Location Managers Guild International

erate all of this. Getting all of this done is only a small portion of our job. This small dialogue-driven movie of four little girls just talking becomes this enormous project with hundreds of moving parts. It's incredibly fun but literally nonstop work." Oliver recently moved up to LM and is currently working on Penny Dreadful: City of Angels. "The saddest thing for me is that I won't be working with Doug anymore," he says. "He's like my brother. We've been working together for over 24 years. We like to say, 'Longer than most movie marriages.' We know each other so well, and that has a lot to do with pulling things off and getting things done." Dresser shares a story about Oliver that shows what lengths he will go to get the job done. "Snappy was in charge of the NYC scenes shot in Lawrence," he says. "They had a major gas explo- sion in the town on the day we had our technical scout. Snappy called the town, asked what they needed, then fi lled his car with supplies for the residents and the shelter for people who were evacuated from their homes. He's a great person." SAVING MONEY "Massachusetts has one of the largest rebates in the country," Gonchor says. "It's comparable to New York and Georgia. You get a lot for your money. It was the right place to do the movie. There was no way we were fi nding those places anywhere else. Little Women is defi nitely a great location movie. I think it will stand out from some of the other versions. It's on a bigger scale and is more detailed, but it's not because of technology. We had to do a ton of work at every single place. We built a lot of sets on stage and in the woods. Some places we just went to and shot or altered a little bit. It was easy to mix all three of those things together." SNOW CHALLENGES Where did the snow come from? "We got ice from the fi sheries industries," Merims says. "A lot of crushed ice was made and we were blowing it around as we needed it." "It was winter almost all the time in our fi lm," Oliver adds, "and almost every single loca- tion had snow. We'd be trucking in 80-to-150 tons of snow to each location. Our greens people would spread it out to make it look like winter. Even though it was at the end of the year and always cold, it very rarely snowed when we needed it to. We used two types of snow. One was biodegradable paper material, which you'd think would be a great material to use, but when it gets wet, it's not easy to sweep up. We used real snow in the areas where the actors interacted with it, like walking. On the edges, we'd fi ll with the biodegradable paper product." Oliver, who is based in Southern California, says he was ner- vous about driving in snow. "The night I arrived in Boston it had snowed about four inches. By the time I woke up the next morn- ing, they'd shoveled all the snow off the roadways." He wishes it had been that easy to deal with the non-real snow, which had to be cleaned up afterward. "Real snow would melt, it is a normal occurrence so the city would leave it alone," he says. "We had to arrange for closing down streets and lanes of traffi c to put snow in and then had to clean it up the day after. That often meant maintaining a street closure until we were done sweeping it up." THE WAREHOUSE-TURNED-STUDIO Not everything could be shot on location, despite the plethora of options. "I'd say we shot 80%-90% on location," Dresser notes. "We did build some interiors in a warehouse in Franklin. We needed some things for weather cover, so we turned the warehouse into a studio. That's where we fi lmed the interiors of the March house."

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