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LMGI COMPASS
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Fall 2025
bouncing in the office and he is like, 'Hey, I had a thought. There's
this golf course … and it's abandoned so it's a bit overgrown, but
we can just bush-hog it and clean it up.'"
Beachler was dubious. A golf course? "He said, 'Let's just go
out there and look,' and I trust him, of course, so we went," she
says. "And, um, no joke, the weeds are up to our arm pits and
there were water moccasins and alligators—alligators, I'm not
kidding you. They were everywhere."
Thinking back, Howard laughs, "She wasn't exaggerating about
any of it. I'm six foot three and the sticky, mad grass weed was up
to my chest. And the gators and moccasins? All true."
They had to trek in on foot and Beachler thought he'd lost his
mind at first.
"We had to get to the fourth or fifth hole," Howard says. "And
when we got there, I was like, 'the Juke Joint would be there,
here's the water. We can take the overgrowth down to back there.
We can put a road in here. Basecamp will be over there.' She got
it right away. But would Ryan and the producers see it? For that
we'd have to do a bit of work."
Howard told Beachler to give him two days.
"I was like, 'you can have all this cut back in two days?'" she
recalls.
Howard smiled and replied, "I swear. If you bring Ryan here
two days from now, I'm gonna bush-hog a road in and I'm just
gonna cut a little cavity in the middle of this this golf course, and
we'll sell him on it.
"The good thing about Ryan," says Howard, "is that he's so
decisive on every level that you wouldn't have to show him a
dozen locations. You'd just pick your three favorites, show him
those and he'd know right away."
Two days later, they drove Coogler onto the golf course
property and riding through swamp grass up to the windows …
and then, suddenly, they were in a clearing with a bayou behind
it.
Showdown at the Juke Joint. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
