Jason Sperb
"What attracts me to a location: If I can reduce it to a phrase—and I hate reducing anything—I want vividly photographed, vividly represented banality."
Having managed to see most all Omaha locations I was looking for the day before, I was able to set out for the last leg of the journey across the northern portions of the state pretty early that morning.
My destination(s) all involved the filming of Nebraska (2013), which I hadn't seen much of yet outside the afternoon spent in downtown Lincoln two days earlier. Ironically, the part of the movie that most intensely struck me the first few times I saw it was the film's opening acts--when Woody (Bruce Dern) and his son, David (Will Forte), head from their home in Montana across Wyoming and South Dakota into Nebraska.
It is a stunning sequence of open sky landscapes and Mark Orton's haunting score--it is bar none the most aesthetically beautiful (in a particular classical cinema sense of the word) single 20-30 minutes of film to be found in any of Payne's body of work (and I would include any passage in the Hawai'i-set The Descendants in that assessment).
(Also, as a side note, one of my favorite anecdotes about the making of Nebraska was how one shot--where a group of bikers pass them on the highway with almost balletic precision and grace--was filmed with a camera mounted on the same RV used in About Schmidt over ten years earlier, which apparently Payne himself still owned after all these years!!)
But, ironically, I wasn't seeing any of those locations from the opening road trip, but rather the constellation of small towns that stood in for the movie's fictional location of "Hawthorne," Nebraska, Woody's hometown. While it was fascinating to see how several different movies of his connected and overlapped through locations across Omaha the day before, it was also refreshing to just go back to concentrating on the making of one film with Nebraska.
The first stop, not too far outside of Omaha was Hooper, where the local saloon (above) was used for the interior scenes of Hawthorne's Blinker Bar. In a classic bit of movie magic, the exteriors for this same setting were two hours away in the town of Plainview, where most of the "Hawthorne" locations were filmed (and where I would later end the day). Here's the "exterior" of that same fictional bar (in real life not a bar at all), located nearly 100 miles away to the northwest (if you look closely, you can see where the bar sign was probably attached to the two supports still bolted to the corner of the building):
Back in Hooper, Payne claimed that he loved the "exceedingly high ceilings and remarkable depth" of the Hooper location for the movie, justifying such a big leap across time and space (especially for the actors who had to appear in both).
I'll take his word for it. When I went to see these interiors for myself, I was greeted with one of the more distinctive signs I encountered that week:
A final note about Hooper: it doesn't play a major role in the film itself ultimately, but it was one of the countless small Nebraska towns that Payne scouted for use as the main exterior filming of Hawthorne, an honor which went to Plainview (it is also, as a biographical side note, the birthplace of his maternal grandmother):
Payne rejected Hooper for the film's central location because, as he claimed, it was too picturesque--
"I didn’t want [Hawthorne] to be as solidly nineteenth-century as a town like Hooper, where we filmed a little, which is very picturesque but more of a period piece. I wanted a layering of old and new.”
It is easy to see his point in the photos above. Hooper looks too much like the nicely preserved turn-of-the-century main street you'd expect to see in a Hollywood movie about small town America (or at Disneyland), and he was looking more for a location that evoked, as I took it to mean, a combination of both 19th century aesthetics (such as those seen above) and a smattering of more simple, modern, mid-20th century structures (so not necessarily "new" in the strictest sense) which awkwardly coexisted with them. In other words, what the "typical" small town really looks like. With this in mind, Plainview made more sense to me.
Before getting there, though, I had to pass through Norfolk, the main city in the area and also the location for some scenes from the film. For example, the local hospital here stood in for two different locations in Nebraska--both for the South Dakota surgery sequence early in the film (when Woody wounds his head in a drunken stumble) and another scene late in the movie when the elder Grant again finds himself in a hospital bed after being assaulted (this time in Hawthorne):
Visiting this area, I immediately guessed why this region around Norfolk was picked for the bulk of the filming, a hypothesis confirmed by an interview with Payne I found later:
Indeed, there weren't too many places in provincial Nebraska I passed through all week that featured several truly small towns ideal for filming this particular story, yet were also close enough to a modestly-sized city such as Norfolk that could comfortably accommodate the logistical realities of sustaining a major Hollywood studio cast and crew presence for several weeks.
