About Movie-Locations.com

Movie-Locations.com started out as an idea back in 1992.

Visiting San Francisco on my first-ever trip to the USA, one of the most exciting things for me as a lifelong film fan was to recognise the city I'd seen on screen in Vertigo, Bullitt and Dirty Harry.

I had loads of travel guides with me, in the days when they came in the quaint old format known as books. There were historical guides, foodie guides, literary guides and all sorts but nothing about those sites associated with the most popular art and entertainment medium of the time – movies.

This seemed a ridiculous gap in the market which I thought I might be able to fill.

In those pre-internet days, research involved vast amounts of time tracking down and ploughing through old magazines, Hollywood biographies, memoirs, press packs and the invaluable library of the BFI (British Film Institute) which used to stand on Stephen Street in London's West End.

There was also the endless driving, cycling and plain old plodding the streets. The reaction to most publishers to my groundbreaking idea was "But it's never been done before?", which I thought was rather the point.

By the time the wonderful Titan Books bravely picked up the project in 1999, it had grown unrecognisably from a vague '100 great film locations' to a huge database containing thousands of titles.

So large in fact that it had to be savagely cut down to become a reasonably sized book – a heartbreaking task.

The website was launched at the end of 1999, initially as a teaser for the book which was finally released in 2001. It's since taken on a life of its own, constantly updatable and more easily navigable by either film title or by location.

In the intervening years, 'movie tourism' has really taken off as a concept and we've now found ourselves clocking up more than 29 million visitors.

With constant new releases and new information turning up on old classics, there's still plenty to do.

Tony Reeves