CBC News interviewed The Shape of Water‘s production designer Paul Austerberry in early March 2018 about his work on the recent Oscar winner. His job, according to Leva Lucs of the CBC “was to transform some of Toronto’s most well-known landmarks into a hyper-stylized version of Baltimore in the 1960s. He mentioned on Friday to host Tom Power of CBC Radio’s q that if the viewer ‘figured out it was Toronto, we’d be in trouble.'”
I had to laugh.
Mr. Austerberry was not trying to tell the interviewer that, in general, a Toronto setting for a story is a problem. He was referring to the fact that the setting of the film is 1960s Baltimore and so the clearance work would have been conducted with that city as its focus. They were “shooting Toronto for Baltimore:” industry-speak for telling a story set in Baltimore Maryland but actually shooting the film in Toronto and masking all evidence of Toronto, Ontario. If a viewer watches the film and recognizes enough landmarks and locations to suggest that the story is taking place there, Toronto could well be considered the setting for the story and many story elements would then need re-clearing for a Toronto setting: character names, business names, police department jargon, addresses… the list goes on.
Austerberry’s “we’d be in trouble” comment speaks to one of the pressures put on production by the clearance process. Because our job is to help you avoid the trouble that Mr. Austerberry refers to, our order form asks: Setting: Unspecified? Fictional city/town (please specify)? Actual city/town (please specify)? That answer tells us where we will conduct our research. We often work with productions that might not know where the story will be set when they send us the script. In those situations, we ask: “Will you show license plates?” and “Will any local landmarks be visible?”
Productions have asked us on numerous occasions to re-do the research for a project because their setting has changed. Perhaps a provincial or state tax lured the project to a locale that is completely different from that which the screenwriter had imagined. We’ve re-done the research for a new setting, we’ve helped come up with fake setting names, we’ve even cleared projects for 2 different settings (in that case, the show had different content for U.S. and Canadian versions).
There are times when the best course of action is to use a completely fictional setting. Here is an example of when that might have been a good idea. The release of the 1992 feature film Grand Canyon (starring Kevin Kline, director Lawrence Kasdan) caused some outrage in the city of Inglewood, California, with city officials expressing their disappointment in how their city was portrayed in the film. Per the L.A. Times article published at the time, here is an example of the offending content: “Kline is threatened by gang members on a blighted street that he identifies as being ‘somewhere in Inglewood’ and is told later by his son that he was lucky to get out alive.”
The Inglewood City Council wrote a four-page letter to Hollywood trade publications pointing out that “While it is true that there is crime in Inglewood (as there is everywhere else), on the whole, the residents of this city are just as law-abiding, if not more, than others in cities of comparable size and diversity.” Feeling unjustly singled out, the city asked for an apology and discussed a ban on production permits (dozens had been issued by the city during the previous year). The L.A. Times reported that some residents of Inglewood “complained that the movie would cause their property values to fall, called for Grand Canyon to be reissued without any reference to Inglewood.” Making such a change in post-production is an expensive undertaking and presents even more of a challenge when a film has already been released.
Kasdan explained to the L.A. Times that his goal in making the movie was to encourage conversation about what was happening in America’s cities. “In Los Angeles,” he said, “we had the fantasy that we could run to our neighborhoods and hide, but that illusion has been dispelled. One wrong turn plants you in enemy territory. There is no safe place any more, no sense of security.” Use of a fictional city name would have prevented Inglewood’s anger while still allowing Kasdan to make his point. The level of risk involved with using a real city name was surely discussed by the producers and production counsel. If that conversation had ended with a decision to go with a fictional setting, the clearance company could have sent fake place names to use instead.
Another consideration with the setting of the story is the complexity of the clearances that will be needed. We have recently been working on a tv show that is set in an actual American small town. We typically will look for cast names etc. not just in that town but in all towns within a one-hour drive… “in the greater xxxx area.” Not being familiar with all the towns within a one-hour radius of this one, we then have to consult a state map as we determine where the towns are located in which we find people with similar names, a time-consuming process. If you ask the clearance company for input, they’ll always tell you that a fictional setting will speed up the research and reduce the risk (a big concern) of identifying real people.
I’ll end with an example of something just plain silly that happened recently with the use of a place name in a movie. In this case, it was one of the biggest movies of the year: Black Panther. Those of you who have seen it know that about the place called Wakanda that features very prominently in the story. The Hollywood Reporter spoke with Alise Homola, executive assistant to the village administrator and mayor of Wauconda, Illinois not long after the movie hit the big screen. “Someone called,” said Homola, “and asked how we pronounced the village name and when I told him, he began yelling, ‘Wakanda forever!'” Homola has also fielded phone calls in which she was asked for vibranium (the fictional substance connected with the movie’s Wakanda). People can be goofy and some like to have fun with phone calls like this. When the calls become a nuisance, however, and the possibility of a lawsuit starts to materialize, the idea that the clearance company had floated of using a completely fictional town name starts sounding like a pretty good idea.
First published August, 2018