On Location: Scary Film business in L.A.
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Call it the Paranormal Activity effect.
‘In the Darkness,’ a low-budget indie film about a detective in pursuit of a missing college girl, begins filming this week the Antelope Valley.
‘It’s a suspense thriller with an ‘X-Files’ vibe,’ explains first-time producer Jeremy McGovern of Burning Bridge Entertainment. ‘It’s creepy.’’
Hoping to draw a page from the hit Paranormal, which was shot in a week with a budget of $15,000, ‘In the Darkness’ will be filmed over 10 days in Palmdale and Acton with a threadbare crew and a budget of ‘less than $100,000,’ McGovern said.
His producing partner, Jenna Edwards, and the film’s writer and director, Andrew Robinson, previously worked on ‘April Showers,’ the feature about the Columbine tragedy.
‘We’re trying something new and quick,’’ McGovern said. ‘We want to make a good feature film.’
Whether audiences will ever get to see ‘In the Darkness’ is another question. Like many indie films these days, it is being self-distributed, McGovern said.
In a scary sign, ‘In the Darkness’ is among a handful of mostly indie films that are shooting in the LA region. Only a few major studio films have been filming locally, including ‘Green Hornet’ from Sony Pictures and the DreamWorks/Universal Pictures’ comedy ‘Little Fockers.’ Warner Bros.’s ‘Due Date’ wrapped in Brentwood on Monday. The film, starring Robert Downey Jr., was mostly filmed in New Mexico and Georgia, which offer more generous film tax credits than California.
On-location filming for features, which has sagged this year because of out-of-state film tax incentives and studio belt tightening, fell 16% last week over the same time a year, according to FilmL.A. Inc. Overall filming, including shoots for commercials and television, dropped 35%.
-Richard Verrier
