Location Managers Guild International

Spring 2019

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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30 • LMGI COMPASS | Spring 2019 Frank Gehry, noted architect, sums it up best: "Architecture should speak of its time and its place, but yearn for timelessness." Sense and Sensibility: Filming at Historic Properties I by Eric Klein The stove roars to life as Mary Donegan feeds it hickory logs. When she arrived in America, she didn't think she would tend fire in the kitchen of such a fine home as Lindenhurst, that she would be a kitchen maid in the great house of Master Jay Gould, with baked-bread deliveries and milk from his own cows, making her job easier than most. At the back door, the eggs, milk and bread for the day were waiting. Jeremy, the steward's son, had collected the eggs and milked the cows, and Mr. Pepperidge, the baker, delivers the bread just as early. The house had just been fitted with Mr. Edison's light balls. 'Tis true we are living in a miraculous age. "And CUT." The director crosses into the basement kitchen of Lyndhurst to give her notes to the actress. Like all "Gilded Age" mansions, the kitchen was in the basement and wasn't the most glamorous room in the building, nor the largest as it was usually only visited by the servants. Yet it gave the director the realness she wanted, an actual kitchen where thousands of meals had been prepared from 1838. While very few actual meals are prepared there these days, many productions have filmed at the hearth. This historic treasure has been used as a film location ever since Jay Gould's youngest daughter, Anna, the Duchess of Talleyrand-Périgord, willed the estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation back in 1961. Along with the Gothic castle-like structure came the two-lane bowling alley, the pool, the stables, the Rose Cottage and the massive Conservatory Greenhouse, which was the first steel-framed conservatory in the United States. Today's shoot was a historical piece for cable on food from the Gilded Age of America. It joins the ranks of many other productions, starting with House of Dark Shadows in the '70s, all the way up to Winter's Tale, Mysteries of Laura and Project Runway filming on the premises. The house, the exterior of which is a heavy Victorian Gothic, especially lends itself to horror but is equally adept as a nuanced stand-in for opulence from any decade from the 1880s to the 1960s. Designed by architect Alexander Jackson Davis, Lyndhurst sits on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River, in Tarrytown, 30 miles north of Manhattan. The estate was built by former New York

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