Me: OK. How about if you just let me know where filming is allowed?
Rep: That’s not how it works. You tell me where you want to film. I let you know if it’s possible.
Me: But isn’t that a bit round-about? Like, I can keep guessing at ideas, but wouldn’t it be easier to just tell me where you’ve allowed productions in the past so we can follow in their footsteps?
Rep: As I said, that’s not how it works. You say what you want. I let you know if it’s possible.
Me: OK. How about (guessing) A/B/C/D/E/F/G?
Rep: No/no/no/no/no/no.
Me: So, ah, this part on your site where it says LAX is film friendly…is maybe not entirely accurate?
Rep: Excuse me, but have you not heard of a little movie filmed here called Speed?
Me: YES! Excellent! I love Speed! Like when the bus blows up on the tarmac! Can we do something similar to what Speed did?
Once back in my NYC scouting days, I was working on a TV show that was planning to shoot at a cemetery in Brooklyn. As we were scouting it with the director, an apartment scene was abruptly added to the day’s work, and I was given an hour to find a cleared option for them to see.
Across the street from the cemetery was a row of single story houses that looked small enough to cheat as an apartment, so I ran over and started knocking on doors. No answer on the first few. A few no’s. Then, on the fifth or sixth try, a woman opened the door.
I think she was in her early sixties. Her face was weathered but youthful. I remember she had long, silvery-gray hair pulled back into a pony tail, and a kind smile, and eyes that listened carefully as I raced through my pitch. She said she was interested, and I noticed she had a Russian accent and spoke in a quiet, refined voice.
I hurried to take the pictures of her living room, then thanked her profusely and explained that I’d likely be back with the team within the hour.
I found the director and group waiting at a coffee shop. Showed the pictures. Everyone loved it, and I remember being thrilled that this nice woman was going to get an unexpected payday for her little house by the cemetery.
We went back to the house and she invited us in. The group of seven – director, AD, production designer, a few others, all men – trucked inside and began to look around.
Then, all of a sudden, I noticed: something was in the air. Like everyone was sharing a joke I wasn’t in on.
The scout wrapped up very quickly, which is never a good sign when they’re considering your place for filming. Everyone headed out with polite goodbyes. I thanked the woman again and let her know we’d be in touch, then hurried after the group.
I found everyone walking back to the cemetery, laughing. I asked what was wrong. “Dude, did you not see the stripper pole?” the AD asked. “She’s a fucking prostitute, man. How pathetic is that?”
Apparently, in my rush to photograph the location, I’d missed the fact that there was a stripper pole in one corner, and some other items lying about that made it clear what her day job was.
“What a sad fucking situation,” someone else said. “Can you imagine? Being an old hooker working next to the cemetery?”
“And think about the kind of guys who’d want to bang someone her age,” someone else added. “Fucking depressing.” For the entire walk back to the van, everyone just kept making fun of her. To this day, I hate them for it.
As a location scout, your job is to set foot in an infinite variety of worlds. One day might be Malibu mansions, the next, Skid Row hovels, then on to Everywhere USA suburban homes or trailer parks. And in 20+ years of scouting, two things stand out to me.
The first is that whatever you imagine a situation you haven’t experienced to be, you. are. always. wrong. You might get some of the notes sort of close to the mark, but humans are simply far, far too varied, nuanced, and complex to ever reduce to one-note caricatures.
The second is that there is nothing more vulnerable than inviting a total stranger into your home not only to witness the life you’ve built for yourself, but to cast judgement over it. I’ve seen people hire cleaning crews to scrub their houses from top to bottom before I arrive. Others will literally try to talk me out of considering their place for filming as I’m taking pictures, ashamed and apologetic: “You don’t want to film here. It’s such a dump.”
Which is why I will always consider it the highest privilege to be welcomed into a home as a guest, no matter how expensive it is, how nice the decor, how prestigious the zip code. In fact, I’m not there to judge; my job is to capture it as it is without judgement.
