What The King's Speech and UK Naked Men porn have in common

Did the speech therapist's office in The King's Speech look oddly familiar to you? Perhaps you remember the location from UK Naked Men, a gay porn site. "Photos Leaked Of Gay Porn Past Of 'King’s Speech' Set" (Thanks, Brent Lambert!)

• [SamSam]

  Site’s borked, but if it’s true that the UK Naked Men photos came first, that’s hilarious. Don’t they make new sets for big movies? Do they really just wander around warehouses looking for random sets from other productions?

  Speaking of Geoffrey Rush, I just saw him in the amazing one-man play Diary of a Madman, based on the Gogel short story, in NYC. He’s a completely and utterly different man — maniacal, poignent, and an incredible physicality: a very Buster Keaton-like way of moving as if none of his limbs are connected. Great stuff.

• [semiotix]

  YES! Um, I mean, no. No it did not look familiar.

  I look forward to the inevitable porn remake, tentatively titled The King’s Peach.

  GEORGE VI: So you see, I have this terrible problem with my mouth. It just won’t work as it should. But I doubt a filthy commoner like you could help me get my mouth working right.

  LIONEL: Oh, but Your Majesty, I can. I can make your pretty little mouth do things you never dreamed it could. Do you know the story of Demosthenes, my lord? He, too, had a terrible speech impediment. But he cured himself of it by filling his mouth with stones, and learning to talk that way.

  GEORGE VI: We are inside Buckingham Palace. There are no stones here.

  LIONEL: Then we shall have to improvise. [bowm-chicka-chicka]

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  Wow, what a great set. It must have taken a lot of work to make a sound stage look just like a real building.

• [Anonymous]

  haha, the King’s Reacharound.

• [Quiche de Resistance]

  This is ironic because Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush are like, totally not gay at all, right?

  Right everybody?

• [Anonymous]

  Who the HELL noticed this?

• [Anonymous]

  It’s not a set it’s a location, it is on Portland Place in London, near Oxford Street. It’s actually a very very common set for productions and has been use in dozens and dozens of music videos and commercials. The Upstairs of the houyse is used for Berties palace too.

• [Anonymous]

  http://www.33portlandplace.co.uk/music_video.php

• [Anonymous]

  SamSam, it’s a real building and not a set.

• [juepucta]

  One of the most surprising/cool instances of something like this happening (kinda like the Oval Office set mentioned above) is the Law & Order (mothership) police station set.

  You know, with the green walls, grubby, dingy, feels like a proper leftover from the 70s police station should. Turns out it’s was the Kojak police HQ set!

  -G.

• [Fang Xianfu]

  It’s not a “big movie”, it’s just good. For a British film with a British budget (£8m, peanuts by modern standards), you have to save costs where you can. Using a porn set seems like a good plan, really – plus it’ll get you featured on some blogs and get even more bums on seats ;D

• [Boba Fett Diop]

  Is that a listed property? If so, it’s a way classier location than “Motel 6 near Reseda.”

• [Anonymous]

  “For a British film with a British budget”

  …

  Nice how the porn looks better lit/better production value, at least in these photos, to boot.

• [Wallenstein]

  The location is 33 Portland Place, London.

  “The actual rooms Logue practised in were too small to film so the team found a building a block away [...] which has an unusual vaulted room with large leaded windows at one end, reminiscent of a Venetian palace, and roof lights that make it look a bit like an artist’s studio and allow some light in on the pervasive gloom.”

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jan/02/the-kings-speech-period-sets

• [GlenBlank]

  It’s not a built set; it’s a rented location – an existing building that the owners rent out to film makers, music-video producers, photo shoots, and event coordinators.

  There have been quite a few different films and videos and photo spreads shot at this facility, as well as a number of parties and events held there.

  This is common practice throughout the entertainment industry.

  If The King’s Speech had re-used a standing set built by a porn company, that might be worthy of notice; but they didn’t – they just rented an available location building.

  And while the facility owners probably publicize the big-name prestige films and events they’ve hosted, they most likely won’t mention every single low-budget production – porn or otherwise – in their rental brochure.

  This happens all the time. If you were to watch enough movies and view enough porn – AND always pay careful, close attention to the background details – you’d notice this happening all the time.

  But really, aside from the usual crowd of sniggering perpetual adolescents, who would care?

  • [Donald Petersen]

    This is common practice throughout the entertainment industry.

    True indeed. And for what it’s worth, it’s even true of some built sets. Somebody built a set of the Oval Office for the 1993 movie Dave, and it was such a good representation of the real Oval Office that it was re-used for The American President two years later, and then again through the whole run of The West Wing. It has no doubt been used a few times since. I expect a high-end porn flick production could rent it, if they had the budget.

    Some sets get used a lot just because they’re kind of specialized, yet commonly used in TV and movies, like airliner mockups or cutaway subway cars.

    But there are some actual locations that just keep getting used over and over again. Out near Lancaster and Palmdale in the desert north of Los Angeles, there’s a gas station that shows up in about a million TV shows, movies, and print photo shoots. And it isn’t even a real gas station; it’s just a permanent set by the side of a desert road. About six miles away is Club Ed, which is a similarly fake desert motel set that gets used all the time.

    And then there are the real ones, like the suspiciously Blade Runnerish Bradbury Building in downtown L.A., or the Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena (don’t get buried there if you don’t wanna get trod upon; since the boneyard there is full of picturesque upright headstones, they get an awful lot of filming done there).

  • [RyanH]

    An excellent example of this is the Bradbury Building that has shown up in dozens of films and television episodes. Most famously Blade Runner. Considering the science fiction connections to the building the name is somewhat interesting, although not actually connected to Ray Bradbury.

    • [GlenBlank]

      Actually, the Bradbury Building’s real science fiction connection is that it was commissioned by Lewis L. Bradbury, a silver-mining millionaire (for whom the private gated city of Bradbury, out near Monrovia, is also named), who was inspired by Edward Bellamy’s futurist utopian fantasy, Looking Backward, set in the year 2000, in which the interior of a commercial building is described as:
      

      …a vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a hundred feet above.

      Bradbury first hired noted local architect Sumner Hunt, but was dissatisfied with his design, feeling it didn’t capture the grandeur of his futuristic vision. So he gave the commission to one of Hunt’s draftsmen, George Wyman, who designed the building we see today.

      (And, in a bit of unexpected stfnal coincidence, George Wyman was Forrest J. Ackerman’s grandfather.)

      Lagniappe: Blade Runner’s LA locations – the video.

• [Blue]

  I only watch porn for the interior decor.

• [Anonymous]

  Site seems like it’s taking a hammering (how appropriate)

• [Anonymous]

  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1349362/The-Kings-Speech-mansion-used-sex-parties-porn-discos-elocution-lessons.html

  I know it’s the Daily Fail, but the story appeared in other media at around the same time

  All very saucy!!

  Josh

• [Chanfan]

  Clearly, these two images *need* to be shopped together.