People often ask if there’s a favorite location I’ve ever scouted for a movie, so here’s one. You likely didn’t see this film, and you definitely wouldn’t remember the scene, but this is why finding a place called Dead Man’s Tunnel was so special…
Back in early 2011, I was scouting for Sopranos creator David Chase’s first movie, Not Fade Away. The story was set in 1960s Jersey, and we had a LONG list of period locations to find. One in particular caught my attention though:
INT. SEWER TUNNEL – NIGHT
Douglas, Eugene, and Wells move drunkenly through the dripping tunnel.
In the film, the teen protagonists go to an old sewer tunnel at night to smoke and hang out. The scene is barely a page long, putting it at the bottom of importance for locations to find, but something about it grabbed me right away…
There are just some archetypal locations your imagination can instantly conjure up, like a haunted house or a shadowy alley, and a sewer tunnel large enough to serve as a hide-out felt pulled directly from that same lexicon. I didn’t just want to find a filming location; I wanted to see the real thing for myself.
So I started scouting…and it didn’t take long before I ran into several major obstacles.
First, EVERY tunnel I found that was large enough to walk in had long ago been gated off in VERY permanent ways, expressly to prevent the activity pictured in the film.
Second, such tunnels, unsurprisingly, typically have some sort of sewage or drainage continually flowing through them, which obviously made any thought of filming a nonstarter.
Third, most are controlled by public utilities operations who have zero interest in allowing a massive film shoot and all of its liabilities onto their property, for very understandable reasons.
But most frustrating, the vast majority of tunnels were simply too small. At one point, I managed to get a public works map showing EVERY open tunnel in the county with dimensions, and it was crushing to see that every single one was measured in scant inches: 12″, 14″, 20″…
We came up with some not-so-great cheats, but they just didn’t work, and David decided to cut the scene entirely. That should have been the end of it.
Except…
I just couldn’t believe that somewhere out there wasn’t a graffiti-covered sewer tunnel where the local kids hid away from prying eyes, to mess around with drugs and alcohol and wrestle with the infinitely confusing transition from adolescence into adulthood.
So I kept looking.
I don’t remember how it came about, but after weeks of searching, I finally ran into someone from a public works department with a suggestion. There was a tunnel he knew about, specifically because they had problems with kids hanging out there. He gave me an address…
And it was EXACTLY as I’d always imagined it.
More importantly, everything about it was perfect from a filming perspective. At about 5′, there was plenty of room to play the scene. The corrugated roof gave an awesome texture for lighting. And miraculously, the floor was mostly a walkway, with drainage off to one side.
As I was taking pictures, a classically sullen teen walked by and asked what I was doing. I explained that we were thinking of using it for a movie. He was appropriately unimpressed.
“We call it Dead Man’s Tunnel, because they found a body in there once,” he told me.
And so the tunnel turned out to be that best of locations: the kind with a legend.
We showed David soon after and I’ll never forget how irritated he seemed. “That fucking tunnel… Now I gotta put the scene back. It’s just too damn good.” Highest praise there is.
And I’ll never forget the night we shot it, backlit from one end so the boys’ shadows splayed down the entire length. I was so excited to see it in the final film…
And then the movie came out…and it wasn’t there. A portion of the scene remains – you see the kids talking and smoking through a sewer grate. But the tunnel that got them there was cut from the final film, left to your imagination.
It happens. I’m good with it. Honestly, the reward for me was in finding out for certain that such a place is not just imaginary.
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