Filming at Airport May Be Nearing Its Final Take

Vietnam, late 1960s. A pretty American blonde has just arrived at Saigon airport to investigate her husband’s death amid the turmoil and misery of the war-torn country.

A frenzied crowd shuffles her out of the terminal and into a bustling street, where Army jeeps rumble by and men and women on bicycles stream past.

She looks confused. A cabdriver rushes to her side and escorts her to a waiting cab.

They drive away.

Suddenly, a voice shouts, “Cut,” and in a few hours, work crews pack up the tropical bushes, fake palm trees and other props from around the terminal building, returning it to its former identity: a vacant, aging Van Nuys Airport hangar.

Thus ended the latest day of filming at the former Air National Guard base at the airport, one of the San Fernando Valley’s most popular motion picture and television filming locations. The movie, called “Message from Nam,” was the latest of more than 30 movies filmed at the airport over the past 60 years.

In the past two years alone, the airport has generated about $781,000 in filming fees, most from productions--such as “The Last Action Hero” and “In the Line of Fire”--filmed at the former National Guard headquarters. The site has been mostly vacant since the National Guard relocated to Point Mugu in April, 1990.

But the income that the site earns for the city Airport Department in filming fees is likely to drop in the future, due to city plans to temporarily house some police, fire and other helicopters in hangars at the facility. The helicopters are now crowded into another site at the same airport.

City officials said it is unclear when the helicopters will be moved into two large hangars on the 62-acre National Guard property, because city officials are still studying the cost of refurbishing the buildings before they can be occupied.

Meanwhile, airport officials are considering the long-term future of the National Guard site as they draft a master plan to guide development at the 725-acre airport over the next 20 years.

Suggestions from residents and tenants for future use of the National Guard property include building an aviation museum, an industrial park, a retail shopping area, a police substation or additional tie-down space for small aircraft.

There have been no suggestions to leave the site vacant for filming.

Location scouts and other industry experts say the city’s entertainment industry would lose an inexpensive and accessible filming location if the National Guard site were no longer available.

“It would be just another nail in the coffin” for the film industry, said Greg Sullivan, chairman of the Assn. of Film Location Services and president of American Film Location Co.

Sullivan said he has often recommended filming at the airport because it is nearby and much cheaper than renting space from a sound studio, which he said usually requires that film companies also hire the studio’s in-house lighting technicians at high rates.

He said a sound stage about the size of one of the National Guard hangars would cost about $1,500 per day to rent. But according to an airport fee list, the former National Guard hangars--barn-like structures as capacious as many sound stages--rent for about $720 per day, plus additional charges for services such as police and parking.

Charles Weisenberg, director of the city’s film and television liaison office, said Van Nuys Airport is an appealing film location because film companies usually only need one permit, issued by the airport director.

He said acquiring permits to film elsewhere in the city, such as a park, can be more complicated, requiring several clearances, such as street closure and Fire Department permits.

Airport noise is usually not a problem, Weisenberg added, because most film companies dub in the sound later. Airport hangars make particularly attractive film stages because the large amount of room allows for many dramatic camera angles, he said.

Movie making at the airport dates back to the 1930s, when it was the location for films such as “Lost Horizon” with Ronald Colman and Jane Wyatt and “Test Pilots” with Clark Gable, Myrna Loy and Spencer Tracy.

But the airport is probably most often recalled as the location for part of the classic final scene of “Casablanca,” in which Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman play World War II lovers saying goodby on an airport runway.

The foggy Moroccan runway portrayed in the 1942 movie was created, for the most part, on a sound stage at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank. Exterior shots of a plane were filmed at the Van Nuys Airport and spliced into the sound-stage footage, but neither Bogart nor Bergman were present for the outdoor shots.

More recently, a National Guard hangar was used to re-create a concert hall where the heavy metal rock group AC/DC blasted hard-driving music for a scene in “The Last Action Hero.”

About 700 rock fans, who had gotten tickets by standing in line at a record store in Hollywood, crammed into the hangar to watch the filming, said airport police officer Del Lyles, who coordinates filming at the airport.

But after a short while, Lyles said, many of the fans left, bored because the band repeated the same few songs over and over for multiple camera takes.

Bob Boyle, location manager for “Message from Nam,” based on a Danielle Steele novel, said he chose the National Guard hangar for the Saigon airport scene because the aging hangar resembled a Vietnamese airport terminal.

He said the final transformation required only a bit of paint, some signs, tropical plants, palm trees and an overhang added to the entrance.

“This converted very well to resemble the airport in Saigon,” he said.

Hughes Aircraft even agreed to roll three vintage A-3 jets from across the airport to add some authentic background to the scene.

As part of a separate scene for the same movie, Boyle said the film crew used an adjacent hangar to line up rows of caskets, draped in American flags, to depict dead soldiers being sent back to the States.