VENTI VIDI VICI

The location guru who came, saw, and conquered the Hollywood landscape.

By Hudson Sangree

FADE IN:

EXT. BACK ALLEY — DAWN

Venice, California. Once a beachside haven for artists and hippies; now home to such movie stars as John Cusack and Julia Roberts. Chic architect-designed homes and ultracool lofts abound.

In the alley behind his own loft, MARC VENTI, a big man in a New York Yankees cap, loads equipment into a black Lincoln Navigator and closes the rear hatch. He calls his English bulldog, BRITT, who scrambles into the SUV to, as usual, ride shotgun.

Venti is one of Hollywood’s top location scouts. This is the start of another eighteen-hour day.

Right now, he’s searching for places to film Carnivàle, a new HBO series. Slated to premiere this month, the show tells the story of a traveling carnival during the Great Depression, but it’s really about the eternal war between God and Satan. Think The Grapes of Wrath meets Stephen King’s The Stand, toss in bits of The X-Files, Freaks, and The Greatest Show on Earth, and you’ll get the picture.

Before this day and many others like it are done, Venti will have logged thousands of miles combing Southern California for ideal Carnivàle locations. He’ll have
crisscrossed the Mojave Desert, climbed the rugged Santa Monica Mountains, and soared in a helicopter above the Great Central Valley.

In the dim morning light, Venti eases the Navigator onto a side street, then turns north on the Pacific Coast Highway, still mostly deserted at this hour. The Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier rises above the ocean in the distance.

INT. VENTI’S NAVIGATOR — DAWN — TRAVELING

VENTI
Whadaya say, Britt—ready for another day?

Britt sits up straight and pants in agreement.

VENTI
It’s gonna be a long one. We
gotta drive about five hundred miles today. You sure you wanna come along?

Britt lies down on the leather seat, getting comfortable.

VENTI
I’ll take that as a yes. Okay, then, let’s go!

Britt lifts her head and barks twice, enthusiastically.

EXT. HIGHWAY — MORNING

Venti guns the engine. The Navigator accelerates around a bend toward the Malibu hills and the rising sun.

VOICE OVER:
VENTI
I love this job!

FADE OUT


Yeah, it’s hokey. But this script is, as they say, based on a true story. At age thirty-two, Marc Ventimiglia, UC’95, really is one of Hollywood’s top location scouts. He really does have a bulldog named Britt (short for British Brittany), though the actual Britt rarely barks. And he often says, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, “I love my job.”

Who wouldn’t?

Venti, as he’s called by almost everyone in the business, gets paid handsomely for his efforts. He lives in a cool pad in Venice, one of L.A.’s hippest communities. His neighbors are Dennis Hopper and Robert Downey Jr. His other car is a Porsche.

Yet Venti isn’t one to dwell on status symbols. What’s more important is the work itself, which taps his creative sensibility and tests the business skills he learned as a Northeastern finance major. In fact, after just seven years in Hollywood, Venti has a reputation as the go-to guy when you need a keen eye for the right location and the steeliness and sweat to stay within almost any budget.

The fact that Venti’s current good fortune sprang miraculously from a time when he was down on his luck is just another twist in his made-for-TV life.

Here’s the treatment: While still in college, a fast-talking, hardworking Brooklyn kid lands a plum Wall Street job. After a few years of climbing the ladder, he gets laid off. With nothing to lose, he packs his bags and moves to L.A., to look for a job in the movies.

One day, a location manager—a friend of a Northeastern friend—invites the kid to a B-movie set and says he might be able to hire him in a few months as a low-level office assistant. But while the kid’s standing there, an assistant location manager suddenly quits. Our hero, with no film experience whatsoever, is offered the job on the spot.

That was 1996. Over the next six years, Venti worked on more than two dozen television and film projects, sometimes as a location manager, sometimes as a location scout, often as both. His projects included The X-Files TV series; Scream 3; the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot; Blonde, a miniseries about Marilyn Monroe; and Sharing the Secret, a Peabody Award–winning TV movie about a teenage girl struggling with bulimia.


