From Film to Destination Spot

New York City’s best pitchman these days might be King Kong.

In posters and billboards around Britain -- and soon in Japan -- the super-sized gorilla is shown looming above the Empire State Building with a slogan that beckons potential tourists: “You’ve seen the film, now visit the set.”

More than ever, tourism promoters are realizing the power of cinema to attract visitors -- as are dozens of tour operators, authors and hoteliers who are capitalizing on the public’s fascination with celebrity.

“The Lord of the Rings” trilogy transformed New Zealand into a vacation hot spot. “The Da Vinci Code” has fueled attendance records at the Louvre Museum in Paris and sent tourists flocking to a Scottish church in search of the Holy Grail. “Sideways” put Santa Barbara County’s vineyards and wineries on the map. And 17 years after its release, the baseball flick “Field of Dreams” continues to draw 65,000 sightseers a year to a cornfield in Iowa, fulfilling the movie’s famous promise, “If you build it, they will come.”

“Movies are cinematic travel brochures that help sell potential tourists on how great these destinations can be,” said Harry Medved, co-author of “Hollywood Escapes,” a Southern California movie travel guide to be released this month. “And more and more movie buffs want to see that grandeur firsthand. They’ll see it on the big screen and then say, ‘Take me there.’ ”

One testament to how influential movies have become: The stunning scenery in “Brokeback Mountain” was filmed entirely in Canada, but people don’t seem to care. They’re traveling to Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains in search of the idyllic cowboy country.

Film tourism has been around for decades, said Tony Reeves, author of “The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations.” For example, one of the longest-running movie tours is in Austria, the setting for the 1965 film “The Sound of Music.”

But DVDs -- and all their accompanying special features and commentaries -- have ushered in a new era of film tourism, allowing people to watch movies again and again and memorize every scene, Reeves said.

“I think people feel a lot closer to films now,” Reeves said. “People collect films the way they used to collect record albums. There’s a sense of ownership.... It’s exciting to go to a place that you’re so familiar with on screen.”

In years past, movie-featured locales such as Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming, made famous by “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and Dyersville, Iowa, where “Field of Dreams” was filmed, did little to promote themselves to tourists.

Today, however, destination marketing is far more orchestrated, thanks to travel research and studies that have shown a surge in tourism after a film’s release. The number of visitors rises an average of 54% over four years when a location is featured in a successful film, according to the Annals of Tourism Research.

Armed with that data, some locations are starting their planning before a film even hits the big screen by securing a place for themselves in the credits and negotiating with studios to premiere movies in their cities.

In Santa Barbara County, the visitors’ bureau worked alongside Fox Searchlight, using art from the movie poster for its “Sideways in Santa Barbara” campaign.

The bureau produced a self-guided tour map of area wineries that is so successful it has been reprinted three times since 2004. The bureau also recently released the free 34-page guide “Lonely Planet Santa Barbara County Film Tour,” which highlights dozens of movie sites and encourages tourists to “sleep where the stars slept.”

Before “Sideways,” the majority of visitors to the area were most interested in the city of Santa Barbara and its beaches, historical sites and galleries. Now, people are inquiring about wine-tasting tours and visiting the restaurants and wineries featured in the film, said Kathy Janega-Dykes, president of the Santa Barbara Conference and Visitors Bureau.

Some of the area’s wineries have seen as much as a 300% increase in traffic. And the Hitching Post II restaurant in Buellton reported a 42% increase in business -- with sales of Highliner Pinot Noir jumping 400% -- from the movie’s release in fall 2004 through June 2005.

In an interesting twist, one of the most untapped movie tourism destinations is Los Angeles, where more films are shot than anywhere in the world.

“There’s almost an embarrassment of riches in Los Angeles,” Reeves said. “But it’s not so exploited because I think people probably take it a little bit for granted. They don’t realize they have so many treasures on their doorstep.”

Part of the problem, Medved said, is that movie watchers don’t realize that scenes are actually shot in the Los Angeles area because they depict another place. Segments of “Memoirs of a Geisha” were filmed at Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge, the Huntington Library in San Marino and Yamashiro restaurant in Hollywood.

“L.A. is kind of like Anytown, USA. It’s not a film destination for filmgoers yet,” said Medved, who will try to change that with his book, which suggests movie tour itineraries, including places to eat and stay.

Meanwhile, other official agencies are getting into the marketing act. The U.S. Department of Commerce will spend $10.5 million on “You’ve seen the film, now visit the set” commercials and billboards in Britain and an additional $4.5 million when it rolls out a similar campaign in Japan this summer. Among the featured films are “Thelma and Louise” for its depiction of the Grand Canyon, “Maid in Manhattan” and “Sweet Home Alabama.”

Tourism officials in Britain and France have joined forces to launch visitdavincicode.com, a listing of locations and links to tours. Colorado Springs, Colo.-based travel agency Beyond Boundaries has organized themed tours for three years, banking on the appeal of the “Harry Potter” series, “The Da Vinci Code” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.”

Owner Jeannie Barresi said the tours were selling out and people were already inquiring about 2007 dates. The tours go beyond film locations, using professional storytellers from Wales, for example, to entertain tourists with the legend and lore of Britain and how it influenced “Harry Potter.”

Tim Hardy of Irvine and his wife spent their recent two-week honeymoon in New Zealand. The itinerary included wine tasting in the region known for its Sauvignon Blanc and a hike to a glacier. But the couple also rode horses billed as having been used in “Lord of the Rings” and took a tour by vehicle in which the guide pointed out where various scenes were filmed.

Hardy, who owns the trilogy on DVD, said behind-the-scenes features introduced him to various filming locations and “gave me a feel for what to expect or what I might encounter there.”

“I think [director] Peter Jackson says somewhere that New Zealand is Middle-earth,” Hardy said. “It’s capturing that environment and experiencing a different world that we wouldn’t normally get to experience.”