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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stone and the land re-seeded, and you begin to get a sense of how massive the production was and why the budget shot up to an estimated $200 million. "I've built roads before, I've built train depots and basecamps, but never to this extent," Fantasia says. THE NEIGHBORHOOD IN FAIRFAX REVISITED While the first team of producers had nixed filming in Fairfax, the new team, spurred on by Fisk, eventually agreed to shoot a number of locations there. George Alvarezzo and Mike Reft would handle the majority of them, including the residential street where Mollie and her sister both had their city homes. It meant not only taking the two hero houses back to their '20s glory, but many of the neighboring houses as well. Matt Gatlin recalls, "For some of the houses, there would be a laundry list of modifications we needed to make to bring them back to the period and for others, we wouldn't have to do all that much." Fantasia, Alvarezzo and Reft created a map of each property that Scorsese, Prieto and Fisk could use to mark out precisely what they'd see. Once we knew what the frame was going be," Gatlin says, "we'd go to the guys and say for example, 'we would like permission to paint houses one, five, seven, nine and thirteen,' or 'we need to change the windows on houses 10 and 11 and we also need to remove their mailboxes.'" A major scene required that one of the houses be destroyed in a massive explosion. The actual explosion would be heard off screen, with the sound and reverberations experienced by Mollie in her bedroom down the street. "It's nuts when you read the history of it," Fantasia adds. "They probably could've used a pint of nitroglycerin and gotten what they wanted, but they used a gallon and just decimated the house with three people inside." The question for production was how could they depict a 1920's house as a normal, functioning home and then show it post-explosion without the use of CGI? "I think it was Jack Fisk who originally said, 'let's just buy someone's house and blow it up,'" laughs Lupi, "and I remember saying, 'what are you talking about?'" Incredibly, Fantasia found a house where they could do exactly that on North 4th Street. "We knocked on the door of this house that's about four blocks from the site where the real house was blown up," he says, "and it appeared to be abandoned, but we weren't sure because there was still stuff inside." Eventually, they found the homeowner. "I just kind of laid out for her who we were and what we were trying to do. Then I said, 'so, we'd like to shoot inside the house and then we'd like to blow it up,'" laughs Fantasia recalling the absurdity of the request. The woman took a beat and then said, "OK." I looked at her like, 'what?! I would've bet five weeks' pay that she was going to say 'no' but she didn't," Fantasia says, still astonished at this stroke of luck. The house had belonged to her parents and had sat empty for several years. She was willing to let it go. It was also more than 100 years old which meant it was another property which would require remediation and abatement. In reality, the house was not actually blown up, but restored and then carefully disassembled to show the smoldering aftermath. Photo by Mike Fantasia/LMGI