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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52 • LMGI COMPASS Winter 2024 the Outreach and Production Manager for the Oklahoma Film + Music Office. "It was important that the producers be made aware that the Osage were here and that they were open and interested in being collaborative. But more than that, there was a need to communicate that we believed this story needed to be told in the place where it happened." Osage Nation member Chad Renfro was appointed by Principal Chief of the Osage Nation, Geoffrey Standing Bear, to be the tribe's ambassador for the film. "The truth," Renfro says, "is that once Marty and the other producers started conversations with the Osage, and once they came here to see what we had to offer, it became very clear very quickly that the movie simply couldn't be made anywhere else." "The movie was offered huge incentives to film elsewhere," says Fantasia. "But Oklahoma was where the story happened, and this is where the story was to be told." "To be able to tell this story on the land where these events took place is incredibly important and critical to allowing us to portray an accurate depiction of the time and people," confirmed Scorsese in a 2021 statement. SCOUTING Fantasia pulled his team together quickly, enlisting, among others, LMGI members Donny Martino, Mike Reft, Chris Kucharski and Andrea Keener. Eventually, the department would grow to 14, along with 20 full-time PAs and cultural historian Addie Roanhorse. They scouted through December of 2019 with Scorsese traveling to Osage County several times to see locations with then production designer Dante Ferretti. While most of the actual events in the story took place in the town of Fairfax, the filmmakers settled on Pawhuska, Kacandes and producer Emma Tillinger Koskoff called again in July of 2019 and he finally picked up. Georgia got right to it. "We'd just said, 'hello,' and Emma goes, 'we'll give you whatever you want, we'll give you whoever you want, we'll leave you alone, you've gotta come do this movie," Fantasia recalls. The movie was Killers of the Flower Moon. "I spoke with my wife and she said, 'How do you say no to Martin Scorsese?'" Seems retirement would have to wait. Again. TELLING A HORRIFIC STORY FROM OKLAHOMA'S PAST The story recounts a dark chapter in tribal and U.S. history that revolves around the Osage striking oil on land the tribe had been relocated to from Kansas in the late 1800s because it had been deemed a barren wasteland. The tribe's sudden and extreme wealth attracted predatory outsiders who would stop at nothing to get their hands on the money. A love story between Mollie, an Osage woman (played by Lily Gladstone, a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy of Montana) and Ernest Burkhart, a white man just home from the war, is upended when her family is targeted in a scheme to secure its wealth. Leonardo DiCaprio was producing and set to play the intrepid FBI agent dispatched from DC to investigate a mounting series of mysterious and unsolved murders on the Reservation, with Robert De Niro attached to play William 'King' Hale, the local political boss and Ernest's uncle. OKLAHOMA AND THE OSAGE NATION "This is a story about a monumental period in Osage history and for the state of Oklahoma as well," says Yousef Kazemi, Kihekah Avenue, Pawhuska