THIS WEEKEND Russell Crowe is donning a pair of green tights – well, leather trousers, in fact – to lead his band of merry men through yet another Hollywood biopic of Nottingham's most famous son. Robin Hood, which opened yesterday, reunites Crowe with Gladiatordirector Ridley Scott and poses a question: can Crowe rob the rich, give to the poor, get off with Maid Marion and resurrect Nottingham's travel industry, all in a little more than two hours?
Nottingham’s council leaders hope so. Its modern image is still linked to merry men, only these days they tend to be staggering around the city centre at closing time; a reputation as Britain’s stag-party venue of choice is based on the urban myth that Nottingham has the highest female-male ratio in the UK.
The other major stakeholder in the film, the National Trust, is showing the local council how it's done. The trust owns some of the film's locations, most notably Freshwater West beach, in Pembrokeshire. Its grand houses also featured heavily in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, in which Johnny Depp, as the Mad Hatter, cavorted around Antony, an 18th-century mansion in Cornwall. The ploy is working. National Trust director-general Fiona Reynolds said the bump in visitors means the charity has earned up to €3.5 million from films since 2007.
And while film-related tourism is hardly new, this summer’s blockbusters come with an accompanying PR push that suggests the studio’s location decisions are coming under ever more intense lobbying pressure from national tourist boards and city governments. Generous tax breaks and other incentives are used to catch the eye of big studio producers, according to Tony Reeves, editor of the website movie-locations.com. “It used to be the case that producers would scout for locations within a 20-mile radius of the studio, to keep costs down,” says Reeves, who believes that changes in home- viewing habits have increased film’s power to sell holidays. “Most people now have a DVD collection, which they watch several times over, giving even more time to fall in love with the fabulous backdrops.”
The new Amanda Seyfried film, Letters to Juliet, is a case in point. It promises to do for the Italian city of Verona what her previous film Mamma Mia!did for the Greek island of Skopelos – or Kalokairi as it was renamed in the film.
Cinema history is littered with such examples. The Thai island of Khow Ping Kan, which was used in The Man with the Golden Gun, is now referred to by locals as James Bond Island. New Zealand's government points to a 17 per cent jump in visitors in the year following the first Lord of the Ringsfilm, and Devils Tower in Wyoming became a shrine because of its prominence in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with visitors up by 75 per cent.
Combine films with sport and the results can be even more dramatic. In Field of DreamsKevin Costner was told by a mysterious voice from the past: "If you build it, he will come." When filming finished in the Iowa town of Dyersville, the specially laid pitch was dug up and the land returned to its farmer owners. But as the film foretold, having built it, baseball tourists did come, in their thousands, demanding the pitch be relaid. Within three years of the film's release 60,000 people had taken their bat and ball to the Field of Dreams Movie Site, 28995 Lansing Road, Dyersville.
For every Field of Dreams, however, is a nightmare waiting to happen. The negative impact of the TV series The Wireon the economy of Baltimore is still being assessed. Over five brilliant but bleak series the city's drug and crime problems were laid bare in front of an international audience.
Even a hit film can have a detrimental effect, says Tony Reeves, who cites The Beachas the classic example of Hollywood's power to change whatever it touches, not always for the better. "Sudden unplanned tourism can disrupt the equilibrium of a previously untouched area," he says. The film shows Leonardo DiCaprio living a hedonistic existence on a small Thai island. The problem was it looked so beautiful that a trail of backpackers made their way there, turning an unspoilt haven into something, well, spoilt. A warning, perhaps, to governments keen to boost the tourism dollar via the medium of film: be careful what you wish for.
