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 2022 • 33 would need the jets to y over a resort known for its wealthy clientele coming in and spending a lot of money for a week or weekend of relaxation. Hard to relax with F-18s whizzing over your head. At another location for the sequence, there's a moment where the jets y through a pair of jagged peaks on the ridgeline of a mountain. The jets then invert, go over the ridge and disappear before reappearing and whipping around a corner, mere feet above a river. "Cruise saw the scout footage and said, 'OK, I want cameras on each one of those peaks and then I want a camera on the ground in this valley to catch those planes coming down and around the corner,' and Mike said, 'you won't be putting a camera on the ground in that valley. It's wilderness land.' Then he quoted the specic statute that said so, like "it's the Naturalist Land Act of 1936 or whatever, like he knew it by heart," laughs Ferg. "Cruise wanted a Technocrane and what I actually said was, 'Tom. The Wilderness Act signed by Lyndon Johnson on September 3, 1964, Section 4(C), sub-section blah blah blah…' Well, Cruise just sort of stopped and everyone looked at me," remembers Mike, "and I remember thinking, 'I just said no to Tom Cruise. I'm about to get red,' but what could I do?" The problem was ultimately solved when aerial coordinator Kevin LaRosa II suggested bringing in his helicopter and hovering just above the ground. Mike claried this workaround with the Forest Service in the regional ofce and asked whether they'd be allowed to do it. "The woman I spoke with said, 'I don't like it, but there's no rule that says you can't do that, so yeah, I guess … go ahead,'" laughs Mike. "So that 45-second interaction with Cruise was scary, but the shot with the jets coming around that curve, low to the water and going supersonic with the vapor coming off the wings? It's incredible. And it's real." The Hard Deck Bar In the rst lm, Maverick, Goose and the rest of the aviators let off steam at Kansas City Barbeque, a bar in San Diego's Harbor District that today advertises itself as the "Top Gun Bar." Maverick would need a bar as well but when Harper, production designer Jeremy Hindle and the lm's director went to look at Kansas City Barbeque early in the development of the lm, it was clear that it wouldn't work. For one thing, it was connected to the Maverick/ Charlie storyline which would not be a part of the new lm, but a bigger factor was that it was too small. "Ultimately for what Joe wanted to do," says Harper, "we decided to try to nd a bar that was much bigger and right on the beach." Bigger. And on the beach. "So rst it's like, 'we need a bar, go nd it,'" Mike says, "and my rst response was, you know, based on my 28 years in the business and mostly in California, what they needed in terms of specics just didn't exist but OK, so Hindle and I hit the road." "I think we scouted probably 80 or so bars on every beach up and down the coast," says Hindle. They drove from Ventura County down the coast to San Diego and then down a bit further to the border with Mexico looking at all of the usual suspects like Paradise Cove in Malibu, but in the end, it became clear that they were going to need to be in and out of that location so many times, it would have to be a build. "So OK, let's build it. Well, where do you build it?" asks Mike, "so we go back-and-forth and talk to the California Coastal Commission and you get all of these different restrictions and then there's the unavailability of space … I mean, there's a lot of space, but when you look at available open space, a lot of the beaches in California are narrow and subject to ooding, so you have to look at tides, wind. It's a lot to think about." Someone mentioned the beach at NASNI had a large beachfront, First Baptist Church, Pasadena