Movie-philes throughout the Imperial Valley were excited at the news that actor George Clooney was in town this week for a re-shoot on the upcoming movie “Men Who Stare at Goats.”
The quick re-shoot — necessitated because of bad weather at the original filming location in New Mexico — pushed executive director of the Imperial County Film Commission Charla Teeters into action.
Teeters took time Thursday after visiting the film set to talk about her position and the ways Imperial County is attractive to Hollywood.
Q: What’s it like to be mixing it up with film crews? Do you enjoy your job?
A: I came on board this past July. So far it’s been a tremendous learning experience. It’s been great to see all the different things that do come down to the Valley in various media such as movies, TV and commercials. You’d be surprised at the things that go on in this area.
I love the challenge; it’s a new experience, a new position and it’s been extremely satisfying in that you get to meet different people and do different things every day. You get to meet with the various businesses of the Valley and explore the resources that we have that can help different productions.
Q: What would surprise people most about your job? What has surprised you about it?
A: How unglamorous it is, how much sand you can actually get in your shoes.
What surprises me is how genuinely nice the location managers and production crews and all those people can be. They just want to work; they just want to do their job and they’re glad to receive assistance from us.
What also surprised me is we do receive a lot of things down here, not just movie shoots — a movie is a rare thing, but we have a lot of the commercials and magazine shoots and things dropping out of planes: one time we had a location scout that was looking for a PS3 commercial shoot that involved dune buggies, ATVs and motorcycles dropping out the back of a C-130 into the Salton Sea. It actually ended up right over the border into the Inland Empire, but it was quite the event.
Q: How often do actual movies come down here?
A: We do get movies here, rarely full ones but more often pieces of movies will be shot here. We’ve had “Three Kings” film here, “The Scorpion King.”
“Jarhead” almost filmed three months here, but this movie is just getting some pickup scenes for a few days. We were used because we didn’t have bad weather.
Q: What brings film and TV crews to the Imperial Valley?
A: The thing that really draws them here is our amazing scenery and the fact that they can operate and work without a lot of interruption. We try very hard to make sure they can do what they need to do without invasion. Plus we’re not too far from L.A.
Our dunes are a huge asset because of the similarities to the Middle East, North Africa and other desert areas. We’re a varied desert: we have dunes, hard-packed desert, the Salton Sea, so we can be any kind of desert you need.
Our border town communities are frequently used as well. That’s one of our draws, is we have true border towns. There was an independent film called “Border Loss” filmed in the Calexico area before I got this position.
But interestingly the thing that has been shot the most since I have been on staff is Bombay Beach.
" You know, Thermal and the area close to the Salton Sea and Cat City is very very almost identical to some Iraqy towns, I wonder why that location hasn't been considered. "
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Chammy wrote on Jan 9, 2009 9:46 AM: