by Alec Boehm
Making The Red Machine was never going to be easy. The movie is set in 1935, in Washington, DC. There are 36 different locations, ranging from prison cells to U.S. Navy offices to thieves’ hangouts to jewelry stores to elegant apartments to diners. (And did we mention the flashbacks to Tokyo in 1928?)
Over the course of our proposed 27-day shooting schedule, 36 locations would mean a new location every day, which would mean packing everything up at the end of every day. It would also mean that nine shooting days would also include a company move, which would mean packing everything up twice on each those days. That would take more than a little of the fun out of filmmaking.
So, what could we do?
Our producer Ken Cortland found the answer: the Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility in Whittier, California. 
Nelles was a recently decommissioned home for juvenile delinquents — in other words, a former jail for kids. (One famous inmate was Kevin Mitnick, a notorious young computer hacker in the 1980s, who is now a renowned information security consultant.) First opened around 1900, Nelles continued to grow through the whole of the 20th century until the State of California finally closed it; that meant that there were dozens of genuine period settings, ranging from warehouses to barracks-style dorms to open streets to offices to real prison cells.
Still owned by the Sate of California, Nelles is now used exclusively for filming. Even more wonderful, they only allow two productions at a time to use the facility. For the three weeks we were there, only one other project came to shoot there, and then only for three days. Otherwise, we had the entire 92-acre facility to ourselves — our very own backlot.
There are a few oddities about shooting at Nelles: first of all, the guys who run it used to be the guards when it was an active detention center, and they start off by assuming everyone is a juvenile delinquent until proven otherwise. One favorite phrase they’d snarl from time to time: “I’m the guy who’s gonna tell you no.” If you made a movie about them, they’d all be played by Rod Steiger. When you first contact Nelles to find out about filming there, you are introduced to the Nelles way of doing things. You are told that scouting occurs only once a week, on Wednesdays from 10am to noon. Period. If you want to scout the place, that’s when you go there. No exceptions. It doesn’t matter who you are or when you may be available to scout. If you want to work at Nelles, you scout on Wednesdays from 10am to noon. You go there, walk through the double rows of 12-foot chain link fence with barbed wire on top and hand your ID to the guard behind a thick glass barricade. You hope that you’ll someday see your ID and the outside world again — but it seems best not to ask.
Your guide (also a former guard) not the slightest bit interested in your production. He’s not the slightest bit interested in your problems or your concerns, and he’s not very much interested in your questions at this point. It doesn’t matter to him if you film there or not–he’ll still draw his salary either way. This morning he’s interested in doing his job, which is to show a group of filmmakers around his facility. Which he does. At breakneck speed.
You scramble along behind him as best you can, pausing in each building long enough to be told the name of the building, and then it’s on to the next. If you’re good and nimble, you manage to squeeze off a photo or two. Most of the time, you’re actually running to catch up.
We loved the place. It was perfect. Back in our guide’s office, he made it very clear what they do and don’t allow at Nelles, and what they expect from filmmakers who shoot there. How marvelous is that? Who else gives you such clear and direct instructions on how they want to be dealt with? And as long as we didn’t do what they didn’t want us to do, and did do what they did want us to do, we were the golden children. We eventually found out that almost nobody who filmed there ever followed their instructions, which helped explain their initial brusqueness: we got the feeling that they were testing us, perhaps trying to scare us off. I have to think it worked fairly often.
Not on us. After we got our approval to shoot there, we made the first of our strategic plays: we brought the guards a box of cupcakes. They suppressed smiles at the gift, and maintained their gruff exteriors, but we noticed they became a lot more cooperative. Doors that nobody could open before suddenly had keys.
We descended on Nelles with hammers and nails and many barrels of paint. The guards told us we could shoot anywhere we wanted, as long as we returned the locations to their original condition. This rule was eased when they saw how well the art department crew painted and decorated the sets — it turned out our changes were better than the original condition. They also told us we could use any furniture from anywhere on the premises, as long as we put it back when we were done. This was a godsend, as the facility had buildings full of period-correct desks and chairs and cabinets and light fixtures and bulletin boards–almost all of them at least vaguely military-looking. And since many of the sets were going to be used for Naval Intelligence offices, it was perfect.
There was an awful lot of painting to do. Our first shot on our first day involved a long corridor in the Office of Naval Intelligence. Our production designer, Mel Horan, had grown up touring military bases with his father. Remembering the look of those bases, he suggested that we paint the walls two-tone white and grey (white along the top half, grey along the bottom). The walls were already white, so that was half the battle. But many hands were needed to get the entire length of that long corridor to be half-grey.
The other catch about shooting at Nelles is that the place is haunted. Not believing in ghosts, Stephanie and I didn’t see any, but the more sensitive among our cast and crew were sure that they spotted the spirits of broken-hearted former inmates — one person swore that she saw a young man in a sweatshirt disappear before her very eyes. The building in which we filmed a jail cell scene was particularly eerie, and we were all very relieved to move on from there. Later, one of the guards admitted that years earlier, a resident of the facility had hung himself in one of the jail cells.
In some ways, moving from building to building wasn’t easy. Stephanie in particular found it very sad to finish shooting in each location, because that part of our movie world that had come briefly to life was now done and would be dismantled and no longer exist. It’s a pretty striking notion, when you think about it. You’re making something that never existed before, yet hopefully will exist for a long time after you’ve made it (the movie), but the physical reality of how and where you made it basically evaporates day by day. Might be a story in there somewhere…
Here is today’s trading card…this is Card #6.
