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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LMGI COMPASS | Summer 2019 • 37 It takes a team to turn back time. Just ask supervising location manager Rick Schuler, LMGI and his three LMGI core team members—LM Steve Mapel, KALM Sco Fitzgerald and KALM Kirk Worley. These men have worked together for more than a decade on such films as Savages, Her, Gone Girl, CHiPs and A Star Is Born. For Quentin Tarantino's very personal film, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, opening later this month, they transformed Hollywood 2018 into Hollywood 1969. A memory piece by the acclaimed 56-year-old writer/director, the film offers a time capsule of his childhood growing up in Hollywood. The neighborhood's wide boulevards, colorful restaurants, memorable movie theaters and hipster stores inspired his love of cinema. Unfortunately, many of his favorite haunts are gone—or at least, we thought they were—because of the city's penchant for bulldozing its history. But thanks to Tarantino's demand for authenticity, Schuler and his team brought them vividly back to life—at least on film. Before principal photography com- menced on June 18, 2018, Tarantino spent five years working on Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood as a book be- fore turning it into a screenplay. He told Esquire earlier this year, "I let it become what it wanted to become. For a long time, I didn't want to accept it. Then I did." The film, his ninth, focuses on the ad- ventures of a fading movie star (Leon- ardo DiCaprio) and his longtime stunt double (Brad Pitt) as they go about their business. Crossing their paths are actress Sharon Tate and her hus- band, director Roman Polanski, as well as cult leader Charles Manson and members of his "family." "The first time I met Quentin, I inter- viewed with him for The Hateful Eight," production designer Barbara Ling says. "We had a good connection at that meeting, and when he finished the script for Once Upon a Time, he had me in to read the script. The script was just breathtaking and after meet- ing with me he asked, 'Would you do this movie?' I'm an Angeleno-born and raised here. The things that were so important to Quentin about Los Ange- les were just as important to me. I re- lated to everything. We had the same stomping ground. We were about 10 years apart in age. In 1969, Quentin was 6, and I was still in high school. I was wildly zooming all around L.A. I was from the Westside and everyone there was getting fake Vermont IDs to be able to get into clubs in Hollywood. "Quentin and I talked endlessly. When the subject of drive-in theaters came up (Pitt's character lives next door to a drive-in), we both said, 'Van Nuys Drive-In.' It had the most beautiful mu- ral of a Western horse with a rider. If we could have, we'd have rebuilt the whole drive-in. Instead, we built the front of it and installed the marquee." Ling, Rick Schuler and his team spent nearly a year hunting down and pre- paring about 100 locations. "Rick is an extremely talented location manager," Ling says. "It was so easy to give him a visual, and he'd say, 'We'll find some- thing.' He digs deep and tries to work ahead of the problems. On a film like this in Los Angeles, it's not easy to shut down and completely change an entire section of a street to film it and then be able to turn it back. Time is the enemy because of traffic. This was like build- ing a pyramid.