| Now comes some shortcuts and tips I've learned over the years. What I've done is listed the movie I made, and what we did to get locations and what I learned in the process. (All filmed in South Florida.) TRUTH OR DARE (1986) had quite a bit of locations, including a mental asylum, car chases, wooded area scenes both day and night, a car crash, city streets, a restaurant scene, and offices. A majority of the movie was shot at a local Community College. This is a key ingredient to making a movie: keep all your locations close by. Travel time wastes time and energy. The college was receptive for credit and a small payment. We got all the office scenes, an empty room to build the "psycho ward", plenty of offices and hallways, a baseball field, another field in surrounding campus woods where we blew a shed up, and lots of streets surrounding the college for our car chase scenes. The restaurant was easy, you always find places that will let you film in off-hours for a credit! Think about where you frequent, and may know the owners personally! KILLING SPREE (1987) had minimal locations. It was set pretty much at one house, like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. This home was the producer's home. It was a good thing I had him sign a location contract, because right in the middle of shooting (THAT'S RIGHT, HALFWAY DONE, SHOOTING ON 16mm FILM!) he kicked us out of his house! He felt the crew was mistreating his home and blood was getting everywhere and he'd had enough! Fortunately, I had him on the dotted line for providing the location, and satisfied him by drawing up a new contract with a couple of "cleaning additions" added to it, along with a "Location By" credit for him! This is an extreme example of why having a contract is so important. This producer was a good friend of mine, my best friend, and I never expected this to happen. Also, something else I learned on KILLING SPREE was, AVOID BLANK WHITE WALLS AS YOUR BACKGROUND FOR INTERIOR SCENES. At the time, I wasn't thinking about set dressing too much, and to me, the lack of interesting backdrops cheapened the look of this $75,000.00 movie. Put up paintings, find wood paneled homes, ANYTHING. It's called PRODUCTION VALUE, it adds to the movie when you have neat lighting or interesting and unusual homes. I mean, at the time, I thought, "this is realistic, everyone has homes with white walls." Even so, dress your sets! Add curtains, paintings, whatever. Strive to find rooms that are DIFFERENT or LIGHT IT with different colored (gelled) lights to get rid of that harsh white background. See KILLING SPREE to see what you think! I mean, part of the reason MIAMI VICE was so successful was because of the wild sets and interesting backdrops and most of that was achieved economically. I always have a "beach scene" in my movies- it's free and it looks awesome, expensive, especially to people who don't live near the ocean. Remember, think about things you live near (landmarks, etc.) that are public places where you're not going to cause too much of a commotion and use these areas for PRODUCTION VALUE. With WICKED GAMES (1993), Palm Beach County tried to sue me on the old FREE beach scenes. They wanted to charge me to use the beaches for even a static shot of someone walking along the beach! How? By requiring filmmakers to purchase a one million dollar insurance policy to film or videotape on public beaches! I took this public, got a TON of publicity, and the bureaucrats backed off. My basic defense was asking the question, "Do we plan to have every tourist with a camcorder purchase this insurance policy?" Common sense prevailed and reaffirmed public places as public places, no location contract required. (As long as you weren't staging a gun fight or something! But check out what we DID do in WICKED GAMES on the beach: foot chases, a girl gets brutally murdered while sun-tanning, and several character conversations take place on the ocean! I got away with as much as I could!) Also in WICKED GAMES, I practiced what I preached in trying to light "white-walled" scenes with blue gels and yellow tints. Also, use extreme close-ups to avoid shabby interior backgrounds like motel rooms, etc. Speaking of motel rooms, we rented a lot of motel rooms for "bloody bathroom scenes" and such after being kicked out of the producer's home for this in KILLING SPREE. With WICKED GAMES, I also began to ask cast members for help in finding locations. Music composer/actor R.M. Hoopes volunteers his home and didn't mind the gore! Also, Patricia Paul, the lead actress, talked a friend of hers into letting us use his trendy restaurant in a scene! Some other actresses were used only on the condition that their houses were available as locations too! | | |
