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Eight thousand people applied to be extras in a Hallmark Christmas film shot in the house. Three hundred were taken. Hallmark's producers told the estate it was the most applications they had ever had.
A Biltmore Christmas went in for fifteen days in January 2023 and worked in nine rooms inside the house, on the Loggia and the Library Terrace outside it, in four rooms at the estate hotel, in the gardens and the conservatory. Eight vintage cars, two hundred yards of artificial snow. It is the one film in which the house plays itself under its own name, and its plot turns on a 1947 picture that was supposedly shot here and does not exist.
The house has been paying for itself since March 1930, when the family let visitors in because Asheville asked them to. The city was trying to get itself out of the Depression on tourism. A winery went into the old dairy barn in 1985, a hotel opened in 2001. Camera crews are part of the same arithmetic, and the estate keeps the record of them itself, down to which rooms were used.
That record is where the detail is. When The Last of the Mohicans ran into autumn, the crew painted the ground with organic green paint to hold the summer in shot. Richie Rich barely dressed some of the rooms it used and left the Vanderbilt portraits hanging, so a children's comedy from 1994 is showing the real family of the real house. Hannibal made the whole estate Mason Verger's Muskrat Farm, gate, front and outbuildings. The Swan brought Grace Kelly here in the autumn of 1955, for a story about a family driven out by Napoleon, to a house that owns Napoleon's games table and chess set.
Being There did its principal photography on the estate. The Private Eyes turned the place into an English country house for Don Knotts and Tim Conway. Forrest Gump's run goes along the estate's road, inside the gate. Four more titles, Tap Roots from 1948, Mr. Destiny, Patch Adams and The Odd Life of Timothy Green, sit on the estate's list and on no production record we could find.
The staff who worked those shoots have been recorded. Their recollections went into the estate's oral history collection, along with hundreds of other reels going back to the early 1900s, and none of the film ones has been published. Eight thousand people wanted a day in the house. The people who were in it while the cameras ran are on tape, and the tape stays in the house.