SMASH CUT TO: 2002

We find Venti on the set of Carnivàle, the multimillion-dollar, twelve-episode series HBO is hoping will become its next Sunday-night phenomenon, following on the heels of The Sopranos and Six Feet Under.

Venti acted as location scout and manager for the Carnivàle pilot and the next four episodes; after that, he remained on board as a consultant. During his scouting, he put 18,000 miles on his odometer in just a few months. That doesn’t even include the dozens of hours he spent in a helicopter, looking for isolated places to set up a full-size traveling carnival, complete with Ferris wheel, carousel, and sideshow tents.

The miles and the hours paid off. Venti found spots that resembled Oklahoma, Texas, and the Midwest, yet most were less than an hour’s drive from downtown L.A., a huge money-saver for the show’s producers. For instance:

In the hills above Malibu, an Old West set at the Paramount Ranch, a 436-acre lot once owned by Paramount Studios, was painstakingly transformed into “Mintern,” a 1930s California town that some Dust Bowl refugees call home (as does Brother Justin, a preacher with questionable intentions, not to mention possible ties to Satan).

Simi Valley provided the first site for re-creating the intricate carnival operation. Later, near the San Fernando Valley town Santa Clarita, a mountain-top plain known by the movie world as Mystery Mesa morphed into another carnival site, a farm on which the caravan sets up for business. An actual team of carnies was hired to run the antique rides and live on the set full-time.

The Valuzat Ranch—also near Santa Clarita, tucked away in a dry canyon accessible only by a washed-out dirt road—was used for a scene in which a giant dust storm consumes a small town. Huge fans powered by Chevy V8 engines kicked up enough dust during filming to make everyone on set run for cover.

But Venti’s most critical and hardest-won location was for the Carnivàle opening scene, which unfolds amid Dust Bowl conditions on the Great Plains. The problem: High mountains ring Los Angeles in every direction. If viewers caught a glimpse of those jagged peaks, they’d know for sure they weren’t looking at Oklahoma.

To find a workable spot—a wide, treeless plain, with no mountains in view for at least 180 degrees—Venti drove through the desert northeast of Los Angeles for days at a stretch. He traveled dirt roads surrounded by nothing but sagebrush, guided by military maps and the satellite-based Global Positioning System.

Finally, he found the right place, a barren landscape in Antelope Valley, one of the remotest corners of Los Angeles County. That’s where we’re introduced to series protagonist Ben Hawkins, a young man with miraculous healing powers whose family farm is about to be bulldozed by a merciless bank.

“That was the money shot,” says Venti. “I drove at least seven thousand miles looking for that location.”

Such perseverance and ingenuity get recognized. In 2002, Venti won the prestigious California on Location Award for Television Location Professional of the Year for his Carnivàle work; he’d also won it three years earlier for The X-Files.

“This is a one-of-a-kind award. It’s basically the Oscar or Emmy for location managers,” says Pauline East, the Antelope Valley film commissioner who nominated Venti. The award honors work “above and beyond the call of duty,” she says. In Venti’s case, that meant creating the illusion the carnival is traveling from state to state—and from one distinct topography to another—while filming everything close to L.A.

“Marc’s exceptional tenacity in scouting and wrangling five tricky locations in four counties kept this project in California,” East wrote in her nomination letter.

The work demands more than just resourcefulness and time. Scouts need a developed aesthetic awareness. “Locations set the mood and the tone of a film. They say things about character in subtle ways,” explains Steve Dayan, Venti’s union representative, and himself a veteran location scout and manager.

And Venti’s creative instincts are well-regarded. “As an artist, I can talk to him about a vision, and he understands it,” says Scott Winant, one of the creators of thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, and an executive producer on Carnivàle.


MONTAGE: VENTI WORKS THE SET

In addition to finding locations to film in, Venti often manages the sites during the filming, a double duty that’s not unusual on Hollywood sets.

Location managers oversee daily operations related to filming on location. Where do you park the trucks? Where does the crew eat? Where do you put the extras when they’re not in front of the camera? Who gets the local airport to rearrange flight patterns? Location managers are “masters of nothing and experts at everything,” Dayan says.

