Democracy on the Front Lines
City Administrator’s Blog
Walter Denton
June 4, 2007
You may have seen the news articles about portions of a movie being filmed in downtown Edwardsville. Well, Edwardsville isn’t the only Metro East city to be the movies. The same movie crew is filming in O’Fallon today. They did not need any official approvals to film here, so I guess that’s why it did not make the news.
Anyhow, we were contacted last week by a movie production company about filming a scene in O’Fallon. The details are murky but they are filming a brief, approximately two-hour-long sequence involving a minivan driving north on Green Mount Road toward Pierce Boulevard and getting stuck in traffic.
The movie is titled The Return and stars Rachel McAdams (Wedding Crashers, The Notebook), Tim Robbins (Academy Award-winner for Mystic River, Shawshank Redemption) and Michael Pena (Babel, World Trade Center) as three soldiers returning home after serving in the Iraq War.
They will be filming in the St. Louis area from late May until mid June. We said we would accommodate them within reason as long as they do not paralyze traffic all day at the I-64 interchange. They agreed to comply.
What struck me most about the event is the amount of work required by the production company to schedule the scene. Depending on the number of locations to film the movie, they will have to contact local officials, get approvals, arrange for road closures, and coordinate the players for each location change. The scene in O’Fallon was minor, but they still had to contact the police chief and arrange for all of the logistics. No wonder movies cost millions of dollars and no wonder most director prefer to film in studios where there is more control and fewer logistics.
It will be a very short scene in the movie and who knows whether it will actually make it into the final cut. If it does make it into the film, it may be difficult to discern any O’Fallon landmarks. It is exciting nonetheless, and we can brag about O'Fallon's big moment on the silver screen.
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