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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38 • LMGI COMPASS | Fall 2025 Production designer Hannah Beachler, perhaps best known for her Oscar-winning work on Black Panther, had worked with Howard twice before, and when she reunited with Coogler for her fifth collaboration with him—along with his producing partners, Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian—for their new feature Sinners, there wasn't any question of who she wanted to lead the Location Department. Howard, one of the most sought-after SLMs in the business with the professional accolades to prove it, including membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a 2024 LMGI Award nomination for his work as the New Orleans LM for SLM Bill Doyle/LMGI on David Fincher's The Killer, laughs at how he joined Sinners. "Hannah basically called me up and said, 'you're doing this film with me!'" Ohanian says that bringing Howard onto the team was an easy choice. "Hannah knew she wanted to work with him, so there was that … but we always do a quick vetting, and he just had such a great reputation that there wasn't really any question that he was going to be a good fit for us." Howard took a deep dive into the script, but it wasn't what he was expecting at first. "I had done my share of vampire movies down here and as I'm reading, I'm just kind of visualizing everything and at a certain point you're like, 'I thought this was a vampire movie. Where are the vampires?'" But as he kept reading, the tone swept over him, and he got caught up. "I think it's a masterful script," he says. Howard admits that his two favorite types of projects are action films and period films, and this had elements of both. "I like taking a place back in time … or the details of arranging to have gunfire or blow up a car in the middle of downtown New Orleans," he says. "I just like the adrenaline of it." Lucky Breaks Elston Howard was born and raised in Louisiana's Lower Ninth Ward which runs along the New Orleans Canal connecting the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. The largest of the city's districts, it is perhaps known best as the public-facing epicenter of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster. Both of Howard's parents were educators—his father was a school principal, and his mother taught first grade for 30 years. Howard attended Dillard University where he earned his bachelor's in business and computer science, degrees that helped him land a job at the local Fox affiliate in 1988. "The station was actually owned by legendary music and film producer Quincy Jones," Howard says, "so you can imagine it was not the Fox we know today. Back then it was about The 700 Club, In Living Color or The Simpsons." He spent four years at the station, putting his computer programming skills to work. "At that time, in the master control department, you had to manually input all of the data to insert the commercials into segments of a movie or TV program. And so, I would program the in and out times for the commercials, whether they were 15- or 30-second spots," he recalls. Howard was making decent money, so he decided to move to a place right near the French Quarter. A chance encounter with L-R: Miles Caton, Delroy Lindo, Michael B. Jordan driving through the "cotton fields" on the set of Sinners. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures