Movie Stalking 101, or How I Found Matt Smith on a Derelict Lot in Downtown Detroit

No apologies for more gratuitous shots of Matt Smith. Obviously these were taken a few days ago and many similar ones have already hit the net, but there’s always room for more. People keep asking me how I find the sets to get these shots. It isn’t too hard these days, though I’m not sure how people managed before Twitter.

Step One: OnLocationVacations is a great starting point. Every day Christine posts filming locations on her site and people comment on her posts during the day when they get updates, but obviously Twitter has a more real-time thing going on, and I confess to spending too much time with some good key words, trying to track down the day’s filming sites in the D. Think laterally. What would the average (non movie-stalker) person tweet if they saw filming trucks on their street? If they actually see Ryan Gosling, that’s easy. It’s sure to be “OMG RYAN GOSLING!!” Or something like that. Obviously celebrity names are a good search term (unless the celebrity is Ryan Gosling, because a thousand people tweet about him every minute of the freaking day). In addition to the twitterverse, I have some friends I’ve met on set over the years: stalkers like me, autograph hunters, and the occasional ‘real’ photographer. It’s not always easy. Movies being filmed on abandoned lots in downtown Detroit with a handful of extras are a lot harder to find than something on the U of M Campus in Ann Arbor with a few thousand students tweeting celebrity sightings like crazy. Extras cannot resist tweeting and instagramming. If you’re lucky the casting agents for extras will also have a website/facebook/twitter, that can provide useful info such as call times. Call times are gold.

Step Two: Find the movie basecamp. The place where all the trailers and trucks are, usually in a big parking lot. Once you’ve found this, you can stake it out if you’re patient and security are nice. This is one way to see the ‘stars’ come and go, and may be a good place to get autographs if that’s what you’re looking for, but obviously you have to be there at the right time of day or you’ll just be sitting staring at a vacant lot and a bunch of trailers all day. If you are having trouble finding the basecamp, or the filming location, you can watch out for the coming and going of ‘the vans.’ These are the black or white passenger vans that take actors and crew back and forth from basecamp to the set. Movement of the vans is a clue that something is about to happen!

Step Three: Drive around in circles for hours seeing nothing at all. This is usually my step 3 and 4 and 5. Unless you are a little bit addicted to movie stalking, you really don’t want to be doing this as it can be pretty dull and demoralizing, and you can’t help thinking about all the things you really should be doing, and most of those don’t involve cruising around areas of Detroit that you have spent the last x years of your live carefully avoiding. (Ignore this if you are stalking the U of M campus — walking is easier that driving, and generally you won’t get mugged there, though the huge waste of time clause still applies).

Step Four:  You’ve found the set. It’s obvious from the trucks, porta-potties, small canopy tents, and burly guys in black or red polo shirts who are yelling at you to go away. Smile as best you can. These guys have a job to do, and mostly I imagine, it sucks. My movie set security stories would fill another post. Best approach is to smile, be respectful, and keep a low profile, but if they are on public property, remember that you can absolutely stand and watch AND take pictures. They may tell you otherwise, but when they do, they are wrong. Scope around, work out what’s going on, and wait. There’s always a lot of waiting.

Step Five: Just when you are about to give up, someone yells. “It’s them!” In this case, I had pulled my car into a small parking area a hundred yards or so from the place the trucks were set up. It turned out that in the same small area were a couple of paparazzi from Splash! (hi guys), who were doing a much better job at being inconspicuous than I was, despite their enormous lenses. Hey, size isn’t everything, and my puny 200 mm lens did just fine, thank you. Dumb luck is key here. We had no idea that the scene currently being filmed would soon be about 20 feet from where we were standing. Never underestimate dumb luck. At this point you hope that the adrenaline kicks in just enough that you can get your camera out and start clicking, and not too much so that you can’t focus or actually drop your camera. In this case, dumb luck worked out pretty well. (cue more gratuitous shots of Matt Smith and Ryan Gosling)

Matt Smith plays the role of Bully in Ryan Gosling’s “How to Catch a Monster”

 

 

Ah, now I get it. Sort of. 

Ryan Gosling’s “How to Catch a Monster” filming in Detroit

Apologies for the shameful neglect of this blog. It’s hard to write about the movies being filmed in Michigan when the politicians chased them all away. More politics later, but for now the news around town is of course Ryan Gosling and his directorial debut movie, How to Catch a Monster.

Everyone loves Ryan Gosling, and Twitter is abuzz with the fact that Ryan is in town. But Matt Smith! Yes, Doctor Who is in Detroit, and I think people may have underestimated the impact of Matt and his newly-shaved head! 

