Brigadoon (1954)
Brigadoon has a lot going for it. There's the all-star cast of Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse, and Van Johnson. It was adapted from a Broadway show by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, masterminds behind My Fair Lady , Camelot , and Gigi . And it is an MGM musical! So why wasn't Brigadoon a hit? The movie opens with a series of landscape shots, presumably of the Scottish Highlands. In reality, they were the MGM Backlot Highlands. Brigadoon was filmed entirely on MGM's vast backlot in Culver City. Locations were scouted in Scotland, but the unpredictable weather and enormous expense of filming overseas caused the idea to be scrapped. Another idea - filming in the hills of Big Sur, California - was rejected for cost reasons as well. After all, why travel to Scotland when you can build a perfectly good Scotland in California? Or so MGM thought. The major budget cuts the studio undertook in the 1950s caused a reduction in Brigadoon