Talaat Captan’s Air Hollywood got a close look from the aviation press in December 2013, when NYCAviation published “Flying to the Movies with Air Hollywood,” a behind-the-scenes tour of the Los Angeles studio by writer Ben Granucci. The piece was written for readers who know airplanes well, and it was later republished by AirlineReporter in August 2014. Here is a summary of what it covered, with some background on the sets it describes.
A better way to film airplane scenes
The article opens in 1998. Captan, then working as a writer and movie producer, was shooting airport scenes for Ground Control, the air traffic control drama starring Kiefer Sutherland. Coordinating a film crew inside an active airport proved extremely difficult. As Granucci puts it, “Mr. Captan knew that there had to be a better way.”
The article describes Captan as a self-described aviation enthusiast, and says he founded Air Hollywood shortly after filming wrapped. The idea was simple: a studio where every kind of aviation scene could be made in a setting built around the needs of a film crew rather than the schedule of a working airport. The full story of that shoot and what came after it is told on this site in How Talaat Captan Turned a Ground Control Setback into Air Hollywood.
Three generic cabins instead of one airline
One of the most useful details in the piece is how Air Hollywood thinks about its aircraft. Rather than reproducing particular aircraft types, the studio worked with three generic interiors that could be reconfigured quickly. A single set can be made to look like many different airplanes, and because it is built for production it can be filmed from any angle.
That flexibility matters on a film schedule. The article notes that cabin components on the sets could be removed and replaced in minutes, a job that would take several hours on a real aircraft. For a production that needs a business class cabin in the morning and an economy cabin after lunch, that difference saves real time and money.
Walking onto the wide-body set
Granucci’s tour followed the path a passenger would take. Visitors passed a scenery piece built to look like a jet bridge, walked down a ramp, turned a corner and arrived at what looked like an aircraft entrance door. Through that door was the studio’s wide-body set.
The set was not a real airplane. Its shell was built from wood and finished with real aircraft cabin panels, and its width sat between that of a Boeing 767 and an Airbus A330. At the time of the visit it was configured with a small business class cabin and a slightly larger economy cabin. To the camera, and to the actors working inside it, it reads as an airliner cabin, but it can be opened up and rearranged in ways a real fuselage cannot.
Used parts, real details
The article also explains a practical choice behind the sets. The entire interior, seats included, was bought used. Captan told the writer that new aircraft components are cost prohibitive, and the article gives a sense of scale: a new first class seat can cost more than $30,000, while a used one costs a fraction of that.
Buying real, pre-owned aviation parts gives the sets their authentic look at a price productions can afford. It is the same thinking behind Air Hollywood’s prop collection, which grew into its own business. That side of the company is covered in Talaat Captan and Air Hollywood Props: Preserving Aviation History for the Screen.
A famous cockpit and a 727 in progress
Two photo captions in the piece will interest anyone who loves aviation or film history. The first notes that the flight deck at the front of the studio’s first narrow-body set is the one from Airplane!. Air Hollywood identifies this as its vintage analog cockpit, an actual Convair 880 flight deck used in the classic comedy.
The second shows the front section of a Boeing 727 that had once flown as a real aircraft, then being rebuilt as a working movie set with clicking switches and glowing lights. Working flight decks like this one let actors play pilots convincingly and let directors light and frame a cockpit scene without a real airplane. The wider craft of making a set on the ground look like a flight is explained in How Talaat Captan’s Air Hollywood Films Airplane Scenes Without a Real Plane.
Why this tour is worth reading
Many features about Air Hollywood focus on the famous films shot there. This one is different because it was written for an aviation audience. It looks at how the cabins are built, how wide they are, what they are made of and why the parts are bought used. That makes it a good companion to other press tours of the studio, such as the one summarized in AirlineGeeks Tours Talaat Captan’s Air Hollywood.
The approach the article describes has served Air Hollywood well. According to the studio, it has hosted around 500 films along with hundreds of TV shows, commercials and music videos, and its own list of credits includes Bridesmaids, The Wolf of Wall Street, Moneyball, Red Eye and Grey’s Anatomy. The studio is now preparing a move to a new home on Stage 2 in Valencia. Key dates are collected in Talaat Captan and Air Hollywood: A Timeline of Milestones, and Captan’s biography is on the Air Hollywood founder page.
The original article is available at NYCAviation (link below). More coverage of Talaat Captan’s work is collected on the Press page.
