Blank Check’s castle is a real Austin house, and it started life as a water tower.
If you are looking for where Blank Check was filmed, the answer is central Texas, standing in for small-town Indiana. Variety’s February 1994 review says so in as many words, and the Austin Chronicle, reviewing it at home that month, said it was shot the previous summer in the Austin area. That puts the shoot in the summer of 1993, a few months after Disney bought the spec script.
The film moves around the middle of the state more than its suburban setting lets on. The house is in Austin, the bank and the theme park are in San Antonio, and one scene goes north to Dallas for a fountain.
The castle is a real house, and it was a water tower first.
The castle that young Preston Waters buys with his million dollars is Pemberton Castle at 1415 Wooldridge Drive, in the Pemberton Heights neighborhood west of downtown Austin.
Its history is better than the movie’s. The Texas Historical Commission marker on the property says it began in the 1890s as a cylindrical water tower. In the mid-1920s Samuel Fisher turned it into a small castle to serve as the sales office for the new Pemberton Heights subdivision. A University of Texas architecture professor, Samuel Gideon, bought it with his wife Sadie in 1937 and kept adding to it. The state calls it the Fisher-Gideon House, and it has been a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark since 1996, two years after the film came out.
One sourcing note. It is widely reported that Robert Rodriguez owns the castle now. I found no primary source for that, so I am telling you it circulates rather than telling you it is true.
San Antonio supplied the money and the rides.
The bank where the check gets cashed is the Alamo National Bank Building at 105 South St. Mary’s Street. It went up in 1929, designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, the Chicago firm behind a long list of grand American banking halls. In 2006 it became the Drury Plaza Hotel, and the old banking hall is now the hotel lobby. You can walk in and stand where the film did.
The theme park is Six Flags Fiesta Texas, which had opened on March 14, 1992, about a year before the shoot. The Rattler, the park’s wooden coaster, is on screen. Wikipedia adds the Power Surge water ride. I could only confirm the Rattler against a second source.
The fountain scene goes to Fountain Place in Dallas, the Henry Cobb tower finished in 1986 with a plaza of 172 fountains designed with WET. A thread or two online insists it is Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles. The Dallas attribution is the one with a source behind it.
Who made it.
Rupert Wainwright directed. It was his first feature, after a run of music videos, and the Austin Chronicle noted the same thing in its review.
Blake Snyder and Colby Carr wrote it. The story of the sale is the kind people in development still tell: per Variety’s April 1993 report, as Wikipedia relays it, the two sent the script to executives in backpacks stuffed with fake money. Snyder went on to write Save the Cat, the screenwriting book half the people reading this own.
Craig Baumgarten and Gary Adelson produced, with Hilary Wayne and Snyder as executive producers. Bill Pope shot it, five years before The Matrix. Nelson Coates designed it.
Brian Bonsall is Preston. Miguel Ferrer is the crook whose blank check starts it all, and Variety singled him out for playing the villain straight. James Rebhorn and Jayne Atkinson are the parents, with Karen Duffy and Tone Loc in support.
The money.
Disney released it on February 11, 1994. It opened in third place that weekend with $5,411,897 on 1,698 screens, behind Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and, in second, The Getaway, the remake of a 1972 Texas picture that shows up on this list at number thirty eight.
Box Office Mojo records $30,577,969 domestic, which places it at forty two here. The Numbers has $30,573,770, close enough that the two databases agree for once. The budget in circulation is about $10 million, from Wikipedia without a primary source, so read it as reported.
Then it went to tape. Buena Vista Home Entertainment put it out on video on March 21, 1995, per The Numbers, and the film found most of its audience there, then again when it came to Netflix in 2017 and later Disney+.
Why people love it.
It is every kid’s dream, filmed straight. A boy gets a million dollars and nobody stops him. And the stretch where Preston spends it is one of the best “let’s spend this money having fun” sequences in any film. It does not apologize for the fantasy, which is why it works.
It is also a perfect 1990s time capsule. A lot of people of a certain age watched it on the same rented VHS until it wore out.
My read.
Making a movie for kids means speaking like an adult in a way kids understand, not talking down to kids like kids. Blank Check gets that. The stakes are real money and real bad guys, and it trusts its audience to keep up.
The production lesson is in the map. A story set in one generic Midwestern suburb was built from four different places across three Texas cities, a castle in Austin, a bank hall and a theme park in San Antonio, a fountain in Dallas. Nobody watching notices the seams. That is what central Texas offers a show that needs to be anywhere: variety within driving distance, and a crew base that can move with it. I have written about where Texas doubles for somewhere else.
What this means if you are scoping a Texas shoot.
Austin and San Antonio are about eighty miles apart on I-35. That is close enough to share a crew and a schedule, and far enough apart that it needs a real company move day, lodging decisions and two sets of permits from two different offices. The film office usually does not issue the permit, and which desk to call is different in each city. I have written up who to call.
The previous entry in this countdown is number 43, The Last Picture Show. The full countdown lives here. For the doubling question, see where Texas doubles for somewhere else, and for permits, who to call about shooting in Texas. If you are scoping a multi-city Texas shoot, start here.
Next in the countdown: number 41.
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