KING Silas’ throne room looks suspiciously like it’s in the Time Warner Center, and indeed, it used to be. When the NBC pilot episode of “Kings” aired in March, viewers saw a throne room that was filmed in the real glass-walled Allen Room concert space overlooking Columbus Circle.
It’s a regal setting, fit for a king. Too bad it also cost a king’s ransom to shoot there — $300,000 a day — an exorbitant sum even by network television standards.
So, once the show got picked up by NBC, its producers did what Hollywood does best. They constructed a totally fake Time Warner Center. Now a duplicate Allen Room, complete with glass wall overlooking Columbus Circle, sits on a soundstage in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The show is on hold now, but will resume airing in June.
“If it were up to me, we would be in the real place all the time, but that would be just financially irresponsible,” says “Kings” director Francis Lawrence, who has worked in film re-creations of New York before. When he directed Will Smith’s “I am Legend,” he worked in a Times Square that was built on a soundstage in The Bronx.
The fake Time Warner Center room costs upwards of $650,000, as set builders used a real wall of glass and other iconic — and expensive — attributes of the real space. There’s no confusing the TV set from the actual Time Warner Center when you’re actually standing in one of the two places. But through the lens of the television camera, the two are nearly identical.
Nearly. Some astute viewers will be able to see the differences between the throne room as it appears in the pilot episode — and how it looks during the rest of the season, when the replica is used. Some of the differences?
* The real Columbus Circle is replaced by a 100-by-26-foot photograph hanging behind the glass (pictured above).
* The entire scale of the place was reduced by about 25
percent.
* The “Kings” set has lights built into the walls to give them an eerie glow.
* Macaulay Culkin has never guest-starred in the real Columbus Circle performance space, but he does on “Kings.”
* The sizes of the wooden wall slats start big on the bottom and smaller on the way up, lending a feeling of flying upwards in the TV version.
* Since the “outside view” is actually a photograph, viewers will notice that some vehicles are parked outside the throne room day and night, episode after episode.