For the woman in the house by the cemetery, all I know is that she was willing to let me into her home and share a glimpse of her life. If anyone should be ashamed, it’s those who accepted her invitation and acted like tourists instead of guests.
One thing I love about scouting on crime shows is when they’ll ask the locations department for fresh ideas on where to stage a murder. I’ve always thought the maze of tires you find at mom-and-pop auto repair shops could make a pretty solid option…
Here’s another example of how hard it is to shut off the location scout part of my brain when watching old movies.
I’m watching Pickup on South Street, the 1950s noir I mentioned yesterday. Set in NYC, it was actually filmed in LA, as seen in this shot staged on Grand…
Like most films of the era, the vast majority of it was shot on the backlot – in this case, Fox, featuring its city streets and subway set.
Then, once in a while, they film on location cheating LA for NYC, like this newsstand scene shot at the PacMutual building. Pinpointing the on-location addresses, they’re all on the same city block, suggesting the movie was given exactly one day off the lot to give the movie some scope.
And then, an absolute oddball hits: two police detectives look out their office window…and we cut to their POV of the street below…
And as I’m staring at the shot, something strange hits me – I know this location… But it’s not in LA… It’s in New York City. So why was this exceptionally random shot of a car pulling up filmed in NYC, when 98% of the movie was filmed in Los Angeles??
Then I realize something else: it’s actually not random at all. This is the north entrance of what was once the official headquarters for the NY Police Department at the corner of Centre and Broome. So maybe they were going for accuracy…
Except, if the detectives are supposed to be in police headquarters, why is their POV looking AT it, rather than out from it? It must have been shot from this building across the street… And then I see something…
Written near the roofline is “The Annex” – which refers to the fact that this used to be the Police Annex building, and housed such departments as the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Meaning: it is the absolute height of real-world accuracy that this view is the detective’s POV!
But why bother?!? Literally no one watching the movie will EVER recognize this absurdly obscure location. And how the hell did they EVER justify the expense of a camera crew to get this shot, when it could’ve been cheated in LA without any effort whatsoever??
I have a theory. There are roughly four other actual NYC shots in the film: the NY Public Library, a street in Williamsburg, and some rear projection footage for the main character’s riverside shanty and a subway scene.
Writer/director Samuel Fuller had once been a crime reporter, and, when writing the script, worked closely with an active NYPD detective named Dan Campion for the purposes of realism.
So here’s my guess: the production approved a single day of second unit photography in NYC to grab pick-up shots. The library, the river, the subway, the Brooklyn street…
And then Campion offers: hey, if you need a POV shot out a Police Department window, why not come by and shoot the real deal?
Wish I knew for sure. But whatever the reason, TOP marks to Fuller for bothering to include this ridiculously obscure few seconds of true NYC realism!
Just another example of what it’s like to watch movies when you’re location scout… 🙂
Whenever I watch an old movie that was shot on location, it’s really hard to stop the location scout side of my brain from constantly trying to figure out how people did my job 70+ years ago. Here’s an example from a 1953 noir called Pickup on South Street….
And here’s what goes on in my head as I see it:
In 2026, darting through traffic is a serious enough stunt that you want everything to be buttoned up. That’s your lead actress putting herself in harm’s way, and the entire production depends on providing everyone with a safe and controlled filming environment.
It’s fun to look closely and see things I recognize, like this police officer, just barely visible, holding back traffic. Also, I believe that’s his police car blocking people from exiting the parking lot, which is a smart way to do it!
Then you have the pedestrians in the background. These days, you don’t leave anything to chance, for both safety and legal reasons, so everyone in frame should be part of the production. But in older movies, you often see this funny mix of background actors walking around crowds who are clearly gawking at the shoot. You usually won’t notice it unless you look for it, but once you do, you’ll start to see it in countless old movies filmed on location.
But what about everything we consider standard in 2026? From permits and craft service, to equipment truck and basecamp parking, generators and insurance… I’m sure much was far, far more lax in 1953, but what was actually a strict requirement that we don’t even think about anymore?
