SUBMITTED BY Timbo

November 20, 2003 — Moviegoers may laugh at Mike Myers playing the Cat, but their eyes will be taking in much more -- the lush, over-the-top production design of the movie. USA Today takes a look.

Last year during shooting, film crews spent four months building an elaborate faux suburb on vacant land in rural Simi Valley, west of Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. "We irrigated it and put in some streets and built 22 houses," Welch says. "We had some partial interiors, doors in rooms, but most of the houses were shells."

Each house was 26 feet square and 52 feet tall with four windows. The 18 acres surrounding the set were hydroseeded and sodded to give the area a lush look.

So lush, in fact, that the pastel-colored houses, which are visible from a nearby freeway, raised interest among prospective home buyers, filmmakers say. Local real estate agents received calls, although some did ask about "the funny color," Welch says.

Filmmakers also created a cozy downtown, called Anville in the movie, in the real city of Pomona, east of Los Angeles. They redressed 24 storefronts along two blocks of the antique district with 600 gallons of paint. Sixty-thousand cubic feet of Styrofoam were used to create icons of what the stores sold. A giant hammer and nails, for a hardware store, and a 26-foot-high hot dog, for a deli, adorn the business district.

The movie's color palette is intensified and broadened from the book's.

"In the book there are only a couple shades of blue, red and pink," Welch says. "It's very simple. If you made a movie like that, it would be so selfconsciously stylized that you couldn't get into the story.

Read the rest at the link below.