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THE
RAINMAKER filming locations
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CREDITS
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Another John Grisham legal thriller, with greenhorn
lawyer Rudy Baylor (Matt
Damon) teaming with cynical Deck Shiflet (Danny
DeVito) to fighting the system and get compensation
for a dying worker from a big, bad company.
The movie was shot in Memphis,
Tennessee,
and San Francisco.
Director Francis
Ford Coppola "wanted to use real locations,"
says production designer Howard Cummings. "He wanted
the honesty of what a real location can bring you. He
didn't want a lot of studio shooting.'
With a little interior alteration, the North End bar,
on the main Street Trolley Line, in the shadow
of the great gleaming Pyramid Arena in the Pinch District,
became 'Yogi's'. The bar has since been damaged by fire
and the premises has reopened as Westy's
Bar and Grill, 346 North Main Street at Jackson
(also seen in 21 Grams).
The Butcher Shop Steakhouse,101
South Front Street, at Gayoso (tel: 901.521.0856),
to which Bruiser Stone (Mickey
Rourke) takes Rudy and Deck to dinner, appeared
as itself, as did The
Arcade, 540 South Main Street, the oldest diner
in Memphis, which first opened in 1919 at the end of
the trolley line on South Main Street, not far from
the Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum).
The Arcade has also appeared another John Grisham adaptation,
The Client, as well
as Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train,
Jim McBride's underrated musical biopic of Jerry Lee
Lewis, Great Balls of Fire
and 21 Grams.
Tthe "cafetorium" as they call it at Springdale
Elementary became the 'Cypress Gardens Senior
Center'
There were also two hospitals on the locations list.
'St. Peter's Hospital' was created at the Regional
Medical Center of Memphis, the facility known
as The Med. Memphis sometimes seems like a city where
every other building is a hospital, but The Med is the
only one in town that takes indigent patients. It is
also the busiest trauma center in the mid-South. Shooting
went on around the hospital's busy schedule.
Also used was Baptist Memorial
Hospital, which was once also known as E.H.
Crump Hospital. Dormant for almost two years, and most
recently a rehabilitation center, it was recently given
to an organisation called Mission Core, whose whole
goal is to get homeless people off the streets, give
them a place to stay, get them jobs, and get them fed
and clothed. As soon as the production finished shooting,
Mission Core took over the facility.
Two facilities
of the Union Planters Bank supplied Drummond's office,
a hospital cafeteria, and the Great Benefit Boardroom.
Rudy takes the bar in the Continental Ballroom of the
famous Peabody Hotel, a Memphis landmark. The Shelby
County Courthouse served as a two-day location. Rudy
and Deck's office was situated in the Bruce Printing
Company.
In January, 1997, the production shifted to interior
scenes at the Alameda Naval
Air Station, across the bay from San
Francisco. NAS Alameda is in the process of
being de-commissioned and renting out its huge airplane
hangars as industrial space. Except for the fact that
the hangars are neither heated nor sound-proofed, their
size makes them ideal for filming. It was there that
Cummings faced one of his biggest challenges: the courtroom,
the largest of the sets he was to build.
"It's very
hard to re-invent the courtroom but Francis really wanted
to. It's a civil not a criminal case, although in our
civil case, there is a life and death struggle. But
the basics of the law are being addressed and I felt
that austerity would be more unusual at this point than
what we've seen so far, and with this kind of framing,
you can really explore something like that." What they
ultimately agreed on, was that the courtroom ceiling
should be moveable, that in its high position it would
exhibit what Cummings refers to as a "very big volume
space." And the ceiling can come down "to get a sense
of doom, of pressure, ofbeing enclosed, of being trapped,
of tension. In the end, you probably won't know that
we did this. But emotionally, you'll get the impact."
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FILMING
LOCATIONS FOR THE RAINMAKER
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CHECK
OUT
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ASSOCIATED
FILMS |
See the
Arcade in The Client,
Mystery Train, Great
Balls of Fire! and 21
Grams |
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