On a big picture it is because we make EVERYTHING that you see. It might be an entire world made of plywood and minimal stick framing, but there is a lot of it and it’s all custom. Every costume is hand built. Robin Williams robot costume got an academy award or nod.
The six roof ribs each have hundreds of man-hours worth of work.
Everything in the room is custom built including the room. This is probably the largest single enclosed set I ever worked on. For 7 weeks, I hammered away just making the blank segments of the 180′ diameter perimeter wall- a twenty foot tall truncated conical shape that is totally undetectable. That was an extremely wasteful design detail, but the Hollywood designer said “Make it So”, Disney opened the checkbook, and this one million dollar Bicentennial Man set was ordered up and built for about 5 minutes of screen time.
Alcatraz TV pilot
Working ON Alcatraz is very expensive so they usually fake it in Hollywood. Or Canada! I’m standing in an Alcatraz set, on Alcatraz, next to real Alcatraz bars and cells. The set was built in Vancouver and trucked all the way south to San Francisco for a 4 day shoot at the National Park (the whole island is the park). I was just one of about a sozen carpenters- we all got a couple thousand for the work.
Carpenters are the low pay folks on set. That’s why I specialize in effects props:
The ‘escape props’ I created for a shoot in 1991 are still on display in the “MGM cells” at Alcatraz. (power drill, paper mache vent cover, hand tools)
In house Google ad that totally did NOT rip off JJ Abrams Star Trek set… (yeah, it did) Just a little plastic model… $7,500.
Toyota Prius “jet pack” $4,000
It’s all custom. Lights and camera equipment cost millions and millions of dollars too. And because everything is so high stakes, everyone above the carpenters gets paid eye watering chunks of change.