An Uneasy Subplot in Film Boom

Preservationists made a pitch several years ago to turn this storied city into “Hollywood South” -- an alternative and cheap place to make movies, a living production lot peppered with riverboats, mossy trees, striking architecture and gothic, above-ground cemeteries known as “cities of the dead.”

“We told them: ‘The city is a set,’ ” said Mary Louise Christovich, a native and a community activist. “That appealed to people in city government.”

Now, some of those same preservationists are up in arms, contending that a fabled cemetery in the lush Garden District has fallen victim to the very industry they helped beckon to town. The municipal cemetery, called Lafayette No. 1, has become such a popular filming locale, they allege, that it has been trashed, trampled, spray-painted and otherwise defaced.

“They’ve made a mess,” Christovich said.

The preservationists said one production crew that had received a permit to film there spray-painted delicate 200-year-old walls that recently had been covered with a special paint to help them survive.

Moss, the preservationists alleged, has been jammed into cracks in walls to make them look -- in a contradiction that only the entertainment industry could appreciate -- more authentic. If the moss took hold, it could grow into a destructive force, they said.

Heavy trucks ferrying lights and generators have scarred the aisles between vaults, pieces of 19th century tombs have been painted, and bricks dating to the Civil War have been tossed about and shattered, preservationists said.

“These people need to understand the delicacies that are involved,” said Christovich, who founded the nonprofit group Save Our Cemeteries in 1974 and remains on its nine-member advisory board.

“Just because something is made of brick doesn’t necessarily mean it’s sturdy. Just because something is made of marble doesn’t mean it doesn’t crumble.”

Tensions came to a head during the May filming of “Stay Alive,” a Spyglass Entertainment horror film about a group of young adults who discover that as their characters on a video game die, so do they.

Upset by the latest film plans, activist Ruth Goodman, who lives a block away, left a lock bar -- the kind typically used to prevent car thefts -- on a cemetery gate in protest. The next day, the crew arrived to find that someone had vandalized sets and hung signs reading “Go Home.”

The crew “blamed me,” Goodman said.

Goodman denied it. But she has not toned down her campaign to raise awareness about what she calls the abuse of Lafayette. She said that after the “Stay Alive” crew left, she found fast-food containers stuffed inside a partially collapsed vault.

“The coffin has rotted away,” she said. “There’s nobody in there or anything. But there shouldn’t be trash in Grandpa’s tomb.”

Government officials and representatives of films shot in Lafayette said great care was taken to protect the burial grounds.

Wise Wolfe IV, a movie location manager, said some crews might be “overeager to dress those sets.” But most, he said, follow to the letter a plan for shooting, which requires approval of local officials.

“Nobody’s perfect,” Wolfe said. “There probably have been infractions. But I guarantee you they have been rectified.”

Preservationists are writing a proposal to force production companies to hire an outside observer to watch over crews. They said the oversight would be valuable partly because it was sometimes difficult to attribute damage to a specific project.

For instance, preservationists said they recently noticed that an urn atop one vault -- containing the ashes of two men believed killed in the Civil War -- was missing. But no one is sure how long it has been gone.

However, local officials are wary about disturbing an industry that is one of the few bright spots in the city and state economies.

A 2002 initiative created tax incentives for production houses and helped cement Louisiana as a popular filming spot. The combined budgets of the movies filmed in Louisiana were about $20 million a year before the initiative. They jumped to $212 million in 2003 and $380 million in 2004, said Alex J. Schott, director of the Governor’s Office of Film and Television Development.

The industry was worth nearly $150 million to the Louisiana economy last year, Schott said, and the majority of the filming was in New Orleans.

Still, Stephanie Dupuy, director of the city’s Office of Film & Video, said the city probably would back the proposal to allow preservationists to oversee filming, though she said she believed crews were generally “very conscientious.”

“We have to make sure that these sacred places are protected,” Dupuy said.

Virtually all of the complaints center on Lafayette No. 1, where film crews almost always turn.

Many city cemeteries are controlled by the Roman Catholic diocese, which has strict restrictions -- often including demands for script approval -- that make filming there difficult. There are other picturesque municipal lots, but many are in rough neighborhoods, leading to safety concerns, or surrounded by old, narrow streets that do not allow for the caravan of trucks that often accompanies a movie set.

New Orleans has long buried its dead in above-ground vaults, largely because underground burial is difficult in the sodden soil. The cemeteries have come to embody New Orleans because, like the city, they teeter between being charmingly timeworn and hopelessly run-down.

Lafayette, built on a former plantation in 1833, was so choked with weeds when preservationists began to clean it up in the 1970s that they could not walk from one end to the other. Today, it is relatively clean and trimmed, though peppered with shards of marble that have broken off some vaults.

Shaded by meaty boughs of oak trees, it is an eerie step into history. Some of the dead, including three young siblings who died within two days in 1878, succumbed to yellow fever. One vault, built in 1852 and decorated with a delicate relief carving of a fire pump, was reserved for members of the Jefferson Fire Company No. 22, one of the volunteer departments that served the city for decades.

The cemetery has been used in a host of movies, including “Double Jeopardy” and “Interview With the Vampire,” in which Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise perched in a fake tomb erected in a corner of the lot.

Spyglass spokeswoman Karen Sortito said she was surprised to hear about the concerns after “Stay Alive” was filmed. City officials were so pleased with the condition of the cemetery when shooting wrapped up, she said, that they returned the production’s deposit -- typically $5,000 -- and invited the crew to return anytime.

“We have always been so respectful of historic sites,” Sortito said. “Nobody takes that lightly.”

Schott said problems with film crews were rare. “We’ve been very pleased,” he said.

Many in the film industry and in New Orleans contend that activists like Christovich and Goodman, both of whom live in well-appointed mansions ensconced in an impoverished city, should concern themselves with more urgent problems. Even some of their fellow cemetery lovers, Goodman said, have encouraged them to back off so they don’t scare away the film companies.

But Goodman said she was undaunted. Ironically, she said, many of the crews’ efforts to stylize Lafayette No. 1 seemed to be aimed at returning it to its days of neglect.

The cemetery was so tidy when one recent crew arrived that it apparently wouldn’t have looked appropriately creepy on screen. Goodman said she watched with astonishment as crew members left the cemetery, filled lawn bags with magnolia leaves, returned and scattered them around the freshly raked grounds.

“They show up and decide that it doesn’t look old and crumbled enough -- so they undo everything that’s been done,” she said. “It’s like some Kafkaesque nightmare.”