Lights, Camera, Action! Self Storage On Screen
Ready For Your Close Up
There are stars of the screen, and there are legends – Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Ingrid Bergman …
… and Self-Storage.
No, we haven’t tripped over in our storage unit and bumped our heads – think about it. How often does a self-storage unit play an integral part in a story we’ve enjoyed on screen?
From movies like The Silence of the Lambs (Don’t look in the jar, Clarice!) to TV Shows like Dexter (oh no – the Tooth Fairy’s real!), unfortunately Self-Storage facilities have traditionally been typecast in rather dark supporting roles. However, like, celebrated horror actor Vincent Price who played more villains than we’ve had hot dinners but was kind, warm and charming in real life, there’s more to Self-Storage on screen than meets the eye.
Let’s look at some times that Self-Storage was completely ready for its close-up in the best way!
SILVER SCREEN SELF-STORAGE
Primer (2004)
Okay – you might not have heard of this one but it’s a cult classic that earned the 2004 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival. Not too shabby for an independent sci-fi film that was written, directed, produced, edited and scored by one person – Shane Carruth – who also starred!
Primer tells the story of two genius engineers who accidentally discover time travel, in a complicated plot which involves phrases like electromagnetic reduction of objects weight and field exhibit temporal anomalies. It’s a bit tricky to wrap your head around but the best part is that they get all this wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff (as another two-hearted-TV-time-traveller is wont to say) into a box which they keep in a self-storage unit! We’ve been telling you all along that it’s a genius way to keep your delicate and valuable items safe – how much more proof do you need?!
Imagine it in real life – how exciting would it be to key in the code to your secure unit and inside you could take a trip to meet the Tudors or slip to next Saturday for the winning Lotto numbers?
Primer might be a bit of a brain-tangler but Irish times film critic, Donald Clarke, included it in his list of the top twenty films of the decade (2000–2010). Definitely worth checking out.
Citizen Kane (1941)
Innovative, dramatic – Citizen Kane has been described as a masterpiece and its director, producer and star Orson Welles as yet another genius – looks like there’s a pattern of self-storage advocates emerging here!
While a self-storage unit doesn’t actually make a screen appearance, Welles’ character, publishing tycoon Charles Foster Kane informs his unfortunate wife Susan that he’s on his way to a storage warehouse in Manhattan to make ‘a sort of sentimental journey to the scenes of my youth’ where his mother’s belongings are stored. Why Welles persisted on that whole snow globe/Rosebud thing when he had a whole storage unit storyline right there we’ll never know but hey, it’s not like it’s been called the greatest movie of all time or anything.
Skyfall (2012)
So you know how self-storage is safe? Like super-secure? And if you have something precious to keep in self-storage, you know that once it’s safely in your unit you won’t have to think about it which frees up loads of time for other things – like being a Spy?
Well that.
And if you need anyone to vouch for the security of self-storage, we know a guy who’ll highly recommend it: His name’s Bond. James Bond, and in 2012’s Skyfall we find out that he keeps his iconic Aston Martin DB5 in self-storage. And get this – the Aston first appeared in Goldfinger in 1964 meaning it’s been kept in pristine working condition, available whenever 007 needs it, for sixty years, proving that long-term storage really pays off in keeping your valuables well, valuable!
And who said self-storage wasn’t cool?!
LethalWeapon 2 (1989)
It’s the archetypal 80’s buddy movie series. Good cop, crazy cop, explosions, mullets, exploding toilets … classic!
Murtaugh and Riggs always save the day. Well, unless they don’t, and in 1989’s action sequel, something much closer to our hearts is the true hero of the piece. Our human heroes don’t manage to catch the baddie – his nefarious ways, however, come to an end when nothing other than an overhanging storage container crushes him in an extremely violent 80’s way.
Rumour has it that the producers wanted to make the storage unit part of the team but it wouldn’t fit in the back seat of Murtaugh’s Oldsmobile so the gig went to Joe Pesci instead. Can’t win ‘em all, I guess.
SMALL SCREEN SELF-STORAGE
Forget about true crime shows and finding awful things behind a roll-up door. We know it’s where Walter White stored his cash in Breaking Bad and where Klaus the vampire’s coffin hangs out in The Vampire Diaries but it’s in comedy and crime-solving that self-storage really comes into its own on TV. Time to win that Emmy maybe?
Seinfeld
Break out that bass guitar – In 1996’s The Andrea Doria, we find out that Jerry rents a self-storage unit. However, he then rents out half of the unit to Kramer who, in turn, rents a quarter to Newman the mailman – still with us so far?
Newman, it transpires, is miffed because he didn’t get the transfer to Hawaii he wanted and so is hiding the mail he’s meant to be delivering in the unit, letting himself in to just dump it all there using Kramer’s key. Could it happen today? Well, not if the unit has modern security measures like code access, CCTV and other ID systems!
True Detective
Rust (Matthew McConaughey) and his former partner Marty (Woody Harrelson) in Season One of this HBO classic might not have been as much fun as Riggs and Murtaugh, but in 2014 they had us glued to our screens to see if they could hunt down the killer that Rust had pursued for years in a nonlinear narrative that had us scratching our heads while simultaneously begging for more.
Like our Lethal Weapon cop duo, however, the storage unit in True Detective is key to solving the case, being the home of the makeshift investigation HQ that Rust has compiled over years of investigation. As workplaces go, it’s not exactly the corner office with the view, but it helps get the job done – and keeps the crucial evidence safe and secure!
The Big Bang Theory/How I Met YourMother
Two of the best-loved sitcoms of recent years make sentimental use of self-storage units for their characters, showing them to be safe places to keep precious memories.
In The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon rents a unit – his ‘Fortress of Shame’ – to keep items like books, electronics, clothes and lots of other things from childhood that he simply cannot bring himself to part with.
In How I Met Your Mother, Barney, played by Neil Patrick Harris, stores all of his love interest Robin’s (Cobie Smulders) possessions in a unit he’s hired expressly for that purpose, even though he tells her during a breakup that he’s thrown them all away. Cue a touching and tender moment when he reveals that this isn’t the case – altogether everyone, awwww shucks!
Only Fools and Horses
In our last, but not least, comedy classic, the 1996 Christmas Special sees Del Boy and Rodders finally hit the big time with the discovery of a £6.2 million pocket watch in the Trotters’ garage storage unit. Cue fainting, Reliant Robin-Rocking and the classic line “We’ve had worse days”.
Time on our Side scored a record 24.3 million viewers. And who knows, maybe this time next year we could be billionaires.
Unlock the freedom of extra space. Get in touch with Storage World today or get a quote online.
