Talaat Captan is best known for Air Hollywood’s airplane sets, but one of his longest-running ventures lives on film rather than on a sound stage. Apex Stock, the stock footage company he leads as a subsidiary of Air Hollywood, grew out of a closet of airline film reels and became a licensing library of aviation, travel and nature footage distributed through Getty Images. This is the story of how that library came together, drawn from Air Hollywood’s own announcements and published coverage.
A library that came with a studio deal
In July 2003 Air Hollywood acquired the assets of its main Los Angeles competitor, Airline Film and Television Promotions. Along with stages and standing sets, the deal brought a film archive that few people outside the company knew about. By the studio’s December 2003 announcement, that archive amounted to nearly 30 hours of 35mm footage, about 162,000 feet of film, covering airplane takeoffs and landings, in-flight scenes, international locations and famous landmarks.
Much of it came from the film unit of Trans World Airlines. A 2008 Aviation Week profile of Air Hollywood described staff finding a closet holding some 25 hours of TWA motion picture film, the material that started the stock footage business. Captan saw the value immediately. In the 2003 announcement he called the library an “unmined treasure,” arguing that recreating many of those historic airline and landmark shots today would cost a production far more than licensing them.
That December, Air Hollywood announced it would begin licensing the footage to the film and television industry, using its existing relationships with studios and production companies to bring it to market. You can read more about how the studio itself took shape in our timeline of Talaat Captan and Air Hollywood milestones.
Adding large-format nature and travel footage
The archive did not stay purely aviation for long. In January 2005 Air Hollywood announced the purchase of more than 70 hours of 65mm footage from visual effects pioneer Doug Trumbull, whose credits include 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Branded the Elements Collection, it contained aerial and visual effects footage of international destinations and natural wonders, and the announcement said it had never before been offered as stock footage.
Captan said at the time that the two acquisitions positioned the studio as a serious provider of 35mm, 65mm and high-definition footage. The company committed to the expensive work of transferring the film to high definition and digitizing it so that clients could use it easily.
Distribution through Getty Images
In November 2005 Getty Images announced it was distributing Air Hollywood’s contemporary and archival film collections, transferred to HD and available on gettyimages.com. The release described two main collections:
- A vintage collection of historic TWA footage shot on 35mm, showing the early decades of commercial flight from the 1950s through the 1980s, including aircraft from every angle, flight attendants and early in-flight entertainment.
- A contemporary collection shot on large-format film, with aerials over New Zealand’s mountains, historic European landmarks and close-up wildlife footage from Latin America and Africa.
Captan’s pitch to customers was practical: rather than paying a crew to travel the world for one perfect shot, producers could license it for a fraction of the cost.
ApexStock.com and a licensing agency
In October 2006 the business launched ApexStock.com under the Apex Stock name. According to the launch announcement, the archival collection had already been placed at Getty Images as one of its few rights-managed collections in January 2006. The new website was meant to let clients browse and license clips directly, marking Apex Stock’s shift from producing content to operating as a full licensing agency. Captan, named in the release as Apex Stock’s CEO and President, explained that the company had long wanted to license its footage directly but had lacked the technology to make that easy for clients.
In May 2008 Apex Stock announced that it had retained Filmatics, a Los Angeles production company, to help produce new content for the library and to offer production on assignment. By then, the release noted, Apex Stock’s collection was distributed directly and through Getty Images, Corbis Motion and National Geographic.
How the footage fits the bigger picture
Apex Stock follows the same idea that runs through Captan’s other work: keep aviation history usable instead of letting it disappear. Air Hollywood’s sets recreate the cabins of retired airliners, Air Hollywood Props preserves real seats, carts and signage, and Apex Stock keeps decades-old airline film available for new productions. The vintage TWA footage also captures the same golden age of air travel that the Pan Am Experience later brought back to life on a sound stage.
A 2012 Los Angeles Daily News profile noted that Captan was focusing on growing the businesses around Air Hollywood, including Apex Stock, with aerial and other footage from around the world dating back to the 1940s. Today the collection can be viewed through Getty Images via Apex Stock’s website, and the original announcements are archived on Air Hollywood’s news page.
