movie set construction is flimsy and I'd guess a lot of sets are struck as soon as production is fully over. Struck and destroyed.
But how great would it me to walk in Cabin One of the Bates Motel, or have drinks at the fake Oak Bar or Ernies?
In the seventies, I walked at Universal on one interior set from Topaz(the Virginia safe house) and one interior set from Family Plot(Adamson's home and stairs.) The first time I was on an official tour; the second time I was sneaking on the lot.
QUESTION - I haven't seen NXNW in a year or so but I've seen it probably 10 or more times. Although the UN supposedly wouldn't allow filming inside, isn't there a shot from the roof as Roger runs out of the UN building after the stabbing incident? Was it not the UN building? It sure looks like it.
shareI think that was a mock-up painting of the UN Building from above.
Likely a camera was put very high up on a very high crane to shoot down on "Thornhill" running(likely not Cary Grant himself; its a speck) simply across some concrete to a waiting cab, and then that footage was matted into the painting of the UN Building "looking down."
At least, that's what I think.
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shareIts pretty cool, isn't it?
I think we have swanstep to thank!
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Yes, I have been to the lobby of the UN and Hitchcock's version(a mix of in-studio art direction and matte painting) was more impressive.
Keep in mind that Hitchcock told Truffaut he entirely invented "the public lounge" where Townsend is knifed. Hitch said he had to make that up in order to create a room "where the man with the knife could just walk in."
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