Consequently, managing locations involves a different set of skills than scouting. A lot of time is spent troubleshooting and keeping movie people, many with inflated heads and sensitive egos, happy. “I’m almost a psychotherapist, sometimes, dealing with different people,” Venti says.

If a scene is being filmed in a residential neighborhood and a guy starts using his weedwhacker, Venti asks him to stop. If a dog barks while his owner’s at work, Venti gets him to quiet down. “I’ll be making peanut butter sandwiches and throwing them over the fence,” he says.

Clearly, the work can be less than glamorous. “It’s a pretty thankless job,” says Dayan. “You have to swallow your ego.”

And dealing with the nuts and bolts of film production is a far cry from the aesthetic challenges of location scouting. “It’s weird,” Dayan says. “When you get into production, there’s a disconnect between you and the creative people. We move from this very creative job to this very technical job.”

For Carnivàle, Venti hired a team of assistants to do much of the day-to-day management. He supervised at a macro level, broadly overseeing the operations at the various sets. Still, his days often started around 4 a.m. and ended late at night. He’d check in with the crews on all the sets every morning, attend production meetings later in the day, and, with the help of his ever-present cell phone and text pager, constantly put out fires.

Even this was a more relaxed pace than Venti had faced on The X-Files. During the show’s sixth and seventh seasons, he was the key assistant location manager, the man on the ground who dealt with every problem, tiny or catastrophic, under extreme time pressure. Endless days and sleepless nights were the norm. But it was a valuable introduction to big-budget productions.

“On the first episode I worked on,” Venti recalls, “we blew up an actual bank in downtown L.A. We had to close several streets for days, and board up the windows in the hotel across the street.” The X-Files, Venti says, “was let’s get it done and make it look right first, then we’ll worry about the money after.”

Truth be told, that’s not how Venti prefers to work. He specializes in holding down costs; producers like him because he’s frugal and able to bargain well, products of his business background.

“Marc treats the money for the show like his money,” says Kimberly Dickens, a Carnivàle producer. Dickens has employed Venti on every television production she’s done since 1998, in large part because of his financial acumen.

“If you have all the money in the world, it’s easy,” she says. “But in television, you don’t have a quarter of the money you do in feature films.” Venti is a master of working under restrictions, she says: “He accomplishes the impossible.”


SUPER: THE ZONE (AND WHY IT MATTERS)

A big key to saving money: Finding locations within “the Zone,” a circle that extends thirty miles out from the La Cienega and Beverly intersection in West L.A. Shoot outside the Zone and union wages increase. For Carnivàle, Venti had to travel beyond the magic circle to get his desert locations but kept his other sites close to central L.A.

That’s not easy. A typical scouting day starts around sunrise, when Venti makes a pot of coffee, checks his various communication devices, and loads up the SUV with the day’s supplies. Scouting requires lots of photographic equipment, a variety of maps, a cooler of refreshments for the road.

And constant sidekick Britt, whom Venti rescued from a breeding operation in South Central L.A., one of the city’s most blighted areas. Now Britt rides on a leather seat in the SUV, with the air conditioning cranked up for her comfort. Venti even bought a mobile home to give her a place to hang out on location. Britt’s really a party girl, though; she likes making the rounds of cast and crew, who know her and greet her warmly. “She’s probably been on more sets than ninety percent of the actors in Hollywood,” Venti laughs.

When he scouts, Venti tries to find sites that match images in his head, born of his reading of the script and his discussions with producers, directors, and production designers. Once he’s found a likely site, he photographs it, then tapes the photos together into panoramas. Production executives review the panoramas, and give the location a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

Many of Venti’s scouting trips take him outside the city proper, to deserts and mountains remarkably remote and unpopulated, given their proximity to the L.A. megalopolis. Pre-scouting research often suggests an agenda of places to visit.

Other days are more hit-or-miss, just driving around looking for that flawless filming spot. “Some days, you have no choice but to do cold scouting,” Venti says. “Sometimes you end up in a dead end, and sometimes you end up in that jackpot location.”

