When I’ve scouted desert properties with old mines, the owners will tell me how people trespass and break into the mines in search of undiscovered gold, with no regard to deadly odorless gases or cave-ins.

Later, owners will find tire tracks, discarded tools, and liquor bottles.

I’ll never forget a prison I once scouted that had frosted windows opposite the cells. Pigeons kept landing on the ledge outside…

And it made me think how torturous it must’ve been for prisoners, to see these small creatures peer in, then fly away with all the freedom in the world, again and again and again.

When a film shoot ends, you often get a wrap gift or two, and Euphoria delivered exactly as one would expect.

Thanks Sydney!

First time I’ve had my credit appear over a location I scouted, so that final shot in Euphoria was pretty special.

But I get uneasy revealing the locations I’ve found for shows, because people take that to mean you were “responsible” for them. Which couldn’t be less true!

Filmmaking is a collaborative art, and NONE of this would have been possible without the talent and effort of every single member of the locations department credited above, let alone the entire rest of the cast and crew. Here’s a glimpse of what I mean with regard to the farm…

The locations department is hired very, very early in the prep process for any shoot, because you can’t do much if you don’t know where you’re filming.

Head of the dept is the location manager (my boss).

In turn, a location manager works for the production designer, who is responsible for the overall look/aesthetic of a shoot; production designer in turn works for the director/showrunner to help them achieve their vision.

By the time I’m hired as one of several scouts, many evolving conversations will have taken place between these higher-ups regarding the fictional locations we’re now to find in reality, with notes on the most important creative/logistic notes to hit when possible.

We divvy up the list. Read the scene(s). And then set out to clear and photograph as many options as possible. You want to try very hard to hit all the exact requirements, but you also want to go a few deviations outside the ask, just to show some variation and inspire new ideas.

With the farm location, I’ll start by turning to options I have on file. But computer scouting taps out pretty quickly, and it’s also boring and makes me feel lazy, so I’m always anxious to hit the road to “cold scout” (lol a silly term to mean looking somewhere new).

So I scout farms. Some options in Santa Clarita, in Lancaster, in Palmdale, and beyond. I upload the pictures. I get notes back: we like this, look for more of that, etc.

And then, one day I’m told they have enough, and to move on to something else.

Sometimes I hear which location gets chosen; often, I forget to ask, and only find out when I watch the finished work. So that’s where my role ends.

But my part is only the start to a LONG process.

From the cleared locations, the production designer and location manager will re-scout their top selects in person to assess both creative possibilities and logistical feasibility.

Also weighing into the conversation is the director of photography; where the production designer can speak to the look of a location, the DP will offer expertise and insight into how it will shoot.

At some point, the top top selects are chosen, and a director/showrunner scout will follow. Hopefully, a final location is chosen; but often, we’ll be asked for more rounds of options.

Once a “hero” location is finally chosen, a member of the locations department is assigned as the main point person to handle EVERYTHING there, from logistics to contracts to neighbor complaints and so forth.

Meanwhile, the production designer/art department start drawing up plans for how the location will be dressed/altered. Because EVERYTHING is likely to change in some way. Walls painted or wallpapered. Furniture removed. Appliances swapped out. New artwork on the walls.

Similarly, other depts have to work out their logistics, from generator placement to cable runs, condor locations, and so forth. Much of this takes place during the all-hands-on-deck tech scout, where all departments visit the hero locations and download their needs to locations.

I haven’t even mentioned anything about departments like casting, which are so far outside my purview that I never hear how things work; yet they clearly have to take a location into consideration to figure out who should be in the scene.

And of course leading the charge on all of this are the ADs, who work out the exact schedules of all this insanity, background counts, arrival times, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Prep begins. All the various crews descend on a location to ready it for the shoot in the days leading up to the shoot. The locations person assigned to the location makes sure everything goes smoothly and puts out fires as they occur.

Then the big shoot. Crew of 100+ descend on the location. Much goes exactly according to plan; much changes as sudden inspiration takes place. Then it’s time to clean up and restore like we were never there.

This is an extremely, EXTREMELY superficial summary of the various contributors to a film shoot. But my point is simply this.

Who is responsible for a location?

Literally. Fucking. EVERYONE.

Yes, I found the farm…but I also found dozens of other farms too.

Choosing THIS location, to look the way it did, to shoot it the way it was shot, with actors playing off their environment as they did, directed as they were, and so on…

The collaboration in filmmaking is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in life, a ridiculously intense, passionate group effort of professionals from a thousand hyper-focused disciplines gathering together in the creation of art…

It’s a really beautiful and unique thing in filmmaking that I think is rarely acknowledged, and in 20+ years of location scouting, Euphoria was one of the most talented group I’ve had the pleasure to work with. Hope you enjoyed our work.

One of my favorite walls in LA is at the Hollywood Rec Center Pool. PERFECT shade of aqua-teal, love the three bubble-like windows, the geometric minimalism…

Just exquisite.

Backrooms is opening this weekend, and it’s awesome to see people so excited about a movie for its location! It also gives me an excuse to talk about the strange time when a bunch of BR fans became convinced I’d actually visited the original backrooms myself…

In 2011, I posted an article about touring NYC’s Farley Post Office, a massive building that at the time was nearly completely empty, just an eerily endless maze of hallways and offices that went on forever.

