Tin Ceilings on the BIG Screen and the Little One

Tin ceilings have been around for a long time and here is my proof. What I'm talking about are the old TV shows. You can see tin ceilings used a lot on the walls and the ceilings of those old westerns, mostly in the saloons. Yes, in TV shows such as Wanted: Dead or Alive, where the card table in front has a tin ceiling in the background. The Maverick brothers, Bart, Bret and even cousin Beau gambling on a riverboat and there, against the wall, is a tin ceiling. Maybe I should say tin wall or even better tin wainscoting, because it’s not always up the whole wall, but just accenting the area you can see on the screen.

Johnny Yuma, The Rebel, would go from town to town, but would often over look the tin on the front of the bar. He had more important things to do.

I always thought how cool it would be, that instead of Paladin handing out his card, "Have Gun, Will Travel", that it was me going through the old west handing out my card, “Have Tin, Will Install”.

 We here at Chelsea Decorative Metal have supplied westerns, not the ones previously mentioned, but these newer ones from movies in the theater: American Outlaw, Jonah Hex, The Homesman and the remake of True Grit. We also supplied the western on the television show called Lonesome Dove.

The fascinating part to me, and to prove my point is that the metal in these old TV westerns were used because the tin was used in the actual old West as seen in these pictures.below:

To switch genre, we all remember The

Godfather 2, when Vito (Robert De Niro)

is in the hallway of the tenement building

unscrewing the light bulb to make it darker f

or when he shoots Fanucci. Well, the whole

hallway has tin ceiling sheets. It didn’t muffle the sound, but sure did add to the ambiance.

Here to the left is a scene from Bonnie and Clyde meeting in a dinner with a 1' Victorian design, We have that design in our 1' design section and our Victorian patterns section.

I don’t know how many times I rewound a scene because I thought I saw a tin ceiling, but it’s been a lot. Sometimes I don’t even know what movie or television show we are supplying, but here are some, to name a few, where you can see the metal very plainly on the screen: Ghost, in the kitchen, Two Broke Girls, in the cupcake area on a column, Seinfeld, in the restaurant scenes, not the diner and Law & Order, on the elevator door and even in a scene in The Monkees television show.

Here are movies you would think are perfect for the tin ceilings and we definitely supplied: Barber Shop 1 & 2, Spiderman 1 & 2, he even hides up on the tin ceiling at one point. Between the Lines about a Village Voice type newspaper office and Coyote Ugly, where the ceiling is so plain to see, as they dance on the bar. 

I’m not going to forget the horror genre. They ordered the metal from us to get the atmosphere they wanted. John Carpenter’s

Vampire, Stephen King’s Skeleton Key and Dreamcatcher and I don’t know who’s The Unborn. All in all, tin ceiling in movies are like in real life, it add to almost every situation. It’s nostalgic, decorative and inexpensive at 2.25 a sq. Ft. Everyone should install a tin ceiling because life is like living in a movie.