On Set in Wilmington

June 10, 2011, By Craig J. Heimbuch 3 comments

I have a friend who is a talented photographer. He's got a great studio, great business and is just a great guy. I visited him once in his loft while he was working on some product shots for a consumer goods company. The products were nice but not terribly photogenic. For two hours, he tweaked lights and lenses, played with angles and apertures. It seemed like a lot of work for a photo that would probably end up in a newspaper circular, seen for a moment and forgotten instantly. But he takes a lot of pride in his work, always wants to do his best and I respect him for it. I watch his meticulous tinkering and kept trying to imagine what the final image would end up looking like. A plastic bottle, I thought. What else could it be?

Once the lights were set and everything was perfect, he snapped the photo. When it came up on the screen of his MacBook, I was stunned. What looked to me like a plastic bottle came out as something more—more interesting, more important, more beautiful.

"How did you do that?" I asked.

"Photography is nothing but lies, my friend," he said. "Photographers, directors—they are professional liars."

Earlier this week, I had a chance to meet a couple of professional liars. They were the stars, the producers, the director and the crew of the eighth WalMart and Procter & Gamble Family Movie Night production. I thought about what my friend said when one of the actors, Josh Braaten, joined me and three other bloggers for lunch at a cool little cafe in Wilmington, North Carolina. Someone asked him how he was liking working on the movie.

"It's great," he said. "I get paid to play make-believe.... I think that's important for everyone to do, to have a chance just to pretend."

Braaten, for most, is not a household name. You may have seen him in "Semi-Pro" with Will Ferrell, "Dumb and Dumberer" or on an episode of USA's "Psych" last season. He's been in a few other things too, some you know, some you don't. Either way, he's a guy whose living the dream, a workaday actor keeping his head above water in a turbulent and unforgiving business—a business where talent only gets you so far and where roles for talented people like Josh are harder and harder to come by in this reality-obsessed media culture.

Call it lying, call it make believe. Call it the magic of Hollywood or whatever you want. But there's something special about Braaten's business. The time that goes into creating something out of nothing. The people, the effort. Work all day and into the night getting ready for a short scene to be filmed the next day. Filming that scene—which will probably be less than a minute of the final cut—takes hours. There's takes and retakes. Establishing shots and close-ups. Repetition and slavish devotion to detail are the norm. Like my friend the photographer, people who work on movies are asked to make something out of nothing, using only what they have and their vision for what it could be.

I sit next to Braaten at lunch. He's a nice guy. Affable. A kid from Minnesota whose made his living for a decade on TV and in movies. Tall, handsome in that 'guy on the high school basketball team' kind of way. He's patient with even the simplest questions and seems genuinely interested in answering them. Maybe it's the tabloids, maybe it's the evening news stories about Charlie Sheen, but I expected Braaten and other actors to be brats. I expected the people who make movies to be stand-offish and demanding. And, yet, here was this guy, this dude, eating a burger and talking to me about how much he likes to write about sports.

It's a good thing Braaten ate only the burger. The scene he filmed, with co-star Beau Bridges, involves a family dinner. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, peas, iced tea. Over the course of the afternoon and evening he will have to take dozens of bites of mashed potatoes and make each one seem like the first. Every take requires a new plate, each one piled with an identical cone of mashed potatoes. In some takes, he'll be allowed to make noise with the fork. In others, he'll have to do it silently, all under the watchful eyes of the director and script supervisor, whose job it is to ensure continuity. Assistant Producer Justin Bell goes over all of this with us at lunch and again during a walk-through on the set.

When touring the childhood bedroom of the main character, Bell points out the details of the room. The character is in his 30s, so he wouldn't have a DVD player in his childhood bedroom. There's a pile of VHS cassettes piled next to the television, which is vintage in that 80s way—not classic, just old. The posters on the wall are of fake football players from fake NFL teams. One of them is named Justin Bell, a small joke played by the art department on their producer. Everything about the set, which is a private home on a tree-lined street in Wilmington's central residential neighborhood, is a lie. The homeowners, who are staying in a hotel while production is ongoing, decorated the home with eastern art and modern furniture. When they left, every one of their possessions was cataloged and removed. The house was redecorated to be more appropriate for Bridges' character, a high school football coach. Everywhere you look are details—fake family candids, stacks and stacks of identical plates, forks and glasses—all under the watchful glare of lighting rigs, put there by professional liars and highly skilled pretenders.

Even if you've never been there, you've seen Wilmington. It may have been called something else— "Capeside," "Tree Hill," "Shelby,"—but it's always Wilmington. It's where Michael Jordan was born and cut from his high school basketball team. It's where movies and TV shows are made, such as "Weekend at Bernie's," "Empire Records," "Cape Fear," "The Crow," "The Hudsucker Proxy," "Blue Velvet," "Matlock," "Dawson's Creek," and "Eastbound and Down" to name a few. It's an old town and also kind of new. It could be anything, anywhere and therein lies the appeal.

I had always wanted to visit Wilmington. My colleague Jack Heffron told me it's one of the five places in the world he'd like to live. Another friend told me it was his vision of heaven. Personally, I just like North Carolina and old cities. I like the Mid-Atlantic. Put all these together with an opportunity to go visit a movie set and it wasn't much of a decision to go. I went and it was everything I had hoped it would be. The Cape Fear River, the wooden boardwalk, shops, restaurants and a downtown that seems to have peaked in the 50s, but is making a comeback with hippie bakeries and hipster bars.

I wandered through town on a morning run and realized any one of the stately, sleepy old houses could be a set. Making movies here is a big part of the economy, but also just works. It's unlike any other place I've ever been and exactly like every place I've ever been. I ask Justin Bell why it was chosen as the location for the Family Movie Night project. He talked a little bit about economics and tax incentives, a little about a skilled labor force, but then settled in on this idea:

"Because it could be anywhere," he said. "It could be the South or the Northeast or the Midwest. It could be a city or a suburb or in the country. It's one of those places that can feel like home, no matter where home is."

In other words, it's like that plastic bottle my friend was taking pictures of. Looking at it through normal eyes, you just see a bottle. But look at it with the eyes of a liar, of a pretender and you can see what Wilmington could be, if you only have the patient attention to detail to see it. I guess that's why they call it movie magic.