![]() Filming of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World in 2003 | |
Formerly | Fox Studios Baja (1996-2007) |
---|---|
Fox Baja Studios | |
Founded | 1996 |
Founder | 20th Century Fox |
Headquarters | |
Area served | Worldwide |
Products | Filming Studios, filming stages, filming tanks, productions, major filming studios, movie productions, box office |
Owner |
|
Parent |
|
Baja Studios, formerly Fox Baja, is an American-owned film studio near the resort community of Rosarito, Baja California, Mexico. It comprises the world's largest stages and water tanks designed for filming. [1] As well as major film work the facility is used for making commercials, music videos, television series, and movies for television.
Originally built for Twentieth Century Fox for the reconstruction of RMS Titanic in the 1997 film Titanic , it has since then built some of the largest sets for numerous other studios including, MGM 's Tomorrow Never Dies , Amblin Entertainment 's In Dreams , Warner Bros. 's Deep Blue Sea , Phoenix Pictures 's The Weight of Water , Disney 's Pearl Harbor and Fox's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World .
Fox Baja Studios began life as a subsidiary of Twentieth Century Fox, a part of the global corporate holdings of Rupert Murdoch on land leased by the Hollywood studio. Construction of the facility costing an estimated $20 million USD [2] began on 6 June 1996 on land leased by the Hollywood studio next to the northern edge of a small fishing village (Puerto Popotla). Construction lasted 100 days. [3] The corporation had an interest in breaking the power in Hollywood of the Teamsters Union; [4] [5] the corporation had learned from the Wapping dispute. The studio's design was heavily influenced by the production needs of the first film to be shot there, James Cameron's epic Titanic, where there was a requirement to shoot a 775-foot-long (236 m) replica of the ship in a water tank. [6]
Fox sold the studios in May 2007 to Baja Acquisitions (a consortium of "local financial interests") for an eight-figure US dollar sum. [7]
There was a downturn in the area from 2007 when tourism lessened due to a local drug war and a tightening of travel restrictions. [8] Popotla had become attractive to smugglers of illegal immigrants at night once the restaurant trade had closed for the day. [9]
In 2018 a resurgence in filmmaking for Internet streaming by Amazon, HBO, and Netflix lifted prospects for the studio. [10]
The studio is built alongside the ocean coastline, enabling an unobstructed view of the sea. It comprises 35 acres (14 ha) of land overlooking the Pacific Ocean, [11] with 2,000 feet (610 m) of coastline frontage. The facility has 5 stages, 4 indoor and outdoor water tanks, street sets, and is a self-contained facility, with offices, scenery shops, wardrobe and dressing rooms. Two of the stages and three of the tanks are combined. There are four tanks with a combined volume of over 20 million gallons fed by a filtration seawater plant capable of delivering 9,000 gallons of water per minute.
Tank 1 is an infinite horizon pond which adjoins and overlooks the Pacific. Built to film Titanic, it is a 360,000 square feet (33,000 m2) concrete pool with a full capacity of 17 million gallons, [3] used for exterior shooting, wet or dry, and consists of three depth levels from 3+1⁄2 to 40 feet (1.1 to 12.2 m). The tank can be emptied or filled in 40 hours. Alongside it is a 162 foot (49 metres) motor-driven tower crane, used for constructing film sets and as a lighting and camera platform. Fox employed mostly American technical personnel for the tank's construction, despite available Mexican resources. On completion of filming, the tank was drained of chlorinated water too quickly without management in one batch, ruining the fishing waters at Popotla. [5] [12]
There is a smaller outdoor tank and another two built into an indoor stage.
Fox created a Studio Tour named Foxploration, which opened in May 2001 consisting largely of Titanic exhibits, Fox-derived displays, and items from other films, notably Master and Commander. [13] This tour closed.
Titanic is a 1997 American disaster film directed, written, produced, and co-edited by James Cameron. Incorporating both historical and fictionalized aspects, it is based on accounts of the sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912. Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio star as members of different social classes who fall in love during the ship's maiden voyage. The film also features Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Gloria Stuart, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Hyde, Victor Garber, David Warner, Suzy Amis and Bill Paxton.
Pinewood Studios is a British film and television studio located in the village of Iver Heath, England. It is approximately 18 miles (29 km) west of central London.
The Walt Disney Studios, located in Burbank, California, United States, serves as the corporate headquarters for The Walt Disney Company media conglomerate. The 51-acre studio lot also contains several sound stages, a backlot, and other filmmaking production facilities for Walt Disney Studios's motion picture production. The complex also houses the offices for the company's many divisions, with the exception of Pixar Animation Studios, Lucasfilm, and 20th Century Studios, which remains on its namesake lot in nearby Century City.
Gloria Frances Stuart was an American actress, visual artist, and activist. She was known for her roles in Pre-Code films, and garnered renewed fame late in life for her portrayal of Rose Dawson Calvert in James Cameron's epic romance Titanic (1997), the highest-grossing film of all time at the time. Her performance in the film won her a Screen Actors Guild Award and earned her nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture.
Rosarito is a coastal city in Playas de Rosarito Municipality, Baja California, on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. As of 2010, the city had a population of 65,278. Located 10 miles (16 km) south of the US-Mexico border, Rosarito is a part of the greater San Diego–Tijuana region and one of the westernmost cities in Mexico. Rosarito is a major tourist destination, known for its beaches, resorts, and events like Baja Beach Fest.
