How about a bit more Euphoria S3 locations chat? One of my absolute favorite locations that I helped scout, the ominous Hotel Los Gatos, was also the most surprising for me to see on screen…because I thought it’d been rejected!
In the show, Alamo sends some of his crew to a medical clinic in Mexico to facilitate a drug run. We cast a wide net for medical clinic options, and I was sure I’d found the winner when I passed the gorgeous Edificio Toscano building, in the South Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Built in 1928, I loved everything about it – the worn stucco, the beautiful balconies, the triple pane windows, the existing signage…
In my mind, all we had to do was pick a storefront, dress it as a medical clinic, and we had our location. Done and done!
So I went back with the production designer and location manager, who stared at it and said, “OK, that’s good…but what about that actual medical clinic next door?”
Fantastic. This is the nightmare for every location scout, where you take the VIPs by a location only to have them look around and say, “well, there’s a much better option!” All you can do is hide your embarrassment for having missed it and say that you’ll try to clear it for filming.
Now, obviously, “better” is extremely subjective, and entirely depends on how you’re going to play the scene in question. What I hadn’t realized is just how important the conversation in the parked ambulance was, and looking back, it’s a no-brainer that you needed a clinic exterior with a parking lot in front (I had originally thought they’d just be parked curbside).
In the end, it all worked out. The clinic was willing to allow filming, and so we had our location. But still…as a scout, it stings when you miss something so damn obvious! Ah well…I’d just have to remember ol’ Edicificio Toscano for a future production.
And then, I’m watching the episode, and…holy shit!
There’s the little Edifico Toscano and it looks SO. DAMN. GOOD!
As I’ve mentioned before, once a location is chosen, I’m on to the next search, and rarely hear how the filming actually goes. So I was beyond thrilled to see the building I thought had been firmly eliminated makes its on-screen debut as the absolutely iconic Hotel Los Gatos, with Bishop getting an epic hero shot on the balcony…
…and even a walk down the upstairs corridor:
As I’ve said many times before, filmmaking is the consummate collaborative art form, and I’ve long found that the most successful are those who somehow manage be both passionate about their ideas, and yet not precious. Because in the end, it’s not about who “got it right” – it’s about how you helped pave the way.
When I was first assigned to find Gargamel’s castle, I thought I was going to get fired (a good example, incidentally, of the very unique professional concerns us location scouts grapple with).
This was for the first Smurfs movie, and while it was unclear if an exterior was even needed, better to get ahead of the problem while there was time. So I was told to find as many castles as I could within a reasonable distance of NYC.
Castles….near New York City?? Outside of Belvedere Castle in Central Park and The Cloisters, I’d never heard of anything, and was positive I’d be coming back empty-handed. Shouldn’t we be doing this search in Europe??
As it turns out, New York has castles. Lots of castles. So many castles, in fact, that what I’m posting here is just a small selection of what exists.
In my research, I learned that many date to the early 1900s, when it was in momentarily in vogue for industrial magnates to own a castle, ideally along the Hudson River (it seems to have gone out of vogue just as quickly).
Just as I was really getting into it, I was switched to a different assignment, and never got to visit half the castles I’d discovered.
But the takeaway has stuck with me to this day: until you know for certain that something doesn’t exist, assume it does, and that you’re just not working hard enough to find it.
Once, I was scouting a decommissioned wing of a still-active prison when the guard asked if I wanted to try being locked in the solitary confinement cell with the lights off to see what it felt like.
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.
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…
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.
