The rules set by Disney in its amusement parks are clear: no filming is allowed. Not enough to curb the creative ardor of a filmmaker, who secretly shot a horror film there. A crazy story…
The History of the 7th Art is studded with stories of Homeric shootings, harsh and difficult, with, sometimes, downright radical and die-hard methods for directors to complete their works. Including clandestine methods…
This is a bit of the story surrounding the creation of a film signed by a young filmmaker named Randy Moore. The title of the movie? Escape From Tomorrow.
In 2010, without any prior authorization, the latter went to shoot his film in the heart of the DisneyWorld and Disneyland amusement parks. Intended as a horror film and with a budget of $650,000, Escape From Tomorrow tells the story of a man taking his entire family on vacation to an amusement park.
Of course, things are going to go badly wrong, with the park actually turning out to be some sort of large-scale psychological experiment conducted by an organization whose members might (or might not) come from elsewhere. With yet another possibility: that all this misadventure is happening only in the head of the person concerned…
The impression nevertheless to evoke a little one of these many SF pitches of BD Pulp, with extra-terrestrials carrying out experiments on human guinea pigs.
What does it look like? To discover below!
Clandestine filming
The Disney Rules are very clear : the firm does not authorize the filming of films in its theme parks. And a fortiori even more, one imagines, when it comes to a film showing an attraction like that of the train of the mine seeming to ogle towards that of Massacre in the ghost train of Tobe Hooper with the dwarfs of Snow White, princesses Disney working as escort girls, or a head of Mickey trying to run over children… In other words, a potpourri located light years away from the benevolent and good-natured spirit of Disney.
And even if it means pushing the provocation even further, you will also notice the typography used in the trailer, the same as Disney, up to the film poster, showing a gloved and bloody hand which is none other than that of Mickey…
Randy Moore therefore shot his film entirely clandestinely in Disney parks. The film crew pretended to be just an audience, with their cameras replaced by cameras, to walk through the entrance counters and secretly filmed the scenes.
Obviously impossible to shoot everything that was planned in one go. He and his team therefore made half a dozen trips to the parks in 2010 to do the location scouting and then shoot the film, as the interested party told a journalist for the Indiewire site in 2013. The experience stressed him so much that Moore lost more than 20 kg, the fear in his stomach that they would be caught; once spending three and a half hours on an attraction to get the scene he wanted. The team almost got caught by park security…
A montage made at the other end of the globe, in South Korea!
The troubles didn’t stop there, however, even with his canned images. Because it was obvious that Disney would never let such a work come out without engaging in a legal tussle that would certainly have crushed the filmmaker and the rest of his team. In fact, Moore was so worried that his rushes would be seized that he went straight to South Korea to do his film’s post-production and editing there.
Despite these extreme precautions and the very nature of the film, Disney adopted a completely surprising strategy, as reported by the HollywoodReporter : no comment or legal action, where Moore logically expected to receive a visit from a battalion of lawyers knocking on his door, even on the other side of the globe. Radio silence at Mickey therefore, so as not to advertise this work which came out of nowhere or almost, while the firm was concentrating on the upcoming release of the film In the shadow of Mary – the promise of Walt Disney.
Presented at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013, Escape From Tomorrow remains completely new to us. It was only released on DVD reserved for the American market, in 2014.