The Tijuana River is an intermittent river, 120 mi (195 km) long, near the Pacific coast of northern Baja California state in northwestern Mexico and Southern California in the western United States. The river is heavily polluted with raw sewage from the city of Tijuana, Mexico.
James Howard Dunn, billed as Jimmy Dunn in his early career, was an American stage, film, and television actor, and vaudeville performer. The son of a New York stockbroker, he initially worked in his father's firm but was more interested in theater. He landed jobs as an extra in short films produced by Paramount Pictures in its Long Island studio, and also performed with several stock theater companies, culminating with playing the male lead in the 1929 Broadway musical Sweet Adeline. This performance attracted the attention of film studio executives, and in 1931, Fox Film signed him to a Hollywood contract.
Sidney Fox was an American stage and film actress in the late 1920s and 1930s. Fox's Hollywood film debut was in Universal Pictures' 1931 production Bad Sister, which is notable for also being the first film of actress Bette Davis.
Deep Blue Sea is a 1999 American science fiction horror film directed by Renny Harlin and starring Saffron Burrows, Thomas Jane, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Rapaport, and LL Cool J. Set in an isolated underwater facility, the film follows a team of scientists and their research on mako sharks to help fight Alzheimer's disease. The situation plunges into chaos when multiple genetically engineered sharks go on a rampage and flood the facility.
Universal Studios Hollywood is a film studio and theme park in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles County, California. About 70% of the studio lies within the unincorporated county island known as Universal City while the rest lies within the city limits of Los Angeles, California. It is one of the oldest and most famous Hollywood film studios still in use. Its official marketing headline is "The Entertainment Capital of LA". It was initially created to offer tours of the real Universal Studios sets and is the first of many full-fledged Universal Studios Theme Parks located across the world.
Radford Studio Center, alternatively CBS Studio Center, is a television and film studio located in the Studio City district of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. The lot has 18 sound stages from 7,000 to 25,000 square feet, 220,000 square feet (20,000 m2) of office space, and 223 dressing rooms. The triangular site is bisected by the Los Angeles River. In 2021, ViacomCBS sold Studio Center to real estate investment companies Hackman Capital Partners and Square Mile Capital Management.
Birch Aquarium at Scripps is an aquarium and the public outreach center for Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, Birch Aquarium at Scripps has an annual attendance of more than 439,000, including more than 40,000 school children, and features more than 3,000 animals representing 380 species. The hilltop site provides views of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography campus and the Pacific Ocean. The mission of the aquarium reads: "At Birch Aquarium at Scripps, we connect understanding to protecting our ocean planet".
The Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant is an uncompleted energy project 10 miles (16 km) outside Gaffney, South Carolina, United States. In the early 1970s, Duke Power started construction on a three-reactor nuclear power plant at the site. However, the project stalled due to economic problems by the early 1980s, leading to the project's eventual abandonment. In 1987, the power plant was the site of an underwater film studio built by Hollywood director James Cameron, for the film The Abyss.
Buena Vista is a brand name that has historically been used for divisions and subsidiaries of The Walt Disney Company, whose primary studios, the Walt Disney Studios, are located on Buena Vista Street in Burbank, California. The studio lot is also home to the company's corporate headquarters, the Team Disney Burbank building. The logos for the various Buena Vista brands featured the "Buena Vista" wordmark superimposed over the traditional Disney castle logo to signal the affiliation between Buena Vista and Disney.
EUE/Screen Gems Ltd. is an American film and television studio production company that owns and operates facilities in Wilmington, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; and Miami, Florida. The company collaborates with other studios and producers for the development, production, marketing, and distribution of entertainment for feature film, television, and digital content.
Village Roadshow Studios are a set of film studios located in Oxenford, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. The studios are owned by Village Roadshow and consist of nine sound stages as well as a range of other production facilities. The studio commenced in June 1991 and is one of three film studios in Australia, the others being Disney Studios Australia in Sydney and Docklands Studios Melbourne.
Raise the Titanic is a 1980 adventure film produced by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment and directed by Jerry Jameson. The film, written by Eric Hughes (adaptation) and Adam Kennedy (screenplay), is based on the 1976 book of the same name by Clive Cussler. The storyline concerns a plan to recover RMS Titanic to obtain cargo valuable to Cold War hegemony.
A horizon tank is a large water tank built on the coast and used in filmmaking. It allows filmmakers to film an ocean horizon without having to be in the middle of the ocean.
Buddy Pepper was an American pianist, songwriter, arranger and actor, known as one of three writers of Billboard's top tune of 1953, "Vaya Con Dios," which has been recorded over 500 times. He also wrote several songs for Universal Pictures' films, including Mister Big (1943). In 1959, he wrote the title song for the Oscar-winning film Pillow Talk, which actress Doris Day sang during the opening credits.
Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank, formerly known as First National Studio (1926–1929), Warner Bros.-Seven Arts Studios (1967–1970) and The Burbank Studios (1972–1990), is a major filmmaking facility owned and run by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. in Burbank, California. First National Pictures built the 62-acre (25 ha) studio lot in 1926 as it expanded from a film distributor to film production.