Location Managers Guild International

LMGI COMPASS | Spring 2020 • 39 ley to the village of Hockley. It is frequented by motorcycle riders due to its curves and the picturesque valley, but it is out in the country and not heavily traveled. "Pretty much every other motel in Canada is built on a highway or on a main road that used to be a highway before some big by- pass was built. This one was no longer being used as a motel. It was owned by an athletic group that trained elite young basketball play- ers, enrolling them in the local high school for their education and billeting them in the motel. The owner agreed, so I showed photos to Eugene and Dan. They liked it so we visited it in the dead of win- ter and locked it down." (The athletic institute has since built a resi- dence on its site so the motel is slated to go up for sale this spring.) "You'd think roadside motels would be sprinkled all over the place," Barnsley says, "but they're really a relic of the past. In an urban center, where sprawl is a real factor, often these small motels were razed for new developments. Geoff scoured a lot of southern Ontario looking for the right location. He found it in Mono, Ontario, and it's become iconic. "The motel was the farthest location from the offi ce—about 40 miles away. It was out in the country, and I really enjoyed driving there. I don't get to drive on country roads very often. Prior to Schitt's Creek, I was the producer on a multi-camera live sitcom (Spun Out), so I'd be on the stage every day. You make your show and you're done. With Schitt's Creek, I got a sense of the city and the community." "We looked at several—probably a dozen or so—motels," Smith adds. "The one we chose was isolated, which was good. There were no proximate buildings that we would have had to avoid. It had a nice woody background too, and it looked right for us in terms of style and age." INTERIORS "Both Goodwood and the motel formed the backbone of the show's locations," Smither says. "Interiors were built to match the motel, the café, the mayor's house, the town hall (eventually) and Mutt's barn. Scripts were mostly written in advance of the season. At the very least, we had outlines for every episode in-hand by the time we started, so each spring the show was able to fi lm seven weeks of interiors in the studio and then four weeks of exteriors in June because we like the green foliage and even though we are Canadian, we don't like to be out in the cold that much." Over the years, the series fi lmed at Pinewood Toronto Studios, Dufferin Gate Studios and Revival Studios in Toronto. Once the motel was nailed down, Smither and his team began transforming Goodwood into Schitt's Creek. "One of my concerns was shooting at the crossroads," Smither says. "The two roads are not at 90-degree angles to each other, but it allows you to see all three facades in some shots. Then the town peters out and becomes countryside. There's a top of a hill at one end with a big quarry en- trance and a traffi c light and a gas station at the other end. There was a small railroad crossing to the north and a residential street to the south. It was small enough and obviously, country enough that this could be a really tiny place, which is what they were after." COMPOUNDING CONCERNS The railroad caused a number of fi lming disruptions. "An histori- cal tourist train came through once in the morning and once in the afternoon on weekends (only). It blew a horn four times every time it crossed a street, and there were three streets it crossed within three-quarters of a mile. That's a lot of horns going in both direc- tions. Every now and then, we'd have to stop shooting to let the train go through. They'd tour down and then tour back an hour later," notes Smither. Smither was concerned about the impact Schitt's Creek might have on Goodwood. "I dealt extensively with the people there, go- Photo by Stephen Scott, courtesy of CBC

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