Producers of Twister Destroyed Blocks of the Town of Wakita
The practice of massive summer blockbusters really took off in the 1990s, and Twister was one of the biggest of the decade. Although many effects were employed to depict the strength and destruction of tornadoes, not all of them required as much movie magic as you might expect.
For instance, Helen Hunt and the other cast members of the movie inspect the devastation after a passing tornado decimates the town of Wakita. It appears as though dozens of homes were demolished, and that is what actually occurred. In the Oklahoman town of Wakita, the movie's producers purchased a number of old homes with the sole intention of demolishing them.
Two years before the start of production, Wakita experienced a severe hailstorm that left much of the city's housing uninhabitable. Even the main thoroughfare was destroyed. Although the community intended to demolish everything and start over, it would be expensive for a small town to operate.
They paid between $7,000 and $10,000 each house when producers promised to demolish all the structures, including the 30 additional ones they had constructed themselves. But they also fixed the road, all the ancient buildings, and gave the town the movie firetruck. The production acquired eight blocks' worth of homes in total, and at a cost that was probably in the hundreds of thousands, it reconstructed the homes that were destroyed.
- Cost: ~ hundreds of thousands
