There was a time when legendary location scout Lori Balton was like a modern-day Philip Marlowe, trolling the neighborhoods of Los Angeles, in search of the perfect private home to shoot. “We used to literally drive around and look at the front of the house and we were kind of anthropologists in a way,” she says. “You look at the outside of the house, and you look for clues, like what kind of car did they drive? Do they have kids? And then you’d leave a letter and then you’d go and look at the house.”
While working on Rob Reiner’s Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), Balton detected the perfect SoCal home to stand in for the Old South. “In Sierra Madre, I passed this house and I just stepped on the brakes, backed up, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s it,’ ” she recalls. “It was this old farmhouse that was still there, and I shot it. And when I came back, everyone was so amazed. We shot the whole thing there, exterior and interior.”