There will be more pictures later, but first I have to re-learn wordpress and get back to the set today. For now, you can see some of the shots I took of yesterday’s filming at OnLocationVacations.com. Thanks to Christine at @OLV for making the life of a movie stalker SO much easier!

More from the set of The Double

Loved the way they lit the street up with this huge balloon in the sky!.

Richard Gere and Topher Grace setting up for a driving scene.

Topher and his on-screen wife, Odette Yustman.

Richard Gere skulking in the bushes.

More Richard Gere and Topher Grace and the state of movies in Michigan

Looks like the release date for The Double has slipped until the end of October.  Other Michigan movies out in theaters right now include the Ides of March and Real Steel. It’s hard to believe these were being filmed here just a year or less ago, and harder still to see how things have changed since.

The Michigan Film Office has run out of money for this year and is no longer accepting any applications. We just heard that we lost Iron Man 3 to North Carolina, and who knows how many other movies that could have brought millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs to the State will now be filmed in Ohio and Illinois and North Carolina and Lousiana.  I’m going to say that again, louder… MILLIONS OF DOLLARS AND HUNDREDS OF JOBS.  In fact movies will be filmed anywhere other than here, because despite what the naysayers keep nay-saying, 41 states, including California, have some kind of film incentive. Yes, even California has a film incentive! Why? Because they know it wastes tax payer money? I’m guessing (and this is, you know, a wild and crazy guess…) because when movies are filmed in your town and State, it brings in MILLIONS OF DOLLARS.

There are still a few small movies planned for the next few months, but as much as I support these ventures, they are not the ventures that are going to build a movie industry in Michigan. They aren’t the projects that are going to keep young graduates from fleeing the State to the coasts. They aren’t the projects that are going to put Michigan on the map for anything other than urban collapse and an auto industry that is hanging in there, just. Yes, this makes me cranky.

My own State Senator, Senator Mike Kowall, may not agree with me on some other issues, but he is trying to introduce a bill that will restore the incentives in some form. The bill will set aside $100 million rather than the current (already spent) $25 million, and give more oversight and transparency to the program. There are other things I’m not so happy about like a clause which states that the movie ‘must show Michigan in a good light.”  Really? I’m thinking that if someone wants to spend say $160 million to film in burned out buildings in Detroit, we should hug them and take their money.  But we do need to restore the program and put some real commitment behind it so that we don’t look flaky and unreliable — which we currently do. Right now no one wants to commit to filming here when the whole program looks uncertain.

S.B. 383, sponsored by state Sen. Mike Kowall, gives the Michigan Film Office the ability to negotiate the size of incentives it offers to film, television and video game producers.  Under current law, the incentive program is strictly defined, resulting in fixed incentive percentages the film office must offer and greater expenditure of taxpayer money than necessary.  With this change, the film office may offer productions lower incentives packages than the current automatic 42 percent subsidy.  By having the ability to offer varying levels of support, this change will also give the state more ability to ensure the incentive program creates jobs for Michigan residents.  The legislation is now P.A. 77. 

I only hope that sanity prevails, and this bill passes, because, Lions and Tigers aside, Detroit and Michigan could use a break right now.

Meanwhile, remember when we were rubbing shoulders with Topher and Richard?

Topher Grace on the set of The Double, Northville

Those of us a little older were of course, most impressed by the presence of Richard Gere in town. The younger ones were more interested in Topher Grace, who’s certainly grown up a lot since That 70s Show!

Richard was very much the ‘movie star.’  He signed some autographs and allowed a few pictures to be taken, but he was aloof. Topher was predictably a lot more approachable and as you can see, he got a lot of attention from the neighborhood girls!

His character in the movie is a younger FBI agent, married with a young child and a baby. It was obvious watching him interact with his youngest co-stars (twins) that this was a new role for him. Experienced parents chuckled as he tried to look natural holding the babies. I’ll be interested to see how he pulls it off in the movie!

One scene involved Topher coming out of the back door of the house while on the phone holding an infant, but after a few takes it proved impossible for him to do this in a natural way. They decides to substitute a cat for the infant… actually calling around the bystanders to borrow one for the scene, but this didn’t work out so well either!

The Double, Northville, Michigan

The scenes of The Double filmed in Northville, Michigan were at a charming bungalow south of the downtown area. Actually the external shots were filmed at one house, internal shots at another which had a better layout, further down the street.  Filming took a few days, during which there was almost a street party atmosphere in the neighborhood. The crew and security were great, the cast very obliging to have their photographs taken with fans. In fact every effort was taken to work with the neighbors to make the whole thing a pleasant experience. It was a lot of fun.

This is the house used for the outside scenes.

