A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 15

This is the 15th year in a row I’ve run this series in April.

Today’s story idea: “Would You Turn Over Your Home to a Hollywood Film Crew for $5,000 a Day?”

There was a time when legendary location scout Lori Balton was like a modern-day Philip Marlowe, trolling the neighborhoods of Los Angeles, in search of the perfect private home to shoot. “We used to literally drive around and look at the front of the house and we were kind of anthropologists in a way,” she says. “You look at the outside of the house, and you look for clues, like what kind of car did they drive? Do they have kids? And then you’d leave a letter and then you’d go and look at the house.”

While working on Rob Reiner’s Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), Balton detected the perfect SoCal home to stand in for the Old South. “In Sierra Madre, I passed this house and I just stepped on the brakes, backed up, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s it,’ ” she recalls. “It was this old farmhouse that was still there, and I shot it. And when I came back, everyone was so amazed. We shot the whole thing there, exterior and interior.”

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As for her favorite interiors, open floor plans, which can be shot to look like separate rooms, are a perennial favorite. “I like a bigger house that we can make feel small, because if it’s a house that’s too small, you can never make it feel big,” she says. “And we’ve got an awful lot of equipment that has to fit inside.”

The next step is to convince homeowners to rent out their house — a tricky proposition given perennial worries about loud crews, broken furniture and scraped walls. Even Balton admits she was wary when she was approached by a location manager about filming in her own house. “I thought, ‘She’s never going to shoot here, so sure, take a look,’ ” Balton says. “They ended up wanting to shoot there, and my first reaction — to myself — was, ‘Fuck no. I don’t want people in my house.’ Then I said, ‘Come on, you talk people into this every day, you have to.’ And it was a great experience.”

Actress and acting coach Holly Gagnier had no such qualms when it became clear that her storybook 1926 Tudor in Toluca Lake was ideal for filming. And she wasn’t concerned about potential for damage. “I’ve worked so much that I know what sticklers they were for us not touching certain things, not using the bathrooms. I’ve really seen it firsthand, unless it’s just some crappy crew,” she says. “The location was often treated better than the actors, probably because they were paying so much more for it.”

This premise has a lot of comedic potential. There’s the intersection of a “normal” family (married couple, children, pet dog) and a film production team, both above (producers, director, actors) and below the line (film crew). Imagine being an adolescent girl and Ryan Gosling is doing a scene in your bedroom.

There’s the family daily life routine bumping up against the film production schedule.

Then there’s this: What if the family is in a desperate financial state? This film rental is a godsend. But what if the father determines to extort more money from the production. Like, you know, mowing the lawn once the cameras roll. When they pay him $1000 in cash to stop, that feeds his greed even more.

On the other side, this caught my eye in the article: “unless it’s just some crappy crew.” What if the film production is a crappy crew?

In the film Sweet Liberty, a film director tells a local the three keys to a successful movie: Defy authority. Destroy property. Take off clothes.

I imagine this movie would lean into all three leaving the house completely destroyed … but as the home burns, the cameras roll and surprise! The script, which the screenwriter has been slaving over, trying one ending after another … they don’t need it. Because the smoldering remains of the home provides the ending the movie within the movie needs.

There’s my 15th story idea this month.

Previous articles in this year’s series:

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14

Here are links to previous series:

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2017)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2018)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2019)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2020)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2021)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2022)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2023)

A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2024)

Note: The articles from 2010–2016 have corrupted URLs. I am in the process of cleaning those up.

Each day in April, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in RESPONSES to hear YOUR take on this story idea. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.