Anybody know where that house is located? I leave near everything but haven't been able to find the house. The building is the old Burroghs Welcome Building and it's just as creepy in real life as it is in the film.
Btw: there is no way he could have gotten from Pinehurst to Kitty Hawk in that short of an amount of time. It's at least a 4 hour drive from there.
I remember seeing an newspaper article (Chapel Hill or Durham paper) around the time the movie came out that the house was in Chapel Hill. But I don't know where exactly.
It was years ago, but I lived nearby at the time when they filmed this, it was a local attraction to go drive by and see the crews at work, and some of the cast were spotted in local restaurants and such.
The house, horse stable and country scenes were filmed at "Yellowgate Farm", on the NE side of Southern Pines, NC, off of Youngs Rd, just a few miles from Pinehurst. It's owned by the family that created NutraSweet. It's quite a nice place!
The then Burroughs-Welcome Industries building, which is now Glaxo-(Welcome)-Smith-Kline, in the Research Triangle Park, was architecturally famous in it's day, due to the unique design structure (which won a serious collection of international design awards back when it was built in the early 70's). I've worked there, it's one crazy maze of a floorplan, getting seriously lost wasn't too hard to accomplish. The ultra-mod 60's decor existed up until the early 00's, when the building interior was finally overhauled, to everyone's great relief.
Kitty Hawk was Kitty Hawk... don't know much about that, but yes, it's not a quick drive from Pinehurst to the Outer Banks at all. I just wrote that off as poetic license on the writer's behalf. At least they picked locations in the same state, could've been worse.
I had seen the pre-movie and pre-tragedy hype for the movie in 1982 At that time, I was attending The Ohio State University. (Never forget that "The," people. Goodness knows why, but....) I saw absolutely no first-run movies at the time, so I didn't see Brainstorm until late 1983 or 1984.
By that time, I had graduated and moved back to my native red soil in North Carolina. I finally saw this terrific movie at a second-run house in Raleigh. I was staying with my cousin while I job hunted around the Raleigh/Durham area. I had spent the better part of that morning in the claustrophobia-inducing application area of one of the RTP outfits, along with about 50 other people. Strange room -- it was as though the space had originally been two back-to-back walk-in closets with the common wall knocked out. Odder still, people in white lab coats (did the mail room people wear them, too?) kept scurrying to and fro -- "Excuse me. Pardon me. Oh, I'm so sorry...." -- using this area as a corridor. It was an incredibly bizarre set-up.
So when Christopher Walken is hauling his recumbent bike through the reception area, I thought, "Waitaminute...," and when they showed the exterior, I blurted out, "Beth! That's Burroughs-Wellcome! I was just there today!"
The rest of the (thankfully sparse) crowd turned and stared, some aggravated, others amused. My cousin stage-whispered, "She's not from here," which mollified the mob before they got out the pitchforks and torches. I was mortified. Beth is still telling that story at family get-togethers.
Now that I'm back in Ohio, I miss NC, particularly those long, musty-smelling, gorgeous autumns, one of which is beautifully depicted in Brainstorm. I miss the drawls, the red clay, and the barbeque (with hush puppies, of course). dolceri ac dolcere
Does anyone know about the backyard observatory shown in the movie? I'd like to know what company makes (made) it.
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