Several scenes were filmed in the back yard.

Remember when movies were filmed in Michigan?

As those of us who love having movies made in our backyard, and who actually think that the movie industry putting millions of dollars into our State was a good idea, mourn the Governor’s destruction of the movie industry in Michigan, now that the movies are finally making it to the screen we can at least look back at how great it was last year when we were tripping over movie sets in our state.

Watch this space over the next few days for some pictures from the set of The Double with Richard Gere and Topher Grace. Parts of the movie were filmed almost literally in my back yard in Northville, Michigan. Actually they were filmed in my friend Amy’s back yard. Thanks, Amy for letting most of the town come and watch filming from your deck!

One tip: If you do not want to be spoiled with the entire plot of this movie, DO NOT WATCH THE TRAILER!

Taking photographs on movie sets. Can they stop you?

There are several comments today about the somewhat heavy-handed way in which individuals were told to stop taking photographs on the set of AWOL on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. On Friday night in downtown Ypsilanti, I witnessed a member of the production crew approach a woman who had taken pictures of the riot scenes setting up. He asked her to delete the pictures from her memory card and she began to comply. I approached and as politely as I could, advised her that she did not have to do that, and that he should not ask her to do so. I then took some pictures myself and was told that I was breaking the law, and that my pictures were the property of the production company.

In fact the law is very simple. If you can see it, you can pretty much photograph it (that’s not the precise legal terminology!).  The law is very much on the side of the photographer, and, particularly in the situation of movie sets on public property, no one has the right to tell you to stop taking photographs. In fact, if they harass you, tell you they will call the police, ask you to hand over your camera, take your camera or delete the photographs, THEY are the ones in violation of the law. Now, security guards will tell you to stop. They are paid to do that, and they succeed because men in uniform look official and some can be intimidating. And because most people do not know the law.

So I politely advised the member of the crew that I understood that he was doing his job, but that he was incorrect and that could (and would) photograph the set. He then set off to find the police to reinforce his message. I don’t know what the police would have said, because I moved on to another part of the set and continued to take photographs!

On to today. I’d no sooner begun to take a snap or two when the same crew member approaches. He leaves after I smile and shake my head at him, but he brings back  a campus police officer who also tells me I should not be taking photographs because the film company ‘doesn’t want it.’ Well, they may not want it to be 95 degrees either, but this is Michigan. I slowly, clearly and calmly explain that I am on public property, taking a picture of something on public property and that I wasn’t doing anything wrong by taking photographs. She asked for my name and contact details, which I gave and immediately regretted, because… why? I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and she clearly didn’t know the law either.  I pointed out the OTHER people around taking photographs and asked why they weren’t being stopped and she told me that it was because I’d been seen on the set before! Aha, so my crime wasn’t taking pictures today, it was taking pictures more than once.

Finally she suggested that I speak to the University liaison, who eventually arrived. I  spoke to her for a few minutes  and explained the situation and she said that the University had leased the area we were standing on to the movie company. Then she pointed to an area 20 feet away that wasn’t rented to the movie company. Apparently I could do anything I wanted there, and she advised me to that if anyone else hassled me, to send them to her.  She rocks.

Even so, I was hassled again by both security and by crew. It’s crazy. #1. Learn the law and stop harassing people with cameras who are not getting in your way.  I am at a distance. I am courteous. I am not causing anyone a problem. #2. Really? This is an Indie film. George Clooney was totally happy with people taking pictures of the Ides of March filming. But this crew is keeping everything under wraps? Seriously? Absurd. #3. Around 30 people read this blog on a good day when I manage to get a celebrity. Enjoy the free publicity.

There’s plenty on the web about the rights of photographers. There’s even a current legal battle in Florida because a film company thought they could BAN photography from the streets around the set. Uh no. Other great articles like this: Photography and the Law — Know Your Rights.  I’m not a lawyer, don’t quote me. Always be polite. Don’t get argumentative. You may have the law on your side, but if the security guard is having a bad day, you may still get hurt!

I have nothing against the crew guy who seems to have made it his mission to stop me taking pictures of the AWOL set. He wasn’t rude or abusive, just ill-informed and frustrated with my refusal to stop. A week of filming left and I’m not sure I have the energy to fight it. But tomorrow is another day, and I do love all those 70s outfits. We’ll see.

More AWOL on the University of Michigan Campus

Today seemed to be more crowd scenes — student protests on campus. 1970s extras filled the small square, a lot of tie-dye, plaid and paisley. Teresa Palmer and Liam Hemsworth here in the middle of the scene.

Austin Stowell, watching the scenes. No one seemed to notice him, or the rest of the cast sitting at the cafe.