Visiting Real Fictional Towns - I still can't believe these film sets are real places!

This is the tale of two towns.

One is a real town, the other is a fake town. On screen, they both play towns that are somewhere between real and fake. If that doesn't make sense, try to stay with me.

In addition to being featured in two of my favorite movies, the towns are located a three-hour drive apart in the southern United States, both only minutes off our planned road trip route.

Seaside, aka Seahaven from The Truman Show

The Truman Show tells the story of a man whose entire life has secretly been broadcast as a reality TV show. Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) lives in “Seahaven”, a fake island town built in a giant dome. All of Seahaven’s residents are actors, and every product they use is an advertisement.

Building an entire town from scratch would be stretching the budget for the movie. Instead, the location scouts found a real place that only looked like it‘s fake.

Enter Seaside, Florida.

Photo credit: The Truman Show. Yes this place is real!

In 1981, Robert and Daryl Davis turned an 80-acre plot of gulf-front scrubland into an idyllic beachside community. The building code says that every home must have a sloped roof, a porch, and a white picket fence. Their architectures draw from many styles, including Victorian and Antebellum, but the overall flavor is “quaint”.

On our visit, we rent beach cruisers at our campground and ride for 10 miles along highway 30A. We’re soon humming down the quiet, red-brick roads of Seaside. It's a pastel, Rockwellesque dream world.

Each home in Seaside features a placard with the house’s name and the names of their current residents, most of them Southern vacationers escaping reality for a week. On Natchez Street, you’ll find a small yellow residence labeled “The Truman House”. It doesn't have the lawn that Truman mowed (only native plants are allowed in the yards), but the rest of it looks like it did on screen twenty years ago.

The Truman House

Just across the street, an artsy pavilion leads to the beach. This stretch of the gulf between Destin and Panama City is known as the Emerald Coast, famous for its blue-green water and fine white “sugar” sand. The beaches are unreal, and Seaside’s is no exception. (We took these pictures that evening in nearby Topsail Hill Preserve State Park.)

To rest our legs before biking back, we grab a table in Seaside’s town square, share an overpriced grilled cheese from an Airstream food trailer, and listen to live music. As Nash browses Facebook on his phone, he sees a post from his cousin Ann, announcing the grand opening celebration for the clothing store she works at. Nash blinks at the name: Seaside Style. Ann lives somewhere in Florida… could it be?

Sure enough, we're sitting directly outside the new clothing store where his cousin works! She even spots us riding our bikes and can't believe her eyes, and we meet up with her for brunch the next day. It feels like a coincidence you'd only expect to happen in fiction. Maybe that’s just the kind of place Seaside is.

Jackson Lake Island, aka Spectre from Big Fish

In Big Fish, Edward Bloom (played in part by Ewan McGregor with a terrible southern accent) loves to spin tall tales, to the annoyance of his pragmatic son.

One of these fables is about the unnervingly perfect town of Spectre, where they steal your shoes to convince you to stay forever and ever, eating pie in rocking chairs and dancing barefoot on the green lawn.

Photo credit: Big Fish

In the movie, Edward's son discovers that Spectre is a real town, though it's not quite the same as his father painted it. The town had fallen on hard times, and Edward had saved it from the bank's clutches.

The set of Spectre still stands, long abandoned, on a little piece of land just south of Montgomery, Alabama known as Jackson Lake Island.

We pay $3 per person to drive out onto the island. The site is like a caricature of the South, where cypress trees drip with Spanish moss and fishermen ply the bayou to bring home their own big fish tales.

Within ten minutes of walking around, I discover the island hosts another common southern resident: fire ants. My sandaled foot bursts into flames, and a nearby goat rolls around bleating. (Oh yeah, did I mention there's a herd of goats on the island?!) Spectre’s fictional barefoot residents must have tread carefully here.

Little remains of the the twinkly-lit paradise seen in the beginning of Big Fish. First, the film crew artificially aged the town for later shots in the movie, and then 15 years chipped away at what was never intended to be a permanent installation.

Several of the main street buildings burned down or collapsed. Four pillars are all that's left of Jenny’s house, and only two trees still stand in the enchanted forest.

Outside the shots used on film, the buildings are empty shells. The back of the elaborate church is bare plywood, and the trees are made of styrofoam.

Still, the legend of Spectre lives on. Visitors have added their own shoes to the line strung across Main Street, as if to say they would like to stay and dance barefoot for a while.

Why Visit?

As a story-obsessed child, I loved how The Truman Show and Big Fish showed that fiction can be a vehicle for truth. Truman's life was a contrived spectacle, but his emotions were genuine. Edward exaggerated his memories, but they showed the depth of his relationships with friends and family.

Exploring Seaside and Spectre in person made me see these movies through a different lens. I began to understand how the filmmakers shaped reality into fiction. These towns are indeed real places, with expensive rental prices and bothersome insects. However, they also ooze with that surreal, almost-too-perfect atmosphere that made their films so memorable.

If you ever find yourself in this part of the United States, I suggest taking a look yourself. You're certain to walk away with your own stories.

!steemitworldmap 32.448528 lat -86.330497 long The set of Spectre from the movie Big Fish still stands abandoned on this Alabama island. D3SCR <-- Want to know what this is? Check out steemitworldmap.com!

Thanks for reading! All words and images are mine unless otherwise noted. Let me know if you enjoyed other of these two movies as much as I did, or if there are other interesting film sets I should know about!
-Katie, @therovingreader