New York City's best pitchman these days might be King Kong.
In posters and billboards around Britain -- and soon in Japan -- the super-sized gorilla is shown looming above the Empire State Building with a slogan that beckons potential tourists: "You've seen the film, now visit the set."
More than ever, tourism promoters are realizing the power of cinema to attract visitors -- as are dozens of tour operators, authors and hoteliers who are capitalizing on the public's fascination with celebrity.
"The Lord of the Rings" trilogy transformed New Zealand into a vacation hot spot. "The Da Vinci Code" has fueled attendance records at the Louvre Museum in Paris and sent tourists flocking to a Scottish church in search of the Holy Grail. "Sideways" put Santa Barbara County's vineyards and wineries on the map. And 17 years after its release, the baseball flick "Field of Dreams" continues to draw 65,000 sightseers a year to a cornfield in Iowa, fulfilling the movie's famous promise, "If you build it, they will come."
"Movies are cinematic travel brochures that help sell potential tourists on how great these destinations can be," said Harry Medved, co-author of "Hollywood Escapes," a Southern California movie travel guide to be released this month. "And more and more movie buffs want to see that grandeur firsthand. They'll see it on the big screen and then say, 'Take me there.' "
One testament to how influential movies have become: The stunning scenery in "Brokeback Mountain" was filmed entirely in Canada, but people don't seem to care. They're traveling to Wyoming's Big Horn Mountains in search of the idyllic cowboy country.
Film tourism has been around for decades, said Tony Reeves, author of "The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations." For example, one of the longest-running movie tours is in Austria, the setting for the 1965 film "The Sound of Music."
But DVDs -- and all their accompanying special features and commentaries -- have ushered in a new era of film tourism, allowing people to watch movies again and again and memorize every scene, Reeves said.
"I think people feel a lot closer to films now," Reeves said. "People collect films the way they used to collect record albums. There's a sense of ownership.... It's exciting to go to a place that you're so familiar with on screen."
In years past, movie-featured locales such as Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming, made famous by "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and Dyersville, Iowa, where "Field of Dreams" was filmed, did little to promote themselves to tourists.
