Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/619377
replaced at the location. The atmosphere is festive here, family and holiday. It's Christmas Eve, and the house is all aglow with lights. The tones of the walls and furniture are warm brown and saffron gold, with crystal lights, silk decoration, silverware, candles and a fireplace. Then there is an infamous house called the Haunty, a house Whitey kept where he killed and buried many of his victims. We went to the real location, but could not shoot there—too many politics. It's mostly an empty house; the gang just used it for hiding out and killing people. Something similar was found, very small and claustrophobic, with tiny corridors and a maze of stairs and rooms, and with the perfect torture room: a concrete and stone basement. We redressed the basement, took out the boiler and added a dirt floor. An old military bed was put in along with flowering creepy wallpaper and fake plants, plastic couches for the constant spilling of blood and an empty kitchen…just beer in the refrigerator. One of the most challenging parts of Black Mass was Miami. Shooting there was contemplated, but even if we were going to actually shoot in Miami, nothing there has been left the way it was in the '80s. We were looking for a Miami Beach with none of the futuristic and modern skyscrapers that now form the skyline. A lot of CGI work would be necessary, so we decided to try making Miami in Boston. The first thing I did was to go to Google Earth and find the whitest beach in the vicinity of the city. It was Revere Beach, north of Boston. We all drove up there and, miraculously, it was great. The beach was white, Revere looked much the same as it had 20–30 years ago, and even the apartment buildings in the background worked. Right on the beach was an old pizzeria that opened out onto the street, and we stripped it out to create a Little Havana open bar like those you would find inland in the old neighborhoods in Miami. I also ordered two trucks of palm trees from Florida, the imperial palms that you find everywhere in Miami. After adding palms and neon signs, and painting several buildings down the street, there we were in Little Havana. While preparing the sets on Revere Beach, it became clear how important this story was to the Boston community. As the crews worked, turning the pizzeria into a café, crowds of people would stand behind the caution tape and tell us all about Whitey. They would say, "Whitey shot my cousin," "Whitey threatened my father," "Whitey shot all the streetlights out on my whole street." It was clear that doing this movie right really mattered to the local residents. The hospital scene is very dramatic and painful. Whitey's son Douglas died after just a few days of illness, at the age of 6. Even more cruelly, the most innocent creature in the story dies from a fever made worse by a medicine his mother gave him. White was the color of the room where this immaculate, pure child dies. The hospital room was built in a real empty hospital, redressed with a glass partition added to isolate the child and see him from outside. The hospital cafeteria where Whitey has his final talk with Lindsey about the death of his son was stripped of furniture and equipment, and made as bare as possible to underline the emptiness and solitude of the scene. The St. Patrick's Day parade was another tricky sequence. It's a huge event every year in Irish South Boston, but the main street of the parade—Broadway—is Above: A stretch of Miami's Little Havana neighborhood was built from scratch in Revere, MA; an old pizzeria became the Latin-themed bar La Linterna. This Little Havana pre-vis illustration was drawn by Gloria Shih. Below, left to right: A SketchUp model of La Linterna, rendered in Podium by Karl Martin. A screen grab shows the finished street. Opposite page, top: This historical map of Boston Harbor in the 1800s was reworked and resized to cover an existing mural in a Lynn pub. Center: A frame grab in the pub features the mural. The bar is where Connolly and other FBI agents hang out after work. Bottom: The front page (and many interior pages) of THE BOSTON GLOBE from three different eras were re-created by Geoffrey Mandel in Adobe Illustrator ® and CorelDraw ® , and printed by the Hand Prop Room in Los Angeles. Period prop, set dressing and costume items were created for the film. The Alacatraz belt buckle was one famously worn by Whitey Bulger (a former Alacatraz inmate), but no photos of it existed, so Geoffrey Mandel based his design on other prison belt buckles of the era.