Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/686925
P E R S P E C T I V E | J U LY / AU G U S T 2 0 1 6 61 Some materials for the set had to be custom-designed and manufactured. For example, having created the wall and floor scheme with Danielle, we couldn't find tiles that matched the style and boldness of the room. Instead, I made a tile design, which we had printed, complete with grout lines, that matched perfectly. Vintage papers are always difficult to find in quantity and at reasonable cost, and we quickly exhausted eBay and the normal US sources, so I ended up purchasing lots of papers from contacts in Europe. Another exterior built on stage was perhaps the most fun. Shane wanted to open the movie with a truly iconic LA image, so I showed him photos of the Hollywood Sign in the 1970s, a tragic, ruined emblem of what the city had become at the time. This was finally realized as a visual effects shot, using 3D drawings of the Sign that were created when we planned to build the letters in one-sixth scale to shoot in camera. Cut to the interior of a house in the Hollywood Hills for the film's opening, and a boy is sneaking back to his room with a girlie mag stolen from his parents' bedroom. Suddenly, BOOM! a sky blue Trans Am Firebird crashes right through the house just behind him, and out the other side. The scene was started on a location in Atlanta, then cut into the stage set, built mostly three sided, to give space for tracking camera angles. Traps were cut into the floor for other camera positions, and one camera was behind a hinged wall that dropped before it could register a shot. It was nerve-wracking to know we only had one take on this set before it was destroyed, but everything went like clockwork. The effect was spectacular and shocking; just the right opening sequence for the story. After finishing in Atlanta, the production could finally pick up the long-awaited exteriors in Los Angeles. Most of the shooting here involved dressing locations to some degree. City Hall was used for the scene of a smog protest, and the shot along the Strip included the Comedy Club. The last significant set was the site of a burned-out house, once home and office to the editor of the stolen porn movie at the center of the story. In the same way that some of the best ideas appear when you're not looking for them, so the best locations can appear when you've given up looking, and are driving around lost. That was how we found the perfect vacant lot location set in a row of small suburban cottages, with palms running down the street, hills behind, and a network of small streets that worked beautifully for the scene. AllSets Design & Construction of Sun Valley built a beautiful burned-out frame of a house on the vacant lot, using their patented recipe for burn crackling. The set was so convincing that a police cruiser stopped by to investigate. What began with a tour around Hollywood, finally ended on the Sunset Strip between the Comedy Store and the House of Blues, where the final scene was shot. Our journey took us deep into some of the city's recent history and its unique subcultures, and pushed to the limit how much of Los Angeles could be found in Atlanta. ADG