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On Location: ‘Welcome to People’ bids farewell to L.A. with a surge in film shoots

By Richard Verrier
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Chris Pine, Olivia Wilde, Michelle Pfeiffer and the crew of ‘Welcome to People’ had a busy week of filming in Los Angeles, as the DreamWorks Studios movie wrapped production in a flurry of shooting.

The movie, which is due out next year, is an L.A.-based drama about a young man played by Pine who returns home after his estranged father’s sudden death, only to uncover a family secret.

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Principal photography for the film, which has a budget of less than $20 million, began in January and ended in March, but, as often happens, the studio decided to shoot some additional scenes. So DreamWorks obtained multiple permits to film several days last week in nearly a dozen locations across Los Angeles County, including a soundstage in Van Nuys, a home in the Hollywood Hills, the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood and on Kanan Dume Canyon Road in Malibu, a studio spokeswoman said.

‘That’s the strongest activity that we’ve had this year,’’ said FilmL.A., Inc. spokesman Todd Lindgren of the barrage of on location shoots from ‘Welcome to People’ last week.

The filming fueled a 59% increase in feature film shoots in the L.A. area last week over the same period in 2010. Location shoots for feature films generated 246 production days (one production day is defined as a single crew’s permission to film at a single location in a 24-hour period). Television produced 279 production days, down 5% from a year ago, while commercial film shoots declined 13% for 132 production days. Overall production climbed 9%, according to FilmL.A.

For more on what’s filming this week, see the map below.

-- Richard Verrier

Sample of neighborhoods with permitted TV, film and commercial shoots scheduled this week. Permits are subject to last-minute changes. Sources: FilmL.A. Inc., cities of Beverly Hills, Santa Clarita and Pasadena. Thomas Suh Lauder/ Los Angeles Times

Company Town Blog
Richard Verrier

Richard Verrier is investigations editor for Arts and Entertainment at the Los Angeles Times. He has been with The Times since 2001 and has run our Company Town since 2016. After stints at the St. Petersburg Times and the Orlando Sentinel in Florida, Verrier joined the paper as a reporter, and for many years covered all aspects of the entertainment industry before turning to editing. He oversees the Company Town coverage while working to guide and edit investigative and enterprise reporting across the entertainment team, collaborating with writers and editors from all departments. He is a native of Montreal and a graduate from the University of Toronto and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

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