We see the woman in the white dress walk into the PacMutual building…
And then, a shot of the gorgeous lobby, built in 1908 and still used for filming all these decades later (one notable perk: front-facing elevator banks, a rarity).
If there’s any argument for shooting on location, simply watch old movies, where 90% are typically shot on stage builds – and then, a real world shot sneaks in, and suddenly everything comes alive.
But what were location fees like back in 1953? Were film shoots restricted to weekend-only shoots so as to not upset tenants? Was the phone booth she uses real, or a prop trucked into the lobby?
Later in the film, we see a man walk down the street…and eagle-eyed viewers will notice that’s the same arched-window building in the cornder from the earlier street-crossing shot…
He turns into a lobby with a magazine stand – and in fact, we’ve been here before…
This is the side entrance to the PacMutual lobby! And suddenly, the logistics/cost-saving scout in me sees a location manager who knew the value of a property offering two distinct locations in one.
But what I appreciate most is that I first watched Pickup on South Street to check out the handful of scenes shot in New York, a rarity at the time. You get a brief glimpse of the Williamsburg Bridge…
A rear projection of the Brooklyn Bridge at the back of the main character’s dockside shanty…
A quick shot of the Public Library…
After most unexpectedly, when the police officers look out the window of their fake office, the view is ACTUALLY what would’ve been seen from the old Police Annex in NYC at the corner of Broome & Centre Street:
Last but not least, when they ride the fake subway, we get a rear projection taken from the L train:
Which is why, when this shot of LA posing as New York showed up, I didn’t blink an eye on first viewing, and spent about an hour trying to figure out what midtown block it was shot on before I realized I’d been fooled…
Which is the highest praise you can give to a location scout. No credit is given on the film, so to whoever that was, proud to follow in your footsteps all these decades later.
People always ask, “so what big actors have you met as a location scout?” And I’ll always lie and drop a few big names, because that’s obviously what they want to hear. But what I’m actually thinking about are moments like the time I was scouting a midcentury house outside LA…
The owners are showing me around, a husband and wife in their 70s. I’m talking about what to expect for filming, and then the wife sheepishly says, “I was in a movie once, a long time ago.” And I’m like “oh, cool, what movie?” And she says, “well, it’s The Exorcist.”
THE Exorcist? I stop taking pictures and she tells me how back in the 70s, she had a girlfriend who was dating someone on the production. And one day she gets a call from the friend asking if she wants to make a little money playing tennis with her in the background of a shot.
She says I wouldn’t remember the scene, but I absolutely know it, because it’s a pivotal moment where Father Karras is informed that a body was found with its head twisted completely around, news made all the more unsettling by the casual game of tennis echoing in the background.
She says I wouldn’t remember the scene, but I absolutely know it, because it’s a pivotal moment where Father Karras is informed that a body was found with its head twisted completely around, news made all the more unsettling by the casual game of tennis echoing in the background.
Now, I’ve met Ellen Burstyn before, and that was certainly cool too! But for some reason, these are the ones that stand out for me, chance encounters with the sort of people who, through sheer luck of the universe, find themselves forever immortalized playing a small role in one of the greatest horror movies of all time.
As a location scout, I love places that, in a single image, can instantly communicate exactly where they are in the universe. Saw such a place yesterday when scouting apartments: palm trees, stucco, Spanish accents, courtyard pond with statuary…
Once, I was scouting an abandoned hospital building for a movie. I started to go into a large common room, and my guide said, “Oh, don’t go in there.” I asked why and he said, “because that floor is severely water damaged, and you’ll fall through into the basement.”
You’d NEVER have known from looking at it – it looked like every other room we’d gone through. And I realized that if I had been exploring alone, I’d absolutely have wound up in a pile of rubble in the basement, with a broken leg or spine or worse.
Prior to this, there was nothing I loved more than exploring abandoned places like hospitals and schools, often alone. After? I now assume every abandoned building is like a killer in the shadows looking to get me the moment I let my guard down. Hasn’t happened yet… But you never know…
