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Lights, Camera, Action by Bill Glose Portions originally published in Virginia Living Magazine (Excised from a chapter, this portion occurs at the end of a walk from the center of Suffolk to the back lot of New Dominion Pictures.) We slowed down for the last two miles, stopping a couple of times in the shade of a tree. Finally, we saw a few city blocks rising up in the middle of a field. That was our destination for the day. Soon we were strolling down a quiet street lined with residential brownstones. The sidewalk was swept clean and a red fire hydrant stood at the corner. A bench backed up to one of the buildings and Dawn sat down to rest her feet while I continued investigating. I could have been in any American city. Until I viewed the buildings from the side. Then I saw that they were only deep enough to take a few steps inside, their frontage a mere fa�ade. Turning the corner, I noticed something stranger yet: the buildings� back sides were actually the fronts of another row of buildings. No, this wasn�t a mirage. Our stopping point for the day was New Dominion Pictures, a fully operational movie and television studio set on a forty acre plot that included a cemetery, woods, a lake, and a man-made desert. Additionally, on the studio lot was a functional military base, an eleven-thousand square foot sound stage, and all types of building fa�ades filling a fake city. This city had a police station and mailboxes, but no zip code. Out in the field behind the cityscape sat the sawed-off nose of an airplane fuselage and a helicopter with half its body painted military style and the other half painted like a hospital airlift chopper. Tucked away in the bucolic back country of Suffolk, Virginia, New Dominion is one of television�s best kept secrets, a film studio that creates regular shows for cable stations and delivers programs to networks in eighty countries worldwide. It has all the amenities of a Paramount movie set without the Hollywood overhead.
Their ten-thousand square-foot soundstage has the same surreal feel to it. Stepping into an office, you can see the desk, bookshelves, pictures on the wall, and everything else you would expect in an office. But when you look down you see what looks like train tracks curving in an arc on the floor leading up to the desk�dolly tracks for the camera�and looking up you see that the ceiling is missing, a grid of tubing in its place to hold overhead lights and cameras as needed. Just as the buildings outside are reused for different shots, the soundstage rooms are constantly changing. Among New Dominion�s one-hundred full-time employees is an art staff that is forever moving walls, matching paint to the color of rooms �on location,� and building anything required to make a shot work. Realism is their only standard since viewers must believe what they see is accurate. Sometimes day-hire actors are also duped by the realistic feel of the set. Though the mailbox in the backlot is just a prop, many letters have been dropped in its slot over the years. Dawn has actually acted before�and not just playing the part of a tomato. She has twice performed bit parts for New Dominion in a Discovery Channel series they produced called A Haunting. As I plopped down on the bench beside her, she filled me on the details. Her first role was as a turn-of-the-century ghost dressed in period costume. �I was a patient at a doctor�s office in a flashback scene circa 1906,� she said, �and I wore a bustle, a long, tight-fitting, calico gown, and a large picture frame hat. My character didn�t have a name. I was simply �Gossip #2.� I was standing backstage where there were lights and microphones and all this modern technology, then they cued me to come out and the lights were directly in my face and I couldn�t see the camera, I could just see the room I was in. When the heel of my 1906 boot first clunked on the floor, that step was like stepping back into time. The experience was everything I�d hoped for. I couldn�t wait to do it again.� She didn�t have to wait too long. She got a callback to see if she would be interested in another role, this time playing a grandmother. This gave Dawn pause�Aunt Bea she is not. But, when casting assured her that she could be �a hip and happening grandma,� she was fine with it. �It was a very brief scene,� she said, �but it�s funny what goes on behind the scene. Certain things are scripted and then certain things are improvised. In this scene, my little grandson comes up and gives me a big hug and says, �Grandma, Grandma, where is the candy?� So I just answer the question and say, �It�s on the living room on the coffee table. Same place as it always is.�" �But the building that is supposed to be my house is just a false front. It�s like a cottage on one side and then maybe a storefront on the other side. There are barrels and boxes and all kinds of stuff inside this building; it�s not a house at all. So when I tell the kid the candy is in the living room on the coffee table, same place as it always is, he goes running in and you hear his feet slow and he goes, �Hey, there�s no candy in here! This isn�t even a real living room!� And then we had to cut because everybody started laughing. If you see the episode, you hear him ask for the candy but not the rest.� I hadn�t realized I�d been walking with a celebrity. I�d been given a clue when I offered her my hat and she scoffed at me, preferring heat stroke to the fashion faux-pas of wearing my grungy headgear. But when I asked for her autograph, the indelible mark of the silver screen was much more apparent. She brushed me aside and headed for the car, saying, �Speak to my agent.� Now I was certain. I was truly in the presence of a diva. �Hey, your highness,� I said. �Think we can go inside and speak with one of the head honchos?� �Probably,� she said, looking me up and down and wrinkling her nose. �Just don�t tell anyone you�re with me.�
There is one downfall to being located in Suffolk. New Dominion executives, who typically pitch six to eight new concepts per year to cable TV, are forever flying back and forth across the country. Most independent film studios maintain offices a stone�s throw from Hollywood, giving them greater access to decision makers. Even so, New Dominion snags their share of contracts. At the time of our visit, their staff was currently producing season four of Discovery Channel�s A Haunting and execs were in the final stages of negotiations for a History Channel reality series. The Discovery Channel has also given New Dominion a green light to produce a pilot called The Ghosts of Alcatraz, the first in a series on hauntings in iconic places. When Chairman and President Tom Naughton originally created the company, he had a couple of offices just off the Virginia Beach strip and a contract to film a show called Archaeology for TLC. The show earned great ratings, was nominated for a Cable Ace Award, and served as a launching pad for other series. From Archaeology to Paleoworld to Ghost Stories, New Dominion continued to garner high ratings and awards. But it wasn�t until they started filming true-crime docudramas that they really hit their stride. These days, you can�t turn on the TV without running into an episode of CSI or Law and Order, but when New Dominion created The New Detectives there was nothing else like it on the air. It created an industry buzz and served as the genesis for a dozen or so knock-offs. �Anthony Zuiker�he�s the creator of CSI�has said over and over that The New Detectives was the inspiration for the CSI franchise,� said O�Donnell. New Dominion also created its own spin-off, The FBI Files. For a time, The FBI Files and The New Detectives were Discovery Channels highest rated programs. When production of both ended in 2006, the two series had run for nearly three-hundred hour-long episodes�a lifetime on cable TV. One of the reasons New Dominion has achieved such longevity is their ability to write, develop, and produce a TV series quicker and more efficiently than other independent studios. While their competition must farm out pre- and post-production work, New Dominion performs these tasks onsite. Which is a good thing since those tasks account for the vast majority of time put into producing a show. A single hour-long episode typically takes up three-and-a-half days of shooting plus a few days of onsite �beauty shots,� but the associated production adds another five to six months. �All the editing is done here,� said O�Donnell. �Everything from start to finish is done in this building, which is pretty rare. We have a digital graphics person on staff full time; we do all our own deliverables, which is all the legal work and international sales and distribution. The researchers and most of the department heads are full-time staff members and not hired per day.� The only people they don�t keep on staff, it seems, are the actors. �We have to be careful not to keep showing the same faces in every episode,� said O�Donnell. (The chapter picks up again at this point.) |
