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
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/996734
and the tunnels." Despite more reliance on locations, Holley's team hasn't expanded much. "I have two key assistants, three assistant LMs, one of whom is the coordinator and location staff assistant," he says. "For Season 3, my coordinator has become a new key assistant, but that's it." S eason 3 will be almost all on location, according to Pater- son. "As the story expands, so does the fictional town of Hawkins," he says. "Be on the lookout for several new loca- tions in Season 3. Without going into spoiler territory, I will say one in particular has to be seen to be believed." Despite the large number of productions shooting in Atlanta, Holley insists the location team has not had to compete for loca- tions. "By and large, everything we shoot is within a 30-mile ra- dius per the union contract," he says. "The city is very large, es- pecially if you take into account the metro area. We don't step all over each other's toes unless we're in downtown Atlanta. Then it wouldn't be easy. But the only time we shot there was when Eleven was going to Chicago." In Holley's view, the location team's greatest challenge "is that the show takes place in the early and mid-'80s, and there's very little of the '80s left in Atlanta. Even though it was burned to the ground (during the Civil War), we still don't value the history of the edi- fices. We need to keep the show in period perspective, so renova- tions are bad. Updated kitchens are bad." "Our fans spot anything that is not strictly period," Paterson says. "That has meant we have become laser-focused on accuracy and authenticity. And that is very hard to achieve in an age where cell towers, recent construction and twenty-first-century life clutters the landscape. It's getting more and more difficult to create a scene where none of these things exist, so we spend a lot of time narrowing our frame to exclude elements." The town of Hawkins is shot in Jackson, Georgia, a city 46 miles from the location office. "We explored a number of small-town main streets in the myriad small towns around Atlanta," Trujillo says. "Jackson offered us the greatest amount of period-appropri- ate downtown real estate. The Duffer brothers wanted a recreation of what we remembered and loved growing up as kids in the '80s. It's a reinvention of classic American cinema from the early '80s." Unfortunately, Jackson is beyond the 30-mile zone. "Going there is an expensive trip," Holley says, "so we go there about once a season. We'll stack the work that takes place at Melvald's, where Joyce works, and downtown all together. The first two seasons we pretty much put all the Hawkins' work in one shot. "The police station is supposed to be in downtown but it's not. If we need Hopper pulling out or walking away, we'll do that. We have little scenes on the street and mostly just establishing exte- rior stuff downtown." Those exteriors include the public library, Radio Shack, Regal Furniture Company, the Hawk Theater (actu- ally a furniture store with a marquee added) and Hawkins Water and Sewer Authority. A nother Georgia city housing numerous Stranger Things lo- cations is East Point, which is within the 30-mile radius. It's home to exteriors of the Wheeler, Sinclair and Henderson houses. The Hawkins General Hospital is filmed at East Point First Baptist Church. Stockbridge, Georgia, is where they found Patrick Henry High School, the location for Hawkins Middle School and Hawkins High School. "When Chris (Trujillo) and I were driving around there in Season 1 looking for Benny's restaurant, we saw a school that looked closed," Holley says. "I was the first one in there, and we locked that school down for five years. It's a very important loca- tion. It was just a high school, but we split it in half to be a middle school and a high school." Although many of the Stranger Things locations have not been used in other shows, Bellwood Quarry isn't one of them. "That quarry was already a hot filming location," Holley says. "Season 1 of The Walking Dead filmed a number of episodes there. One of the early Fast & Furious movies drove a car off a cliff into the quarry." For Stranger Things, the quarry was where people searched for Will Byers' body. "That location was really challeng- ing because in the winter it was an awful place to be," Holley says. "The coldest night in the first two seasons was in that quarry. But it's no longer available as a shooting location because the city is converting it into a water reservoir and park." Shooting outdoors is rarely problematic. "Georgia does have four seasons, but none of them are extreme," Holley says. "We don't have a big rainy season, although we get enough rain here. We've never honored In- diana winters too closely. Season 1 covered Christmas. Season 2 was fall/Halloween. We did some snow in both seasons but not to where we had to worry about making a winter wonderland." Photo: Tony Holley/LMGI