Barrandov

I've mentioned on quite a few occasions before that I listen to what used to be the various international short-wave broadcasters, most of which are only on the internet any more. Indeed, I've linked to a fair number of stories over the years.

So my ears picked up when I listened to this past Saturday's edition of Radio Prague's English broadcast. They're starting a new series on Barrandov Studios, the Prague production facility that produced many of the well-known Czech films, as well as hosting western productions after the fall of the Iron Curtain, since production in central and eastern Europe was cheaper and the cities could pass for all sorts of vaguely eastern European locations. (And as we saw in Gymkata a few months back, even further east, although that was the former Yugoslavia, not the former Czechoslovakia.)

The first episode in the series is an interview with a set constructor, Štěpán Červený. The link above links to a text that is a close transcript of the audio. There's also an option to stream the audio online, and one to download the MP3 directly. That's a ~2MB MP3 file, with the interview running around four minutes. (I don't know the precise length of that file; I timed it listening to the full half-hour program.)