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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58 • LMGI COMPASS Winter 2024 business open. They'd not only have to find a nearby location large enough to move the entire business to, but then get him to agree to move to that new location—for six months! "The store really did serve a big purpose for the community, so I totally got it," she explains. "The closest real store is a full 30 minutes away, so people really did shop local there as much as they could and this man took care of people in the community." They eventually found him a new spot and moved every single piece of merchandise out. When the team finally gained access, it proved to be much more of an extraordinary find then they had imagined. Keener recalls, "There were rats living in there and birds and just… Yeah. Wildlife. It was ... an unmasking!" Original pressed tin tiles were revealed after the drop ceiling was removed, and also, says Gatlin, "the full height of the front windows and these absolutely beautiful transom windows above that had layers of plywood and other material covering them from both from the inside and the outside. "So not only had they lost the beautiful period ceiling inside the store, but also the light all those windows bring in. Then, on the exterior, there were these amazing black and yellow four-inch tiles, all along the bottom of the storefront that had also been covered. It was like discovery after incredible discovery in that space." In the end, the building got a complete makeover. They uncovered the windows, the original hardwood floor and plastered the walls in an aged-olive green, then filled one half of the room with a dozen 1900's Brunswick pool tables and, on the barbershop side, installed period-correct half-inch hex tile and a line of chairs and mirrors. Many of the buildings on Kihekah were also in a state of disrepair and the location team had to create an entire calendar just to track remediation and repair of the various spaces. This process alone stretched to months and months. "We spent a considerable amount of money on things like mold abatement, remediation and construction. It was just a massive undertaking," Lupi recalls. "Occasionally, what we did was to trade renovations as payment or at least partial payment." SUPPORTING A TOWN Most of the scenes on Kihekah involved as many as 800 background performers, many of them traveling from Tulsa and further out for a chance to be in the film. In the last census, Pawhuska's population was noted at 2,948 people. Between the cast, crew and background, the production grew that population by close to 1,100 more. The team fixed its sights on an abandoned supermarket with a parking lot large enough to hold tents for background, hair, makeup and costumes. It was owned by a man in New York but Fantasia says, "He wouldn't rent to us no matter how many times we came back to him!" They eventually found out that the property owner was in the process of selling to the Nation, who hoped to build a medical center there. The Osage intervened and within a matter of days, permission was granted. They now had to source a very specific kind of tent. "You can't use the same kind you would in L.A. or Atlanta because of tornadoes and inclement weather, so we had to use these huge, heavy, aluminum-frame tents we found from a vendor in Texas," Fantasia explains. "They were maybe 300 feet long by 200 feet wide. Then we brought in swamp coolers and HVAC to keep the tents cool inside and the air clean because of COVID." They got lucky with weather, for the most part, though at one point, a sudden rainstorm nearly washed away all the dirt they'd laid down on the street. Temperatures in Pawhuska through the summer regularly hit 112 degrees or 113 degrees with as much as 95% humidity. And many of the background were dressed in wool, leather or buffalo hide. Fantasia estimates that production spent well over a million dollars for background support alone in Pawhuska. Combine that with the million and a half dollars of roads they had to build on the various ranches they shot on, roads which then had to be completely removed down to the last