[Dec. 04, 2008]

There are many reasons why cities like New York, Paris, Rome or Barcelona are among tourists' favourite destinations. Certainly for their buildings, their streets, squares and monuments. Besides, people identify such cities with a particular allure, lifestyle and fashion.

In modern popular culture, movies and TV series have a strong influence on people's imagination, for they construct or reinforce particular images of those destinations.

In the past, indeed, paintings and literature played that part, if we take into account Goethe's writings on Italy, or the pictures taken from the Grand Tour. Later on, poster and illustrations of cities were used by the railways companies to show to their travellers their potential attractions. But cinema and television have an even more stunning influential power.

Graziana Chieppa examines the topic in her thesis Life Can Imitate Art: an Approach to Movie Induced Tourism. First she outlines an important aspect of cinema's clout over the spectator: he is "unaware of the commercial influence attempt enclosed in the film and so he is more available in accepting it."

There are, at least, three main aspects that urge people to visit some beautiful scenery present in a movie: Place: location, scenery, destination attributes; Performance: storylines or plot, themes, genres; and Personality: cast, celebrity, characters.

A storyline with exciting sequences, or touching human relationships, prompts the spectator to connect emotions aroused by the movie with its settings. In this sense the storyline becomes a kind of Icon, "movie's symbolic content, a single event, a favourite performer, a location's physical feature or a theme can represent all that is popular and compelling about a movie". As well as emotion transmitted by the images can be the motivation for a specific tourist journey.

"When a spectator is looking at a movie, he knows it is a fictional reality but he decides to adopt the fictional as reality, he allows the Believable to win on the Unbelievable. For this reason a spectator responds to the visual-auditory stimulus produced by the film with all his body." And the spectator, especially the young ones, may emulate the performance of the actors.

According to David Rochester, manager at the London Based Halifax Travel Insurance, in 2005, "more than one in four Britons say they have chosen holiday destinations as a result of reading about them in a novel or seeing them in a movie or TV series". These tourists are called Set Jetters, people who decide to visit a country or a city after falling in love with it thanks to a movie or a TV series.

That's what happened in the mid of twentieth century. Rome, was a romantic city, thanks to 1953 Roman Holidays, starring Hollywood stars, Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. Paris was the showcase for fashion and sophisticated lifestyle, just to mention, the 1951 musical film An American in Paris, inspired by the 1928 orchestral composition by George Gershwin. And the allure of New York, where dreams become reality, with a long list of movies, among which the more emblematic example in the ‘60s was Breakfast at Tiffany's, by Blake Edwards, starring Audrey Hepburn.

Actually, New York is the city mostly represented by Hollywood movies, according to Wikipedia 853 films are set there, many of them in Manhattan, with its skyscrapers, its office buildings, mansions, tenements, apartments, penthouse and lofts.

For example, the 5th avenue Tiffany's store features in two other movies, "Midnight Cowboy" and "Sweet Home Alabama", the The Rockefeller Plaza has featured in many films and on television programs and nearby in the same complex is the Radio City Music Hall, an art deco palace which appeared in Woody Allen's "Annie" and "The Godfather".

At present, New York's fictional image is probably represented by the comedy series Sex and the City broadcasted on the US pay TV, HBO, from 1998 until 2004, partly based on writer Candace Bushnell's book who, starting from the columns of the New York Observer created her alter ego Carrie Bradshaw, the main character of the series.

In 2008, on the occasion of Sex and the City film realise On Location Tours, Inc.Where fiction meets reality, New York's only TV and movie location tour company, founded in 1999, organized a three-and-a-half hour guided bus tour is around New York, following "Sex and the City girls' stomping ground, visiting the restaurants where they wine and dine, the shops at the center of Carrie Bradshaw's shoe fetish, the bars they frequent, and much more."

It was a big success. For this reason, Barcelona's cty hall set aside almost €1m to help fund Woody Allen's Vicky, Cristina and Barcelona, providing police escorts for Scarlet Johansson and other actors, and a further €500,000 came from the regional government of Catalonia. Besides, Allen's answer was quite simple, the movie "love letter to Barcelona, and from Barcelona to the world".