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It was September 21st. It was two days before we hit the road to go shoot at our abandoned amusement park location in North Carolina. Jeremy called me and told me that the location had been hit hard by Hurricane Ivan. Much of the park was destroyed, including the road that led up the mountain to the park.
Determined to not let this natural disaster derail us, we immediately changed gears and began to prep for scenes that were on the October schedule. We thought we had a month to prepare for these scenes... but now that the shooting schedule was dramatically altered, we now had less than 48 hours.
Only 19 hours later, everything was in place for the new stretch of shooting dates that would take place here in Missouri. We rescheduled the North Carolina shoot for October, as the owners of the park were telling us that the park would be safe again by then.
Instead of going out to the park in North Carolina, we shot all of our “haunted house” scenes (which were originally scheduled for October). Our location was a perfect old farm house, abandoned for more than 20 years. Most of the scenes were creepy night sequences. These nights of shooting were creepy for the movie... but also for cast and crew, as the location was legitimately frightening. We had no electricity and we were isolated deep in Missouri farmland. When the generators were shut off at the end of each night’s shooting, it was DARK except for the moon and stars above. It was also eerily quiet, with only the occasional owl or wolf cry rising above the nighttime crickets. It certainly set the right mood for shooting a horror movie.
Cast and crew lived in another house about five minutes up the road from the house we were shooting in. We had a problem free shoot with a decent place to crash and lots of good food. Actor Bill Clifton and producer Scott Muck took turns cooking up eggs, bacon, biscuits and/or pancakes each morning. Lorraine Coy expertly handled feeding cast and crew dinner each night. We had no weather problems. It was a relaxed shoot. And the footage we got looks great... especially the eerie footage we shot of the kid actors! It was a great week.
The first weekend of October took the production to an old abandoned amusement park (called Dog Patch, USA) in Arkansas. Originally, this location was going to be our main abandoned amusement park (our Deadwood Park) location... but Dog Patch has had all of it’s rides removed and it simply does not look like an amusement park anymore. Still, the train tunnel section of the Dog Patch rail road ride, and the park’s paddleboat lake were perfect for our movie. So, our plan was to shoot the rail road tunnel and paddleboat lake in Dog Patch, and then shoot the rest of our amusement park scenes in North Carolina.
The Arkansas shoot was disastrous. I got all the footage I needed. So the movie was not compromised in any way. But getting that footage proved to be an ordeal for the whole cast and crew. Our 48 hours in Arkansas would make a good book all on it’s own... But I’ll try to compress the events into one paragraph. Here goes...
We had a large number of cast and crew traveling to location in Arkansas. We arrived at our motel weary after our 5 hour drive... but we had to start shooting immediately. We shot overnight, in bitter cold, isolated deep within the abandoned amusement park, which was itself isolated deep in the hills of Arkansas, many miles from “civilization” ...a situation that made us all the more nervous as hillbillies came down from the surrounding mountains and circled us on four-wheelers every 20 minutes all through our night of shooting. We never saw them, but we heard them all night. This activity really spooked the dog (a rotweiller) who we brought down to the shoot to be in the scene. The frightened rotweiller bit one of our crew members on the hand, bringing a tense pause to the night of shooting. The wound was pretty bad. But Zac continued working through the entire night. The next day, during our daytime shots of the paddleboat lake, we discovered that the people who we had just paid $500 for the use of the park were only 5 percent owners of the property. The pissed-off 95 percent owner sent a local “representative” (a typical Arkansas back-woods type, missing many teeth) to collect our names and vehicle plate numbers. Just as I got the last shots I needed, the situation became dangerously tense. Cast and crew made a rushed emergency exit from the park (before shotguns emerged). Plus, I got poison ivy. Arkansas sucks.
After escaping from Arkansas, we learned that more hurricane activity had battered our North Carolina location. We were told that the property was still not safe and that we could not come out to shoot.
We could not call this movie DEADWOOD PARK and then not have any shots of Deadwood Park! Jeremy and I began to conjure up yet another way around this pesky park problem. We decided to shoot at Holiday World in Indiana (a park that is operational but now closed for the season). We figured we could shoot our actors in front of the wooden roller coasters that are visible from nearby roads and parking lots. This idea sucked, but it was the best alternative to North Carolina that we had... until... About 10 hours before we were scheduled to leave for Indiana, Jeremy set a whole new plan in motion. How we got our footage of Deadwood Park for our movie, DEADWOOD PARK, will be in the next entry.
Thanks for reading!
-Eric Stanze
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