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LMGI COMPASS
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Summer 2022
other lms he's worked on," says Ferg, "and there are gargantuan,
challenging projects on his résumé, but you throw the federal
government and a branch of the military into it and then you
start talking about shooting on bases where there are classied
materials and machinery all over the place, well, Mike and I ended
up working very closely and I was convinced by the end that there
was no problem Mike couldn't solve."
It seems the admiration is mutual. "Ferg, much like a LM, had to
walk a tightrope between production and the Navy but he did an
amazing job of working with everyone and trying to get us what
we needed. The guy is the real deal, man and a consummate naval
aviator," Mike says.
"They're Called Orders, Maverick"
To shoot the aerial portions of the lm, which in the end amounted
to some 800 hours of footage, the team utilized MOAs (Military
Operating Areas—in other words, areas totally closed off from the
public) or other low-level ying corridors that the Navy uses for
training. One of those corridors is in the Cascade Mountains.
"To scout, we'd y all the routes," says Mike, "with Joe and
Tommy looking at the different story points we needed—and then
sometimes we'd y to get a look at the view from a mountaintop."
Once they had a spot in mind for the aerial work in the Cascades,
they'd do another scout by helicopter. "We took two actually
because if one went down, we were gonna have a real hard time
nding it," says Mike, "so it was for safety.
"The challenge on these scouts was reorienting yourself,"
recalls Mike. "I'm pretty good with a compass. I'm pretty good
with a map. But doing stuff from the air? You're up there and it's a
couple million acres of jagged peaks, covered in snow. You've got a
route on a map and you're trying to check the GPS from the pilot's
read-out and not puke while he's banking so … nding a safe place
to do the low-level stuff and then getting permission to shoot there
was difcult."
These scout ights would last for 2½ or three hours and on each
one, they'd narrow things down a bit more until they had fairly
precise maps for each run. Then Mike and the team would launch
into conversation with the Navy and permitting with the different
entities and agencies. In the Cascades, for example, there were
ve: two federal, three state. In Nevada, it was the Bureau of Land
Management and state.
"A lot of it was private land too," Mike says. In one instance, they
Fantasia scouting the Cascades. Photo courtesy of Mike Fantasia/LMGI
Inyokern Airport, Ridgecrest
