38
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LMGI COMPASS
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Spring 2020 38
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LMGI COMPASS
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Spring 2020
were suppressed. I got up to speak for a few minutes and outlined
our worked-on strategy to the Council. We were granted approval
and were on our way for six seasons."
EXPERIENCE COUNTS
Production designer Brendan Smith has high praise for Smither,
with whom he worked on Little Mosque on the Prairie before reunit-
ing on Schitt's Creek. "Geoff is an experienced LM, and he has a huge
inventory of locations that he has already used," Smith says. "That's
a good start, particularly when trying to fi nd something as specifi c
as our town or our motel. Geoff also had a good conceptual idea of
what we were looking for—this is not as easy as it sounds—so there
is not so much time wasted in looking at locations that will clearly
not work."
"Geoff is a hard worker," Barnsley adds. "He knows Ontario, and
he knows how to manage locations and is just such a professional.
We were in the same offi ce, so we had conversations pretty much
daily, tracking how things were going. I'd look at the location boards
and see what was scheduled. I'd sign all the location agreements for
him. Geoff was so good as a representative of the production. We
had to go back to many of the locations season after season, and he
was a master at keeping relationships with owners positive. That
makes production a lot easier."
Both Smither and Smith worked closely with Dan Levy. "Dan was
the arbiter," Smither says. "Eugene stepped back and let Dan take
over. Dan's fi ngers were in every little piece of the show, so some-
times it was tough to get him to respond. I worked through his as-
sistant quite a bit."
"Dan had a very clear view of the show and a clear understanding
of the characters within it—their tastes, their style, their history,"
Smith adds. "The locations simply had to cater for this and work
along with it. The motel was a good example. It just felt like the right
one, almost as if it had the right 'character.'
"For me, the biggest challenge to bringing Schitt's Creek to the
screen was making it interesting, a little quirky. Even though the
Roses initially hate the town and can't wait to get out of it, it still
had to have some charm. We knew it would grow on the family so
we wanted it to be likeable. The recurring locations—the store, the
motel, even the street in the town—should make you want to go
back to them. There's a kind of coziness to old locations. You feel at
home in them."
THE RIGHT MOTEL
Finding the right motel was a worry for everyone, although Smith-
er had some good ideas. "I knew exactly where to look," he says.
"The Hockley Valley is a picturesque valley near Orangeville, On-
tario. The Nottawasaga River runs through it and part of the Bruce
Trail in the Caledon Region of Ontario.
"I knew from previous visits that there is a motel on the Hockley
Road, a quiet stretch running east from Orangeville, through the val-
