34
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LMGI COMPASS
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Summer 2022
Charlottenburg Town Hall
34
•
LMGI COMPASS
|
Summer 2022
so they went to see it and, since they'd already planned to spend
a large chunk of the ground shoot on the base, problem solved,
right? Well, no.
Negative Ghostrider, the PaŒ ern Is Full … of Snowy
Plovers
"We go down to NASNI and nd a spot that everyone loves," says
Mike, "and they tell us we can de nitely build there but then,
oops, there's a bird called a snowy plover, this little tuft of white
feathers that weighs a fraction of an ounce that nests there. And
it's endangered. Well, I used to work for the Fish and Wildlife
Service, so … what are you gonna do?"
Nancy Wong remembers it all too well. "Finding a location is
always a little dance," she says, "and in this case, we had the
environmental folks from the Navy and it took some maneuvering."
They had hoped to start lming there in September but due to
the mating and migration patterns of the birds, they couldn't start
building until September.
In the meantime, the team had all kinds of other environmental
work to do, including geological studies and analyzing tide and
storm surge patterns because you wouldn't want to build the thing
and have it get blasted by a storm and swallowed up by the Paci c.
"I spent a lot of my time dealing with the Coastal Commission,
the Navy's environmental people, state environmental people
and the Fish and Wildlife people," Mike says. "That's where my
experience from working with the Fish and Wildlife Service and
the Forest Service on these kinds of things really came into play. I
speak their language."
With all of the approvals nally sewn up, Hindle and his team
were able to build the bar on the beach—though construction did
have to build a road 400 feet out onto the sand and surround the
set with decking in order to access it.
From the rst scout to shooting on the set was around eight or
nine months.
Was it all worth it? Harper thinks so. "When you're in the bar,
you can see out those windows," he says. "You can see the ocean,
surfers and the different background people we had out there
and I think you can feel that it's not a comp or an LED wall. And
then when we're outside, you can see the bar is actually there on
the beach."
In the lm, the interior of the Hard Deck Bar is modeled on I
Bar, an of cers' club on NASNI that had also been deemed too
small. The exterior has a sort of Paradise Cove style in terms of
architecture.
"In the end, we built it, shot the shit out of it, tore it all down and
you'd never know we were there … but KALM Mike Louis bwas
dealing with that for four months," says Mike.
All photos: NAS North Island, Coronado
