Surveying and the Silver Screen
Surveyors tend to be rugged, outdoorsy folk with an interest in geography and a passion for precision. Three of our presidents and many of the nation’s founders were surveyors; scores of America’s first explorers were surveyors. It’s part of our national story, and of course surveying has played a role in many of the stories told by Hollywood. According to licensed Australian surveyor and movie buff John Brock, 428 movies include surveying content — and that doesn’t include documentaries.[1]
Brock notes that “surveyors have been played by great actors including Randolph Scott (Carson City and Heritage of the Desert), John Wayne (The Fighting Kentuckian), James Mason (Journey to the Centre of the Earth), Brad Pitt (Seven Years in Tibet), Hugh Grant (The Englishman That Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain), Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood) and Nicole Kidman (Queen of the Desert). Cary Grant played a surveyor who is best friends with Thomas Jefferson in (The Howards of Virginia). Surveying has even featured in TV series: from MacGyver making a ‘theodolite’ from two sticks, a pair of earrings and some gaffer tape and Peter Graves also using a theodolite to keep track of a suspect vehicle in Mission Impossible, to Jennifer Garner pretending to be a surveyor in a stakeout to catch baddies in an episode of Alias (complete with a designer red hard hat!)”. [2]
Here’s a deeper dive into some of the surveying scenes in a few of the movies.
Heist
Surveying plays a crucial role in this story 2001 movie about a retried jewel thief who is coerced into completing one more crime – stealing gold bullion from an airplane. Road surveying is used as a cover for star Gene Hackman as he sets up a diversionary explosive charge near the airport runway (filmed at Logan Airport in Boston).
A tense scene follows when a police patrol stops to see what the surveying crew is doing. It’s a thriller of a movie, and according to Rotten Tomatoes, one of the best heist movies of all time.
Masada
Roman surveying had to turn up in a movie, and it features as a key plot device in this 1981 TV miniseries starring Peter O’Toole and Anthony Quayle.
The series tells a fictionalized account of an actual event that occurred at the Masada citadel in Israel in 73 A.D. – the final stand of the Jewish citizens rebelling against Roman occupation. The focus is on the struggle between the rebels occupying the stone fortress and the 8,000 Roman soldiers led by O’Toole, who were determined to put an end to the revolt.
The engineering challenge fell to surveyor/engineer Rubrius Gallus to come up with a way to access the citadel perched on a rocky mesa 1,300 feet above the Dead Sea. Quayle, portraying the surveyor, devises a massive ramp that will provide military access to the fortress. Unfortunately, this task proves fatal to Gallus, who is killed by an arrow as he’s out surveying with his groma.
The Roman siege was ultimately successful, not because of the massive ramp, but because all of the rebels (save for two women and five children who hid in cisterns) had killed themselves rather than become Roman slaves. Masada is now an Israeli national park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the 840-acre complex holds well-preserved ruins attesting to the history of the ancient kingdom of Israel and the courage of its people in the face of a Roman siege. [3]
The Englishman That Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain
This 1995 “Rom-Com” film is set in a fictional small Welsh town (Ffynnon Garw) during World War I. The town takes great pride in having its very own mountain. When two English cartographers, Reginald Anson (Hugh Grant) and George Garrad (Ian McNeice), arrive to measure the mountain, they discover the landmark is 16 feet short of achieving the official "mountain" classification of 1,000 feet. Disheartened that their mountain has been deemed a hill, the townsfolk work through torrential downpours, accidents and chicanery to make up those 16 feet, all while keeping the surveyors in town to verify its height. Fortunately, cupid was at work, because Anson falls for a local woman (Tara Fitzgerald), and ultimately the hill is re-surveyed and has become a mountain, preserving the villages’ source of pride.
The Fighting Kentuckian
John Wayne makes an appearance as a surveyor in this 1949 film that includes some of the challenges early surveyors faced in the early 1800s. The plot follows a heroic (and romantic) surveyor and active duty officer, Rifle Captain John Breen (Wayne), who becomes embroiled in an effort to keep a local land baron from stealing land granted to exiled French officers and their families following Napoleon's Waterloo defeat.
In 1817, Congress granted four townships in the Alabama territory to the exiles[4]. Led by Colonel Georges Geraud and General Paul DeMarchand, the struggling settlers made a thriving community, called Demopolis by the summer of 1819. On a shopping trip to Mobile, Fleurette DeMarchand, the General's daughter, meets John Breen, a Kentucky rifleman, who detours his regiment through Demopolis to court her.
But Fleurette, despite her wish to marry Breen, must bow to the needs of her fellow exiles, who now are at the mercy of the rich and wealthy Blake Randolph who had the previous surveyor killed, and now wants to marry Fleurette. But John Breen has no intention of allowing that to happen. Breen resigns from his regiment and takes up the fight against Randolph and his hirelings, saving the settlement and ultimately getting the girl.
Daniel Day-Lewis in “There Will Be Blood”
There Will Be Blood
Daniel Day-Lewis won a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of a crook who uses his surveying skills to defraud landowners during the California oil rush in the early 1900s in “There Will Be Blood.” Based on Upton Sinclair’s book “Oil”, the movie highlights the way our natural resources were acquired and exploited during the early 20th century. The movie tells the story of a fraudster who uses surveying to help steal oil-rich land from unsuspecting farmers. This movie has a couple of surveying scenes, including one where Day-Lewis uses surveying equipment to check the results of his drunken shooting skills. It’s not a flattering portrayal of the profession of surveying, but it is a pretty accurate reflection of the ideas presented in Upton Sinclair’s book.
Real surveyors are the real stars
Here at Berntsen, we are proud to serve the real stars - surveyors who work every day with the greatest possible precision. But it is fun to see how Hollywood portrays surveyors, and John Brock’s 2004 FIG paper really goes into detail to show where and how surveyors have been depicted over the years.
We’re looking forward to seeing the next portrayal in our local theaters or online - more important, we look forward to supporting surveyors every day.