Street Scenes of the Future

"We chose to use The Burbank Studios backlot, the street there, for several reasons. One, it was available to us for a long length of time, and two, it had never been used in the way we were going to use it. It's a street that's been seen in a lot of forties movies, and it's been seen in movies that Warner Brothers had made recently. '1941' is a prime example. But our job was to take the street and design it into the future. The whole design idea was to give us a very dense-looking, cloistered look."

-Lawrence G. Paull

A crowded and debris-strewn street in the downtown section of Los Angeles, 2019. Amidst throngs of people, flickering neon sign and traffic jams, Deckard seeks out the missing replicants.

Syd Mead's vehicles of the future are parked on the rainy downtown streets. His design for the parking meter is based on present-day meters and "retro-fitted" with a more accurate and secure system.

Mead's Production drawing of a parking meter not to be tampered with.

This sketch of a "prime mover" vehicle is Syd Mead's concept for futuristic sanitation.

"Things are 'retro-fitted' after the fact of the original manufacture because the old, consumer-based technology wasn't keeping up with the demand. Things have to work on a day-to-day basis and you do whatever necessary to make it work. So you let go of the style and it becomes pure function. The whole visual philisophy of the film is based on this social idea.

"The city was getting very dense. Buildings 3,000-3,500 feet high would have old, ten and twenty story buildings underneath, functioning as service accesses to huge megastructures. Cables and generator tubes, delivering air and waste, would go up outside of the old buildings because they were still there. The street level becomes a service alley to the megastructures towering above."

-Syd Mead

"Almost as production began, we started building additional miniatures and more buildings, working on a smaller scale so Ridley could have more scope. He'd have the cityscapes in the background that actually aren't buildings at all- but we dressed them up with lights so they looked like they were."

-David Dryer