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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40 • LMGI COMPASS | Summer 2021 He didn't know it then, but he was about to jump on a roller coaster ride that would eventually lead him to David Fincher. And it wouldn't take long. Just a few months after starting at Sunrise, an on-the-job injury nearly sent him packing. Fortunately, he had developed a reputation as a hard worker and was well-liked. His supervisors offered to move him into a new position and Doyle became a runner for the company. "I would drive all over Los Angeles going from location to stage and back to location, delivering materials to the construction crew," he says. "I got to know the city and county very well doing this, including frequently filmed locations and backlots." He also got to meet with the producers and production coordinators on the commercials and TV shows the set company was building for. It was through one of those contacts, a coordinator named Peter Abraham, that Doyle got an offer to work as a PA on a spec commercial. It was an unpaid gig, but he jumped at the new opportunity. "I became a regular PA for this company immediately after that," he recalls. One day, a location for a Hertz commercial the company was doing fell through and an emergency replacement was needed, and needed fast. Abraham summoned Doyle. "He sent me out with my trusty Pentax K1000 to find a new location," says Doyle. Excited by the options Doyle came back with, the spot's director, Mark Story, began using him on every job as his primary location scout and the rest, as they say, is history. Within six months of that first job as a scout, Doyle was working as an ALM on his first feature, 1990s Heart Condition, a comedy starring the late Bob Hoskins and a young actor named Denzel Washington. "That's where I met location manager Barry Gremillion who happened to be visiting the set. Later that year, he hired me to do The Doors with Oliver Stone," recalls Doyle. The Doors gave him his first taste of working on a period film, in this case, replicating Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s with a very exacting director. After that, Doyle bounced around a bit, diving back-and-forth between the feature and commercial worlds. The Director and the First Iteration By the early '90s, David Fincher was a much-in-demand music video and commercial director, and he became big news when he was plucked from the world of MTV to direct the third sequel in the Alien franchise for Fox. The stories around the difficulties of making that film are also legendary and could easily make a pretty dramatic film by themselves! Fincher would eventually disown the movie and, despite it becoming the second most financially successful film in the franchise, he turned back to the music video and commercial world, working for artists like Michael Jackson and Madonna and clients like Nike. As it turned out, Fincher's feature career was far from over, and was in fact, just getting started. Three years after the disappointing Alien 3 experience, his vision of two detectives, one on the verge of retirement, and one bright-eyed and eager to make a difference in a very dark world, took the box office by storm: Se7en was a rain- soaked auteur piece starring Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt as the two detectives searching for a serial killer. The shocking ending even made the nightly news when audience members at screenings around the country were reportedly seen running from the theaters. Perhaps having learned from the critical reception of Alien 3, Fincher didn't wait for Se7en to open before booking his next film. With Se7en a smash hit with critics and audiences alike, and The Game with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn set for release, Fincher was in the early planning stages for his next film: a Hollywood tale called Mank. "Working as a location manager is great training for the multiple hats a producer wears on and o‚ the set… You are doing some serious multitasking with many di‚erent kinds of people, along with problem solving every day. Producing is very much the same." –SLM/Co-Producer Bill Doyle/LMGI