In this thread, Siam Sam talks about Hawaii 5-0 filming at his condominium complex:
So, I’m curious about how disruptive it is when Hollywood comes along and decides to film near your house, or in your apartment complex, or at/near your place of work, or whatever.
Let’s say something is being filmed on the street in front of my house one day, from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM. Do they tell me I am not allowed to leave my house, or that I need to stay away? Do they have the right to do that? If I’m at home, and decide I want to go out for lunch, and say “screw those guys, I’m going,” what can they do about it?
Happens all the time around here. No, they can’t tell you to stay in your house, etc. If they need your property itself they’ll arrange that specifically–basically rent it from the owner.
The biggest hassle is they put up parking restrictions so nobody but the crew can park on the street during the shoot, for the whole block.
Oh–and it’s not 8:00 am to 4:00 pm. It’s always a 24-hour period reserved, at least, no matter when the scenes are set–they’ll be there for about 14 hours each day.
The Way We Were was shot on my college campus. I wouldn’t say it was disruptive, though they had a lot of equipment on the academic quad, but there was still plenty of room for people go go about their business.
The Age of Innocence was shot in our area, including part not far from where I was working. They blocked off the street, and spread dirt and stone to make it time appropriate. It was just one short scene, where we were standing in for Boston; most of the shooting was in Troy.
I worked in a famous building/set in NYC. In my 5 years, probably 10 movies and several of them for weeks. I road the elevator with Tobey Maguire, he talked to my sister on my phone to say hi to her.
My favorite interaction (for telling the story) was riding in the elevator with Julia Roberts (who is absolutely tiny which makes her unrecognizable!) and her assistant(?). I had just finished running an analytical experiment and was carrying the print out (along with’ wearing a lab coat, etc.) and asked, “Miss Roberts, would you mind signing this so I can put it into my thesis?” and the other person says, “Miss Roberts doesn’t sign while she is working.” I said that Julia Styles, Jessie Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway, Tobey Maguire were far more generous when they disrupted the building and our work.
But I will say that everyone else associated (other than those people tasked with keeping people off the set) are awesome and know that they are creating a pain (for parking, noise, bright lights, etc.) and offer donuts, coffee, hints on expected schedule. So generally it is pretty fun!
There was a scene from a movie that took place in the lobby where I worked. We were told when they were coming and what would be closed. I always went in and out of the building a different way, and didn’t drive past the building. So, if I wasn’t told they were there I wouldn’t know they were there.
The New York Times ran this article yesterday about having your house/apartment/condo used for filming a TV show or movie. It talks about the good and the bad, as well as the disruption to the neighbors. And the comments offer more experiences.
The 1994 movie Blown Away (1994) was filmed (among other places) in Copley Square in Boston. It was a major disruption, with a van “exploding” in the Square. They had to block off the square, and they had zillions of onlookers. I was using the library reading room at the time.
Happens all the f’n time in my neighborhood. ALL the time. And the parking restrictions in an area which relies on street parking are a pain. They will tow to the nearest available parking place (no ticket), which could be quite a distance. By the time one finds out that one has been towed, the signs with the number to call could be gone. Then they’ll move large tractor-trailers onto really tight streets. During actual filming, they might close off some streets to car traffic, which can cause lengthy delays.
Here is a partial list of productions which have shot in my neighborhood, just off the top of my head:
Fringe (they listed the scenes filmed in our neighborhood as Boston, and was the production that opened up the floodgates)
30 Rock
Blue Bloods (very often)
Shades of Blue (very often)
Army Wives (they were looking for houses to film in - good deal if they choose you)
Spiderman 1 (Tobey Macguire)
The Americans
Some CBS web series
Several cable series
Before Fringe, it was “wow, they’re filming in our neighborhood.” Now it’s “dammit, why are they here again.”
I work in a skyscraper and occasionally TV shows shoot some scenes outside. Usually that just means that a couple of street exits will get closed down and the sidewalk will be blocked off (i.e., just a minor detour).
When I lived in an apartment closer to downtown, a couple of times I received a flyer in my mailbox saying “if you hear gunshots on the 13th of Smarch, please ignore them – a gunfight is being filmed in this neighbourhood”.
Back when we were living in NYC, some movie/tv show was being shot right on our fire escape, outside our apartment. There was no communication with us in any way.
The nearly straight to video/The Hallmark channel Richard Gere movie Hachi was partially filmed at my office in an old train station. They took over the lobby, which was rough since we had people working on either side of it. We also couldn’t leave the building during exterior shots. Fortunately, they did a lot of it on weekends so it didn’t affect us as much as it could have. The one part that was really bad was they needed external generators to power all of the equipment, and they ran the lines through a window about 20 feet from me. Yeah they packed it as best as they could, but an open window in the winter in RI was not a treat.
Hawaii Five-0 is hugely popular here. All the residents are excited. This is a large, three-building compound with four different exits to outside, so no one expects to be inconvenienced much. Seems the main inconvenience will be to people living in the building whose elevators open onto the lobby, as that will be a major filming spot, but that’s not our building. For tomorrow, they’re saying the shooting will be from 6:30am-3pm, with free coffee and pastries in the lobby for the residents. I’ll probably miss the whole thing, but the wife will be around.
We’re just a block away from the Hilton Hawaiian Village, where the cast and crew tend to stay and which appears in a bunch of scenes every season. They’ll just have to walk over.
I literally rented out my house for 3 days to a shoot. We got just about a months worth of rent from it. We were allowed to sleep there, but had to be out at 7ish am, and couldn’t return until wrap. Which was usually about 10 pm.
Happens quite often in Portland and less often in my specific neighborhood, but yeah, it’s lots of trucks and tons of equipment and several blocks cordoned off for filming and truck parking.
The tornado scene from “Man of Steel” was shot near my old house. We could watch the shoot from the backyard. The road was closed for three days but it wasn’t a big deal as the detour didn’t take you out of the way at all.
Makes me think too of the 1989 filming for Air America (1990), starring Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. It was filmed mostly in northern Thailand’s provincial capital of Mae Hong Son, where I was living and working as a Peace Corps Volunteer. The movie people moved in and took over for about six weeks. The locals were ecstatic, as the movie people were throwing money around like water. Landlords got what would normally be a year’s rent for the six weeks or so. I met Mel Gibson at the time but was so engrossed in my mail from home that I didn’t even know that’s whom I was speaking with until someone else pointed it out.
I was a background extra on a film shoot in a nearby town. My scene was in a storefront that had been built in the front of the town’s hardware store. During a break, I ended up chatting with the hardware store’s owner. I asked how this film shoot was impacting his business, and he replied, “Not at all. They’re paying me extremely well for the use of the store.” I guess if Joe Smith couldn’t buy a can of paint or a pound of nails for a few days, the store owner wasn’t too worried.
One scene in The Hangover Part II was filmed in a small bar area in Bangkok’s Sukhumvit Soi 7/1 (aka Soi BJ for the presence of a certain popular blowjob bar). (A soi is a “lane.”) The owner of the now-defunct Busaba Bar (no, that was not the BJ bar) told me they paid him and every other bar in the soi a ton of money to close for the two hours of filming. They were like, “You all come back anytime.”
They filmed a Major Motion Picture starring Nicholas Cage at my work. I never saw them once. Whatever they did, however long it was, the crew was really non-disruptive.
But they did give this one guy a screen credit for his “help”. As if he wasn’t already full of himself before that.