Location Managers Guild International

44 • LMGI COMPASS | Winter 2020 A CLELM SUPES LCAT MAAE As supervising location manager for Mayans M.C., Dan Cooley has a lot to do with setting the tone for the show both on screen and off—in fact, he also served as production supervisor for season two. Cooley moved California a little over a decade ago after working in the Location Department in New York City for seven years. He worked primarily as a scout or ALM, learning the tricks of the trade on shows like Rescue Me and New York staple Law & Order: SVU. Once in Los Angeles, he quickly moved up through the ranks, bouncing back-and-forth between TV and features with ease. "I've done everything from The Newsroom to massive Marvel movies where we're doing car chases through San Francisco, flipping cars down hills and blowing stuff up, so I've never had an 'oh, shit, we can't do that' mentality," says Cooley. It was clear from the start that the series was going to be a location-driven show and producer Jonathan Paré, who had worked with Cooley on SOA, knew he wanted Cooley running the team when Mayans began to mount up. Luckily for Paré, despite having worked nonstop in the intervening years between SOA and Mayans, Cooley was available when he received the offer to come aboard. PEP "On Mayans, we typically get a seven-day prep," says Cooley, though that isn't always the case. On a recent episode in season two, the crew got a final script two days into shooting—and pag- es kept coming as they were about to roll camera! "Not a lot of time to find and permit everything for the episode," says Cooley with a smile, "but we made it work." After early meetings with Sutter, Elgin James and Paré about the arc of the series, the scale and needs of the show quickly became apparent. Cooley told his team to assume two things: "The first was that, wherever we scouted, if we used the location, we were going to want to go back there again at some point," he says, "and the second thing was that, eventually, wherever we were shooting, a character on the show would probably get killed there." Even if there wasn't some kind of violence or shoot- out in the scene they were scouting for in the moment, they'd need to be sure that property owners and community members would be OK with the possibility of it happening at some point in the future. "We always go in and say, 'Are we OK to do gunfire here?' 'Are you OK with the content?' even if it's not required for that scene or sequence," laughs Cooley. "On Mayans, you never know. You could have, like, a nun getting killed … or doing the killing." MEC MEC Early in the process of preparing the series, Sutter and James brought up the possibility of shooting Mexico for Mexico. Paré took the idea to the brass at FX and, surprisingly, they supported the idea. "There's just a patina and color you could never find in the States," James says, "and even if you've never been to Mexico or its border with Southern California, the viewer has to feel in their gut that it's legit so they can allow themselves to be swept away with the story." Cooley wanted to make it happen—not just for Sutter, James and the producers, but for what it could bring to the show in terms of authenticity. Still, he knew it would require time, some investigation and a good bit of negotiation. "I think what is expected of location managers is to say, 'let me see how I can take a director's vision, infuse it with what's possible in reality, and then let me present what we're capable of doing.' So when they say, 'We wanna ride the bikes into Mexico, across the border' or 'we wanna take guns and there's gonna be a shoot-out,' which is very difficult to do there, my thing is, 'OK, let me see what we can do.'" One of the first scenes they shot in Mexico had no action at all. It featured some of the female cast members who head out for a shopping trip. The actors get out of a car in Mexico City's Historic Center, next to the Santo Domingo De Guzman's Church, walk around a corner, and then the scene continues in the Mexi- can Plaza of Lynwood, California, some 1,800 miles away. That kind of seamless handoff is just one of many the crew have been able to orchestrate. Ultimately, several trips across the border were planned for each season. SAET ST Making sure the cast and crew are safe is of primary importance The Galindo Estate before the wildfire which destroyed it. The Galindo Estate incorporating its charred remains into the storyline.

• Cover
• 42-49 MAYANS
• 64-69 Jason Wisch
• 74-75 Martini Shot