Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1490572
W E I R D : T H E A L YA N K O V I C S T O R Y | P E R S P E C T I V E 8 7 It had been quite a few years since designing the various videos, ALTV specials and stage pieces for Al when he reached out with the simple text: "You want to make a movie?" I wish every job offer started this way. Usually there are stressful interviews and time-intensive presentations given before knowing if you have the job. The movie is a parody of the hard-hitting musical biopics that have been a staple of Hollywood (Ray, Bohemian Rhapsody, etc.), so the goal was to treat this film as a SUPER serious biopic that showed the gritty (albeit untruthful) beginnings of its hero. With that in mind, the creative team ignored the fact that Al's actual hometown of Lynwood, California, was a quaint working-class neighborhood and shifted the reality to imagine it as a depressed A. "AMISH PARADISE" CONCERT STAGE. PRODUCTION STILL. B. ACCORDION WORLD MAGAZINE COVER. GRAPHIC LAYOUT. C. A SMALL PART OF THE ART DEPARTMENT WALL FEATURING FILM AND ART REFERENCES FOR THE MANSION SET. D. DANIEL RADCLIFFE AS AL AND QUINTA BRUNSON AS OPRAH IN AL'S CLOSET. PRODUCTION STILL. factory town one might find in the rust belt of Ohio or Pennsylvania. The director Eric Appel and I exchanged various research images from such films as October Sky, and began our search for our late seventies steel town. Finding such a place in and around Los Angeles is a bit tough. Fortunately, the location manager Dan Milner had worked recently at RSI Locations' Pomona campus (an abandoned campus of Cal Poly Pomona) and thought it would work well for the project. Given the film's very limited budget and a schedule of only eighteen shoot days, it soon became very apparent that using this campus as our own studio lot could be the way to achieve our ambitious goals. The campus unbelievably had many of our needed locations: factory, hospital, park (as cemetery), warehouses, a party house, and even a slightly sad mid-century residential street that worked well to set the Yankovic family residence. B D C