Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1061165
Headquarters in Denver, to the newsrooms of The Washington Post and Miami Herald, the hotel suites and grand ballrooms of the St. Francis in San Francisco, New York's Waldorf Astoria and Vermont's Hanover Inn, to countless bars, diners, fleabag motels and airports up and down the Eastern Seaboard, with one incriminating side trip from Miami to Bimini in a yacht named Monkey Business (yes, the jokes wrote themselves). Which is why the script simply had to shoot in Georgia. As usual with Jason, this would be a show entirely shot on locations with zero stage builds. Under the tutelage of a longtime ally, location manager John Latenser V, a host of unrenovated '70s and '80s spaces all over Atlanta still exist if one knows where to look for them. The other secret weapon Georgia offered were the cobblestoned streets of historic Savannah—a great match for the upscale brick townhouses of Georgetown. And twenty-five minutes due east of Savannah lay Tybee Island, where with some artful construction builds a forgotten corner of Miami and the corrugated metal piers and back-alley bars of Bimini could be built. Location manager Latenser was a miracle worker, no question. He secured permission to shoot pivotal first-class airplane scenes on a museum- quality 747 with period perfect interiors (though only six rows deep). Hart announced his candidacy amidst the snow-dappled peaks of Red Rocks, Colorado. Latenser found a sloped slab of slate at Stone Mountain, that provided a floor at least, which the CG wizards colored the signature terra cotta, added the snow fragments and completed the Colorado vistas above. Efficient transformation was the name of the game here. In a carefully choreographed two-day put-in, an all-white event space that was once a Macy's got a facelift of Belbien walnut vinyl veneers, richly stained Beaux-Arts portals and grandly tasseled Austrian draperies to become a Waldorf Astoria ballroom and mezzanine. A contemporary Marietta, GA, Sheraton Hotel room of beige drywall gained gold-edged brocade wallpaper panels, period doors (with period- correct door hardware), full Kennedy-era décor, a bed canopy and window swags to become a luxury suite in San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel in 1984. For Billy Broadhurst's high-style D.C. townhouse, another beige location was transformed with contrasting mylar-backed wallpapers and a radical leather-and-lacquer redress to suit Billy's New Orleans-bred taste as a campaign fixer. F G F. BROADHURST'S D.C. TOWNHOUSE. A BEIGE APARTMENT WITH GOOD BONES WAS TRANSFORMED WITH ORANGE AND GREEN MYLAR-BACKED WALLPAPERS, BRILLIANT LACQUER AND LEATHER DÉCOR INTO THE PARTY- READY TOWNHOUSE OF FUN-LOVING MANAGER BILLY BROADHURST. G. THE SLATE QUARRY AT STONE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA, OFFERED A PERFECT INCLINED SLAB FOR THE PRESS CORPS TO TRUDGE UP IN ORDER TO COVER GARY HART'S ENTRANCE INTO THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE. VFX ADDED THE SOARING PEAKS OF RED ROCKS, COLORADO, BEHIND THEM, ALONG WITH VESTIGES OF SNOW SCATTERED ON THE NOW RUST-COLORED SLOPES.