Van Nuys Airport - Filming Locations

Filming Locations

Many movies and television shows have been filmed at the airport, including a scene showing the arrival of Major Strasser in Casablanca, an episode of the TV show Alias, and several episodes of Season 5 of 24. The 1980s action-espionage series Airwolf used the Van Nuys Airport hangars regularly as the site of "Santini Air", the charter air service company owned and operated by Ernest Borgnine's character (Dominic Santini) in the series.

In 2005, a film documenting the history of Van Nuys Airport was released under the name One Six Right, named after the more popular runway at the airport.

Legend has it that Burbank Airport provided the setting for Humphrey Bogart's famous goodbye in the film Casablanca. But the airplane that departed with Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid, who played her Nazi-resisting husband, was actually filmed during a late-night shoot in Van Nuys, at what was then called Metropolitan Airport. All the runway scenes that included actors took place inside sound stage No. 1 at Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, where technicians re-created a dim Moroccan airstrip.

A major part of the science fiction classic Silent Running was filmed at the Van Nuys Airport in March 1971. The Domes from the spacecraft that contained the last surviving forests were filmed there. The main interiors were filmed aboard the decommissioned aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge (CV-45), which was docked at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard in Long Beach, California. Shortly after filming was completed, the carrier was scrapped. The forest environments were originally intended to be filmed in the Mitchell Park Domes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but the production budget forced the sequences to be shot in a newly-completed aircraft hangar in Van Nuys.

In the last episode of Season 1 of the HBO series Entourage, the final scene takes place at Van Nuys Airport, where Vincent Chase and company take off for New York City. It was also used in the 4th season when Kanye West offers the group a plane ride on a Marquis Jet to Cannes. In Season 5 episode 7, Ari Gold and Vincent Chase run into each other in a hangar as each are about to depart on separate flights to Geneva, Switzerland and Hawaii respectively. The last episode of season 6, episode 12, is used as a location where Vincent Chase and his crew run into Matt Damon on the way to Italy for a shooting.

Van Nuys Airport was also a location for filming of Metallica's music video for "The Memory Remains" and pop-punk band Blink-182's music video for "All The Small Things".