In addition to housing the crew and filming at the hospital, Norfolk also was the site of the film's Nebraska state premiere, which reportedly featured Payne and many of the film's main stars:
Sufficed to say, this miniplex was not at all what I envisioned beforehand (I had pictured instead one of those classic main street theatres, like Nebraska City's Pioneer I saw a couple days earlier--those older cinemas which are modest in overall scale given the size of their immediate communities, but often sporting a beautiful marquee out front), and I was disappointed also that its lobby didn't appear to have any displays or mementos of that premiere, given that that night would almost certainly have been one of the more memorable in its history.
Norfolk's Arts Center was also the site of a local fundraiser--which apparently included wine and, thus appropriately, a screening of Sideways--that Payne himself attended while in town during filming:
. . . . and also the amusing scene where Woody and David go to search for his missing teeth among the train tracks:
Just outside Norfolk was the farmhouse where the family goes late in the movie to steal back (or so they think) a water compressor from a misunderstanding decades earlier:
Despite not being that far from Norfolk, this location felt the most secluded of them all that day, since I had to drive over a few miles of uninviting gravel--in every direction--just to get to it.
Beyond Norfolk, other locations included the Uptown Brewery in nearby Stanton (where the dinner scene was filmed, and which was one of four locations from the movie I visited that day--in addition to the aforementioned Hooper bar--which was inexplicably closed, despite internet information to the contrary. Sleepy small town Nebraska indeed):
The gas station in Pierce (halfway between Norfolk and Plainview), where David fills up towards the end of the film:
And the cemetery near Elgin, where they go to visit the graves of deceased people from Woody's past (in a classic Payne scene that manages to be in turn both genuinely heartbreaking and shockingly funny):
And the "Hawthorne Republican" newspaper office, whose interior scenes were filmed in Osmond:
My favorite "movie magic" sequence in Nebraska comes late in the film, when Woody finally gets to drive again, briefly, down Hawthorne's main street, as the whole town watches on (it is a wonderful moment of grace and catharsis that makes more sense in narrative context). There is a lovely moment when he locks eyes with the newspaper editor, an old flame from long ago, as she watches him drive by in a silent, final goodbye. The movie magic here? He was filmed while driving down Plainview's main street; her reaction, meanwhile, was filmed ten minutes away outside the above office in Osmond.
Which brings me finally to the centerpiece of the day: Plainview itself, where most of the Hawthorne scenes, perhaps even the bulk of the movie itself, was filmed. Probably the most easily recognizable location from the movie is the old Hotel--an example of the "old" 19th Century look that Payne desired in only limited doses:
Across the street, the Madison County Bank sign was covered over (presumably to hide the real location) by a "Hawthorne Harvest" sign that can still be spotted in the very back of a nearby antique store:
That store, which featured several mementos from the movie (including the original fictional town's sign seen in the film, above) was, you guessed it, also closed (and was still closed the whole next day, despite calling the number listed on the door) . . . Hey, at least they apparently endorsed the importance of masking!
The vintage look of the hotel contrasted with the "newer" look of the bus spot location across the street (the bench is now in the local history museum, which I did visit--more on that later):
. . . and the auto repair shop Woody used to work at:
For the movie, this location was partially repainted in a deep red, which no longer appears. That's amusing to me, of course, because the movie is noted for being in black and white (I am assuming the dark red was used so that it would still stand out in B&W, but also not look odd as pure black or dark gray for the color versions of the film which do legally exist out there--mainly for international markets. A misconception about Nebraska is that it was shot in B&W, but, as I understand it. the compromise between Payne and Paramount was that it was filmed digital for color in said secondary markets, with the black and white look added later in post-production).
The first shot of Hawthorne in the movie is this street (below) that runs along that charming little grain elevator to the left of the frame (the equally iconic US flag which one might remember from the film version was added to hide the name of the local business, Mary's):
The exterior for the local newpaper is still there:
. . . and if one looks close enough, they'll see that the fictitious "Hawthorne Republican" name from the film is still hiding subtly but proudly on the front door.
One other location still at least cosmetically untouched from the movie I noticed that day was the "A Cafe," which was not, nor as I understand it ever was, an actual "cafe." Reportedly, the filmmakers, with a dose of good humor, added that sign to the windows for background, and no one in the last nine years has decided to remove it.
Finally, I saw the "other" bar in the film (it wouldn't be a real Midwestern small town in the movie, no matter how small, if there was only one!):
After that, I headed back to Norfolk for the night, just like the film's crew back in the late fall of 2012. And, like them, I was getting ready to come back first thing the next morning . . . .
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