Good day UHHers…

For those of you who may not be familiar with the term, a "Backlot" is an area constructed to be used for movies and television shows. They are normally not so big and maybe have a few buildings or set. "Gilligan's Island", for example, was filmed on a backlot in Los Angeles (and interesting trivia, in occasional shots, you can get a glimpse of the LA Freeway in the background, and filming often had to stop because of vehicle noise and horns blowing). Anyway, here in China there is a small city (6 million people) of Wuyi (woo-yea) which has seven magnificently large backlots that replicate "old China" very exactly. And when they are not in use, the lots are opened up to the public for exploration. One of the lots contains buildings from the Forbidden City and many TV shows and movies (The Chinese LOVE the dynastic period and many shows revolve around this time period) as well as smaller "village" scenes are commonly filmed in these locations. My wife and I visited here and spent the day looking around and exploring the different buildings. One of the "humorous" things that I saw was a pseudo production set, complete with lights, dolly track, set and an BetaCam that had to be 30 years old. I imagine that the average person wouldn't know the difference, but was funny to me. One of the more famous films made here was the 1987 film "The Last Emperor", and if you look at images from the movie on the internet, you will see the same in the images shown here. A really interesting place to visit, particularly since I teach film, and what made it better is that my wife is like a little, cute encyclopedia when it comes to Chinese history, so she made it that much more interesting. Anyway, hope you enjoy and have an awesome day!

Mark Lent