Time was when movies were an escape from the drudgery of everyday life. Back before international travel came within reach of the masses, folks oohed and aahed as the likes of Dorothy Lamour saronged slinkily in front of a plaster 'South Seas' volcano and didn't care that it was all being filmed on a Los Angeles soundstage. Now we don't escape in the movies, we escape into the movies. We want real volcanoes, the real South Seas. And, like Leonardo, we want to find the perfect beach.

Package holidays and resort hotels are over. It's theme holidays that get us buzzing. And what could be a better holiday brochure than the movies? To follow James Bond to the unreal luxury of Octopussy's 'floating palace' (it's a hotel in Udaipur, India), or Captain Kirk to the arid wastes of 'Viridian 3' (the blazing red Valley of Fire, not far from Las Vegas) in Star Trek: Generations.

The Daily Express recently published the results of a poll listing the most popular movies to have inspired holidays. The results are surprising. Top place went to Thelma and Louise. Second to Shirley Valentine, and then The Beach. Not the biggest box-office hits of all time, but linked by a common theme. Escape. The the wide-open spaces of the mid-West, the sun-baked Mediterranean and the mysterious East.

"Thelma and Louise was similar [to Close Encounters of the Third Kind] in the use of spectacular natural backdrops... Key scenes were filmed at Arches National Monument in Moab, Utah, a site that is at least five hours drive from major metropolitan areas... not the sort of trip that is conjured up while sitting around the breakfast table deciding what to do for the day... the increase in visitation of 19.1% was fairly significant"
Locations/CinExpo, 1992

The Tunisian Tourist Board sponsored the UK premiere of The English Patient. The movie was set in Egypt, but they knew we'd be queuing up to fly out to see the dazzling golden landscapes where it was filmed. Long-established film location tours for classic films, such as The Third Man in Vienna and The Sound of Music in Salzburg, were challenged by the likes of Sheffield, which made a bid to grab a slice of the tourist market with a coach tour following on the success of The Full Monty. Some locations are, in fact heavily promoted: in Brackettville, southern Texas, the gigantic set for John Wayne's epic The Alamo remains as Alamo Village, a movie lot-cum-theme park; boat trips from Phuket, Thailand, will take you out to see 'James Bond Island' - Scaramanga's lair from The Man With the Golden Gun; while the Chimney Rock Trail in Northern Carolina guides you around the haunts of Hawkeye and Chingachgook in Michael Mann's Last of the Mohicans. In the UK, Bradford's Recreation Division provides a walking tour around The Railway Children's Yorkshire locations.

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