How did the filmmakers build Bedrock?
From scratch. “There are thousands of objects you’d find in a normal home,” says set decorator Rosemary Brandenburg, “but you can’t go to the store and buy them. Every single thing had to be manufactured.” First, production designer William Sandell and his team constructed downtown Bedrock in the then-dormant Cal-Mat Quarry in Sunland, Calif., and laid down the Flintstones’ suburban street in the shadow of a desert landmark called Vasquez Rocks. “Part of the feeling that I wanted to convey was that the earth was still hot,” says Sandell. “Whenever we could, we put a bubbling sulfur pit or a mini-volcano in the background.” For the interiors, Brandenburg and company had to “reinvent the world in a Flintstonian language,” a process involving everything from curtains made out of fake fur to a giant oyster shell for a wet bar. Most of the prehistoric realm was concocted from foam. “You can make it look like granite, or slate, or quartz, or wood,” says Brandenburg. The foam was then carved,
