The Location Managers Guild International (LMGI) is the largest organization of Location Managers and Location Scouts in the motion picture, television, commercial and print production industries. Their membership plays a vital role in the creativ
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32 • LMGI COMPASS | Summer 2018 Production designer Chris Trujillo elaborates. "First- ly, Tony has a very intimate understanding of Atlanta and all of its endless highways, byways, woods, riv- ers, tunnels, hills, back alleys, neighborhoods and myriad small and not-so-small towns that make up the greater Atlanta area. He has cultivated working relationships and friendships with every person with any bearing on procuring locations in this part of the world. We have been working closely since be- fore Stranger Things had even settled on Atlanta as a filming location. Early scouting with Tony is what convinced me and subsequently everyone else that Atlanta would work for our show." T rujillo was not disappointed. "It has served us so well because Atlanta proper and the vari- ous towns that surround it really represent a broad spectrum of archetypal Americana. There are all of these incredible neighborhoods that, with very little modification, perfectly paint the picture of split-level ranch-style suburbia born in the '60s that came to define the look of '70s and '80s Ameri- can life. So, we get rid of the DirecTV dishes, mani- cure the lawns, switch out a few mailboxes, fill the driveways with period-correct station wagons and sedans and voila! You're ready to travel back in time with some misfit middle schoolers on BMX bikes." Stranger Things' premise is seemingly very simple: It's the early 1980s in the fictional town of Hawkins, located in rural Indiana. Nothing much happens there. Then one night, a 12-year-old boy disappears. As friends, family members and the police search for him, they begin to wonder if his vanishing could be related to the top-secret experiments going on at the Hawkins National Laboratory. Are supernatural forc- es to blame? Is there really another dimension called the Upside Down? Where did the odd girl named Eleven come from? The fact that all eight episodes of Season 1 were in- stantly accessible to millions of Netflix subscribers brought a new kind of excitement to Hollywood and the Atlanta community. For the location team, which was getting ready to scout for Season 2 when success hit, there was one overriding fear: they wouldn't be able to go back to some of the places they used in Season 1. "Even though I asked them, the studio de- cided against issuing location agreements that gave us the right to return," Holley says. "So there was a big scramble to lock down as many of those locations as we could. Beginning in Season 2, we now build options into location agreements where appropriate." M any of the locations in the fictional town of Hawkins have become iconic. "The Palace Ar- cade, Hawkins National Laboratory, Melvald's General Store and Hopper's cabin are characters in their own right," producer Paterson says. "Even some of our less frequented locales have entered the pop culture zeitgeist. For instance, it's not uncommon to see someone wearing a Benny's Burgers or Hideaway Bar T-shirt." Hawkins Laboratory is a favorite loca- tion for the crew. "It's always felt like a second home to us," Paterson says. "The actual building has such a fascinating history. The lab itself was formerly a state-run psychiatric hospital that was in operation up until the '90s. There is an inherent gravitas there that makes it an ideal location for the show's nefari- ous research facility." PD Trujillo adds, "Finding Hawkins Lab was a tall order, and we explored many options before arriv- ing on our now iconic brutalist masterpiece. I didn't start with a perfectly clear architectural vision for Hawkins Lab, but I had a very clear sense of the imposing but clandestine mood and tone I wanted to emanate from it. The location (owned by Emory University) where we ended up spoke exactly to that feel. "Historically, the building we shot as the exteri- or lab was effectively a mid-century 'insane asylum,' complete with these terrifying, long, low, stark-white, underground corridors that linked the main building to what once were patients' quarters. Above ground in the main building, there were a number of incred- ible, very institutional, dark-wood hallways and a massive tiled half-basement space that seems to have once been, at least partly, a cold storage facil- ity. We were able to retrofit and elaborate that space into what became the rooms and hallways that Elev- en lives and suffers in at the hands of Doctor Brenner and the insidious Department of Energy." When Stranger Things is not filming on location, the company works out of EUE Screen Gems Studios in Atlanta. "On Season 1, we shot about 40 percent on stage," Holley says. "On Season 2, it dropped to about 25 percent, so more was on me. Most of our domes- tic interiors have been shot in the studio, including the Byers house, the Wheeler house, Hopper's cabin Photo: Greg Grudt/Mathew Imaging Kyle Carey (left) and Tony Holley