Location, Location, Location

Need a ‘Last Picture Show’ movie theater in the zone,” says Ron Abrams, standing in front of Lisa Mosher’s cluttered desk at the California Film Commission’s Location Resource Center. Mosher, the commission’s 42-year-old librarian, fires off a series of questions: “Do you need a desert locale? Does the marquee have to stick out or can it be flat? Could it be ornate? What about a reverse shot?”

Mosher, whose maroon nails and lips match the flowers in her dress, is conducting a “reference interview” with Abrams, a location manager looking for a site to film a commercial within 30 miles of Los Angeles. “Too bad the Montrose Theater burned down. It would have been perfect,” she laments. She then suggests that Abrams might have to go as far as Taft, or perhaps Kern County, to find what he’s looking for. “You really need a trained librarian for this job,” she says. “You have to have a knowledge of terrain, architecture, period and vegetation. Not all location managers are so clear about all the variables. You have to help them focus.”

Sifting through the books, manila folders, writing pads and newspapers piled high on her desk, Mosher anticipates the next question. “Many librarians I know have a desk like this,” she says. “In most libraries, they’re hidden in the back. You don’t see them. Whenever my staff gets on me for my desk, I tell them I serve the public. Everybody else comes first. My stuff comes last.”

A native of La Crescenta, Mosher grew up looking at buildings with her architect father. An art history major at UCLA, with a graduate degree in library science from USC, she became the commission’s first librarian in 1987. The primary function of the library, which the commission established in 1985, is to convince film makers that all things are possible in California. Why go east, say, if you can find a tunnel under a mountain in Monterey County, put up a few signs reading Manhattan, pack some cars with local extras and have a perfect match for the Holland Tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey?

The library, a narrow room in the commission’s offices on Hollywood Boulevard, directly across from Mann’s Chinese Theater, is lined floor to ceiling with shelves crammed with black loose-leaf binders. If Mosher doesn’t know a location, she rattles off the number of the binder that might yield a perfect spot. Thousands of sites have been photographed and classified and then pasted into the appropriate binder by interns. Castles, mobile homes, bowling alleys, back alleys, lonesome highways, crowded malls and parking garages all have their place. Entire binders are devoted to bathrooms and kitchens. Gas stations and garages fill six while sports facilities take up 40.

The library’s staff is particularly busy these days as they prepare for the transition from black binders to a new digital imaging system developed for the commission by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “I had to be dragged into this technology kicking and screaming,” Mosher says, “but, in fact, it was good for them to have me to work with, because they had to make it easy enough for someone like me to use.”

On any given day, location scouts as well as event planners and the occasional bride-to-be thumb through binders at the three long tables that fill the center of the room, looking for a tire graveyard as a backdrop for an apocalyptic future or a lawn or ballroom for the wedding of their dreams. “We can’t spend any time with the brides,” Mosher says, “but we certainly let them look through the books.”