Film Scout an Expert at Finding the Rest of the World in L.A.

The frozen food section of a local grocery store isn’t exactly the first place that leaps to mind when it comes to artistic inspiration.

But amid the Haagen-Dazs and TV dinners at Jons Supermarket on Glenoaks Boulevard in Glendale, Tim Hillman is taking his best shot.

He aims his Pentax 35-millimeter camera at the drab linoleum aisle shadowed on either side by massive glass display coolers. Hillman snaps away from every corner of the store before pausing briefly to capture the image of smoked meats dangling from above the deli counter.

If all goes as planned, the store and its freezer aisle will provide the ideal backdrop for a three-minute scene in an upcoming New Line Cinema drama starring Al Pacino. Then again, maybe not.

Filmmakers can be as finicky as they are creative. And when it comes to scouting a location, experience teaches that it pays to cover all your bases.

“The director is looking for that one shot,” said Hillman, who will visit 15 or more grocery stores before making a final selection for the three-minute scene. “I try and shoot everything because the director can see things other people can’t.”

Hillman, 44, knows all about it. For the past decade, he has been a Hollywood location manager and scout for such films as “Scream 2,” “Feeling Minnesota” and the 1999 picture “Magnolia.”

For every hour of images that flicker across the silver screen, it’s a good bet Hillman and his assistants have spent hundreds of hours on the ground working to make it all come together.

A native of Sandwich, Mass., Hillman can often be found in his blue Ford Explorer with his essentials: a camera, cellular phone, day planner and the weathered Thomas Guide he bought when he moved to Los Angeles in 1990.

To choose the 18 to 50 locations for a typical feature film, creative thinking is required as a matter of course, he says. And as he cruises local streets and freeways, his eyes are always peeled for the next cinematographic gem.

“In Los Angeles, it’s very, very hard to find a spot that hasn’t been filmed at least once,” Hillman said. That means taking the standard location and turning it into something completely different.

In the 1996 film “Most Wanted,” for example, Hillman needed to come up with a location for a library.

After scouting the downtown Central Library, the main library at USC and the Pasadena library, he said, a light went on in his head.

“I just looked at the rooms and eliminated the books and thought of other spaces those books could be in,” said Hillman. “The first thing I thought of was the old ticketing area at Union Station.” The crew filled the area with books, and--presto!--they had a library.

Later, Hillman needed water-filled tunnels for a scene depicting the sewers underneath the streets of Los Angeles for the same film.

During a trip to the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Center in Van Nuys for its Japanese Garden, he noticed tunnels that were perfect for the sewer scene.

Indeed, a star can be born in the most ordinary locations.

Want the feel of New England with Cape Cod-style houses and deciduous trees without jumping on a plane? Plenty of houses in neighborhoods south of Ventura Boulevard in Studio City fit the bill.

Looking to portray a government office building in Washington, D.C.? The steps of Los Angeles City Hall have been used scores of times.

A cheap alternative to transplanting cast and crew a continent away to the Serengeti? Put up a few huts and lions among the tall grasses and trees in the sandy flood control basin at Hansen Dam in the San Fernando Valley.

In fact, before filming begins on his latest project, Hillman will have scouted hundreds of such potential sites across Los Angeles, working 12 to 14 hours a day, shooting 12 to 14 rolls of film.

The images are collected and assembled in a book of photos that can be 20 pages thick.

And that’s just for starters.

Hillman helps coordinate the “field trips” to set locations with the director, the set designer and others, including grips and electricians.

When filming finally begins, he goes from being a location scout to a location manager--pulling permits with local police, fire, traffic and parking officials; establishing a budget for each site and making sure the necessities are there, including phone lines, catering, parking and bathrooms.

For one film’s sequence, in which the crew set a small blaze in San Bernardino National Forest near Big Bear, Hillman had to first appear at a special hearing before the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

“I’ve been in a maximum-security prison, a nuclear power plant, the bowels of a ship, the back of a strip club, and in gorgeous mansions and churches all over the country,” Hillman said.

Complicated Negotiations

Since 1990, he has worked on more than 30 projects, including feature films, movies of the week, television series and pilots. Most of his work is done in the Los Angeles area, but he has gone as far as Georgia, Minnesota, Iowa, Tennessee and Texas.

Hillman is a freelance location manager and a member of the Studio Transportation Drivers Teamsters Local 399. Though he won’t say how much he makes, he notes that the union scale for feature film location managers is about $2,110 per week.

His assistants--he normally uses two--are also freelancers, but he tries to work with the same people if schedules permit.

Things can be complicated by negotiations with homeowners, who typically charge $500 to $5,000 a day to use their homes for filming.

Some of the biggest resistance, he says, comes in the affluent neighborhoods favored by entertainment industry insiders.

Sometimes the demands are outrageous, he says.

During one shoot, one of his crews had to wear surgical booties and was charged $15,000 to film inside a Holmby Hills mansion. When a scene required rearranging the furniture, only movers with white cotton gloves were allowed to handle household objects.

Another time, an executive for a company that issues insurance for movies tried to get government officials to stop a crew from filming a movie of the week in his neighborhood. That effort failed and filming went ahead.

Still, Hillman has empathy for residents displaced by filming.

“I bring the circus to town,” he said of the 18 to 20 production vehicles and 100 crew members that can descend on a quiet neighborhood like a conquering army.

Among the most memorable and challenging experiences was his work on “Magnolia,” director Paul Thomas Anderson’s film set and filmed in the San Fernando Valley.

“He knew what he wanted, and he knew what his shots were,” Hillman said of the 43 locations he helped scout for Anderson.

Hillman spent 15 years playing in East Coast rock ‘n’ roll bands. After moving to Florida, Alabama and later to Chicago, he sold real estate before his sister-in-law told him about location scouting.

He started out with a $50-a-day job as a production assistant for the 1987 film “Music Box,” starring Jessica Lange.

“I got introduced to the whole magic of the business, creating fantasy amid reality,” Hillman said.

Two years later, he worked his way up to location manager in Chicago but realized he had to move where the action was: in Los Angeles.

Now it’s a full-time job--even when he’s taking time off.

“We’ll be on a vacation and my wife will say, ‘You’re scouting again, aren’t you?’ ” Hillman says with a laugh. “She finds it enormously entertaining that I get excited about a large parking lot.”