Nine years later, an email showed up in my inbox: “Hello there, I know that this is a long shot, but I came across this post that you made. There is one picture in it that caught my eye… As you can see, this famous photo of the Backrooms looks notably similar to the picture…”

While it was so cool that someone thought I might hold the clue that could crack open the reigning urban legend of its day, I had bad news. Sadly, there was nothing beyond that doorway but a dead end.

But the the funny thing was, I’d been to tons of similar spaces while scouting office buildings for movies/TV shows that were dead ringers for the Backrooms… because they’re actually fairly common!

While on Wolf of Wall Street, I scouted dozens of office buildings, and found that from the mid-90s on, most places maximized space with execs in the private offices along the perimeter, everyone else in Dilbert bullpen cubicles within, break & copy rooms around the elevator bank.

But! At places built from the 70s into early 90s, there would sometimes be a loop of windowless rooms around the elevator bank. These would often be conference or storage rooms, and sometimes they flowed from one into the next, just like the Backrooms.

I replied to the email with this info and assumed that was the end of it. Then, a few weeks later, I got another asking the same question…and another… And over the next few years, I averaged an email a month from internet sleuths CONVINCED I’d been to the original Backrooms.

At one point, I even got a request to use my office picture in an academic paper on liminal spaces. Eventually, word must have gotten around that this was a dead-end, and the emails tapered off…

But to me, all of it just spoke to the genius of the Backrooms, that sort of proto-location akin to a classic ramshackle haunted house, a singular place we all hold deep in our collective imaginations and can conjure up from nothing more than a single picture.

I didn’t work on the film, but I’ve read the final Backrooms set was 30,000 sq ft (!!). As a location scout, I can say with some authority that coming up with something so powerful is as rare as it gets, and I’m proud to have played a very minor role in keeping the legend propagating over the years.

Here’s hoping the movie smashes box office records this weekend, and inspires future filmmakers to come up with their own wholly original places of dread and despair!

Sometimes, I wonder what percentage of LA is actually just a leftover movie set. For example, if you go up to Mentryville State Park, you’ll see a number of historic buildings from its days as a 19th-century oil town, like a one-room schoolhouse, barns, a derrick…

And this small cottage, built for the 1985 Disney film One Magic Christmas.

Impossible-to-find-near-LA location #512: the Multi-Level Cell Block.

You see this one all the time in 90s action movies like The Rock, Face-Off, and Con Air. But if you’re filming in LA, please do not put this in your script, because it simply does not exist!

I forget what job I was scouting for, but the big finale was supposed to take place in a two-tiered cell block surrounding an open inner space, exactly like we all imagine when we picture a prison.

I found incredible examples all across the country: Alcatraz, Florida’s Hendry Correctional, Ohio State Reformatory, Oregon’s Snake River Correctional, Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Pen (a favorite!), and the Old Main Prison in Santa Fe.

But this had to be in LA, and after tapping out literally all the options within the thirty-mile zone, I had to hang my head in shame and concede defeat.

Oh, we have plenty of filmable prisons. But the two-tiered style is distinctly alien to LA, which is why a lot of those famous cell block filming locations were actually builds on a sound stage.

In fact, years ago, one local mom-and-pop studio realized the value of such a location, and purchased a cell block set after the completion of the action film it was built for, and for a long time, that was the go-to in LA. But ultimately, the demand for an empty studio was higher, so they got rid of it.

So filmmakers, please take note! Standard single-level prison blocks? LA has plenty! But the multi-level archetype? Chances are, the one you’re picturing was a fantasy from the movies.

On Euphoria, I ended up doing a LOT of desert scouting, and I’ll never forget an eerie encounter I had while taking pictures of an abandoned golf course in the middle of nowhere, which I had thought might make a good parcel of land for the border crossing scene.

I’m alone. No one around. No reception. The world is absolutely silent except for buzzing insects.

I’m walking along the old overgrown golf cart paths, snapping pictures and enjoying the desert breeze. I turn a corner –

And there’s a white pick-up truck parked in what used to be one of the golf course’s decorative lakes, now long since dried up.

Both doors are open, and I can see someone inside. Whoever it is is definitely staring directly at me.

Middle of nowhere. No one else for miles. No reception.

I’ve learned the best way to handle these sorts of questionable situations is to just barrel in head on, so I start toward the truck, make sure my hands are in plain view, and give a friendly wave to whoever is inside.

A guy gets out, flannel, jeans, beat-up hat pulled low, few teeth missing. He’s holding some sort of rusted metal pole.

Before I can get a word out, he looks at me and says, “You out here for why I’m out here?”

It is totally unclear from his tone if this is friendly or threatening.

“Why are you out here?” I ask.

“Going fishing,” he says with a weird chuckle.

I force a laugh, waiting to see what happens.

He takes his pole, and I realize it’s an old rusted garden rake. He begins to scrape the lakebed. After a few moments, he bends down and digs something out of the soil.

“Caught one!” he says, and stands up.

He’s holding an old golf ball.

“You have no idea how many are still buried here!” he says with giddy excitement, and then resumes his search.

When I leave 20 minutes later, he’s still hard at work, catching his desert fish.

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.