HollyWoo again

Up on Worcester's Harvard Street near the old Courthouse, these signs are in great abundance. The parking spaces are reserved for people involved with location filming of The Surrogates.

I took a ride over there yesterday and snapped a few pictures. I've seen these operations before, and it always impresses me how extensive it is. I spent a year living in Hollywood back in 1982, and sights like this were commonplace. About every third or fourth person I met was "in the business" and it was kinda like it used to be around here when every third of fourth person you met either worked at Norton's or Wyman's or one of the other big companies.

Imagine a medium sized business, only nobody reports to work every day at the same place. Instead, they travel from location to location without any permanent place of business. Put all that equipment, office support, production crew, CEO and staff, ...put the whole operation into mobile homes, trailers, rigging trucks and hotel rooms, and you might get some idea of what this involves.

This is a roughly joined three picture panorama of the parking lot in front of the Salisbury Mansion, taken from across the street on Highland. (Click on the picture for a larger view.)

The sign on the corner of Highland and Harvard says that this is "Base Camp" for the location.

There were WPD officers and film company security guys everywhere around this area, and it isn't so much to keep out the gawking fans who might want to get a look at a movie star. The film business is surrounded by all kinds of entrepid weavers and crawlers who, if they could sneak into the set, might score big for pictures and script leaks.

This is serious business, and it's big business.

When these guys start arriving in a new location, the first thing they do is set up signs for everyone else. The last thing an operation like this needs is for one piece of the puzzle to get lost trying to figure out how to navigate around in a new location.

By now it should be obvious that I was mostly interested in pictures of the ephemeral nature of the infrastructure surrounding this operation. Everything is temporary, but robust. The medium sized company springs into existence for a finite period of time, and once the job is done, it all simply evaporates and morphs into some completely new and different operation somewhere else.

Before I took all these shots, I drove around the area shooting video and threw them together for a quick tour...