North Texas feels the love on 'Prison Break' DVD
11:24 AM CDT on Monday, October 15, 2007
By JOE O'CONNELL / Special Contributor
A map in the Prison Break production office shows where the television
fugitives have ended up around the country, but it's likely they need a
second, smaller map of North Texas to track the production itself.
That's good news for local cast and crew awaiting the fallout of a
potential writers strike.
For the currently filming third season, Prison Break is packing up and
shooting more outside of the area, but the show's second season was
almost entirely shot here, and the producers have included a little
North Texas love letter on the season two DVD box set via a featurette
called "Turning Dallas Into America."
"We knew we had to play a number of different locales across the
country," executive producer and writer Paul Scheuring says in the
featurette. "We needed to have desert, a big city and a bayou. We needed
to have wide-open plains and also parts of Latin America and New Mexico."
Show producer Garry Brown, who knew Dallas from working on Walker, Texas
Ranger, suggested taking a look at North Texas. "My first thought was
Dallas has only one look," Mr. Scheuring says on the DVD. "It's like
J.R. and people with tall hats. I was quite wrong."
The kicker was the ability to travel 30 to 45 minutes in any direction
and find the right look, even Panama, which was accomplished by taking a
set used to portray Iraq in the television film Saving Private Lynch and
adding some palm trees.
However, third-season filming may halt if the Writers Guild of America
decides to go on strike Nov. 1 when its latest contract expires. The
last time a strike occurred was in 1988. The WGA threatened a similar
strike in 2004, teaming up with the Screen Actors Guild (whose contract
expires in July 2008). This led to a flurry of filming followed by a
lull and a glut of unscripted reality-television programs. Many believe
the WGA will delay a strike, if it occurs at all, until January or later
to pull in SAG again. But the threat is enough to send the
film-television industry scurrying.
Janis Burklund, head of the Dallas Film Commission, is courting a lot of
film projects aiming at January starts, but she expects the strike could
lead to more North Texas reality shoots. "Those folks tend to like
Dallas," she says of reality producers, "but we won't know for a while."
The 'It' factor
North Texas shoots are nothing new. Proof is "The Bride of It Came From
Dallas - 3rd Time's the Charm," a program from the Dallas Producers
Association of "films that drove the drive-ins into extinction." It
screens Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Studio Movie Grill in Addison. This
year's program of clips compiled by film historian Gordon Smith includes
the Dallas-shot movies Logan's Run (1976), which won the Oscar for
special effects that now are decidedly dated, and the even campier
Bloodsucker From Outer Space (1984). The event benefits the Texas Motion
Picture Alliance. A suggested donation of $10 will get you in; head to
www.dallasproducers.org for more information.
Bonus footage: The thriller By the Devil's Hand recently wrapped in Fort
Worth. It features an all-local cast, including Susana Gibb, Reece Rios,
Arianne Martin, Sean Teague, Jason Skeen and Marc Jeffreys....Oliver
Stone headlines the Austin Film Festival, which begins today. More at
www.austinfilmfestival.com.