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 | Summer 2018 our creative team and isn't too far away or hazardous. You start to have to dig deeper. We work about six weeks ahead. We tend to get script outlines that describe what's happening. We'll get two or three of those every month. Then we get two episodes about five weeks out. By then, we'll have locations already selected or have a number of great options. As we're winding down filming a two-episode block, we'll get scripts for the next two episodes." LMGI ALM Luke Welden's Georgia upbringing has been a plus in Stranger Things work. "The South is a friendly environment, so it's a handshake and a smile," he says. "A promise goes a lot further. I grew up in a small town in the construction business, and it taught me how to talk to people. That's the majority of our job. I see myself as a large-event planner. We plan seven weddings a week." Even so, dealing with locals sometimes can be compli- cated. "Hawkins is full of small-town politics," Welden says. "One person knows everybody. When you involve a small community and you change their downtown square when you're filming, you don't necessarily make friends everywhere you go. You're always juggling different personalities and different perceptions of how we're impacting businesses. But once you're in a good Southern city—luckily, I know how the culture is here—you kind of evolve into another citizen while you're filming there and you can keep the excitement real for the people around you." W elden's favorite aspect of the job? "The gumshoe part," he says. "We're detectives. Part of the challenge is figuring out who owns large pieces of land. Everything else is pretty much a checklist. Until you gain access, you can't do anything." Before starting work on the show, the writers watched (or re- watched) a large list of films, including E.T. the Extraterrestrial, Stand by Me, The Goonies, The Thing, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist, Aliens and Star Wars. The reason: "Stranger Things is intrinsically an homage to films of the '70s and '80s," PD Trujillo explains. "So EVERY location and EVERY set is influenced by those films. We try to keep the homage tonal as opposed to directly copying anything from those films. So when we scout locations, we are after a very specific look and feel. We want our locations to feel like they came straight from that era without being a duplication of something you've already seen on screen. Not every homage is fully spelled out in the scripts. "During the scouting process, we aren't necessarily asked to find locations for specific homages as much as to consider a number of classic 1970s/1980s films as the driving force for the look of a location," Carey says. "The art department does a great job of incorporating Easter eggs for specific homages within the set dressing as well. We've referenced Stephen King stories and Spielberg movies, as well as films like The Goonies for scenes involving the kids rid- ing their bikes through town. One of my favorite locations from Season 1, episode 6, is the kids biking through a neighborhood until eventually coming across the aftermath of Eleven stealing the boxes of Eggos from a grocery store. We shot these scenes in Palmetto at a local grocery store that was called Bradley's Big Buy at the time. The owner, Don Hayes, told us that he had worked at the store when growing up in the area. He later bought it in order to preserve its history and keep a grocery in town at a time when it was at risk of closing. That Eggos scene has turned into such a staple for the show, and it's exciting to see a location work its way into popular culture. I actually saved an email from the Duffer brothers with their initial reaction to the photos that I'd taken for that location. That's something that I plan to hold onto. "Also, in Seasons 1 and 2, there are a number of scenes in which the kids are walking down train tracks. This was described to the scouts from the start as an homage to Stand by Me. We ended up using the train tracks at Stone Mountain Park. The rails circle the park's granite mountain, which provides a safe, controllable op- tion surrounded by mixed, old-growth woods. We've also worked with the park on multiple occasions for various wooded scenes. The film liaisons, Christine Clements and Jeanine Jones, along with Paul Maharry of Stone Mountain Police Department, are al- ways incredibly helpful in coordinating our filming with consider- ation for the patrons of Georgia's most-visited park." Before becoming LM on Stranger Things, Holley, 46, worked as an Photo: Tony Holley/LMGI Will checking on strange things in the Byers barn.