Local residents are often the best resource, he says. “I try to find people who have lived in a neighborhood for a long time. Or mailmen or policemen, because they drive around all day.”

Once a location is found and approved, Venti has to track down the owners and strike a deal. After finding the owners of the desert site he wanted for the Carnivàle opening scene—they lived in Beverly Hills, it turned out—Venti was able to get the parcel for $1,250 per month. Urban locations, by contrast, can cost thousands of dollars a day.

Such negotiations, Venti says, are where his financial background comes in handy. Still, he wants everybody, property owners and moviemakers alike, to get fair deals. “Location managers strive to make sure everyone’s happy, without getting greedy,” he says.


FLASHBACK TO: HUNTINGTON AVENUE

Though he’s become an established presence in the entertainment industry, Venti never thought about working in Hollywood during his days at Northeastern. “The film business wasn’t ever on my radar screen,” he says.

Instead, Venti was headed straight for a career on Wall Street. It was in his blood: His father worked at the New York Stock Exchange for thirty-five years.

At NU, Venti did two back-to-back co-ops with the investment firm Tucker Anthony Sutro. His bosses there offered him a full-time job before he’d even graduated. And so, “at the end of my middler year, I went to work on Wall Street,” Venti says. He later transferred back to the firm’s Boston headquarters and finished up his Northeastern undergraduate studies. After graduation, Venti stayed on with Tucker Anthony and entered Boston University’s MBA program.

But eventually he took a job at the San Francisco office of Hambrecht & Quist, another large investment firm. After only eight months there, he got laid off in a management changeover.

“I caught the squeeze,” Venti says. “At that point, I decided to take my belongings and move to Los Angeles, where I had a plethora of friends from Northeastern.” One college friend had a roommate who was a location manager on a low-budget action flick; he invited Venti to visit the set.

The next day, Venti drove out to Los Angeles International Airport, where the moviemakers had rented out five empty terminals. “They were filming on the runway at sunset,” Venti says. “I was standing there with the location manager, and the assistant location manager comes up and says, ‘This job is not for me.’ That was her last night. The location manager turned to me and said, ‘Remember how I told you I might be able to bring you on board in a couple of months? How about six a.m. tomorrow morning?’”

Venti showed up—and immediately began working nonstop. “The first day was a twenty-three-hour day for me, and I loved it,” he says. Soon, Venti recalls, his boss told him he had to move on to another project: “He said, ‘I did you a favor. Now you do me a favor. I gotta take the other job, but I can’t tell this production I’m leaving. You’re gonna do the work, and get the job done. Anything you can’t answer or don’t understand, call me, and I’ll tell you what to do.’”

Later, the crew on the nonunion set went out on strike. When the dust had settled, a union contract was in place, and Venti could begin accumulating the all-important hours he needed to join the Teamsters and work as a location professional.

From there, it was onward and upward.

The high-profile Carnivàle has been a huge opportunity for Venti. But even bigger projects lie ahead, such as the movie based on James Ellroy’s autobiography about his mother’s murder, My Dark Places (produced by Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope), and the TV series Monk, which Venti will join for its second season. Further on down the road? Maybe a $65 million feature film that’ll shoot in San Francisco, Las Vegas, and L.A. starting in January. Maybe Carnivàle, season two.

So what’s the secret of Venti’s success in one of the toughest industries in the world?

Two things, says Sean McGarr, one of Venti’s best friends from Northeastern and owner of the New York City nightclub Webster Hall. First, McGarr says, though Venti is surrounded by huge egos, he stays selfless and generous; it’s why he’ll do whatever it takes to get a job done. “Marc’s motto is, treat people the way you would like to be treated,” says McGarr.

Then there’s the innate can-do attitude.

“Marc walks around every day like he’s won the lottery,” McGarr says. “Some people know they’re going to do well, no matter what. That’s why Marc will always succeed.”


OUT

Hudson Sangree, L’00, wrote in the May issue about Northeastern lawyers who fight the death penalty.