When the DVD of Jason Reitman’s Oscar-nominated movie “Up in the Air” went on sale earlier this month, Jamie Vesay had decidedly mixed emotions.
“I don’t know if I should laugh or cry,” said Vesay, assistant location manager for scenes filmed in Omaha last April.
The DVD includes deleted scenes shot in the Old Market and at Eppley Airfield, which Vesay calls “a fine case of what might have been.”
He’s especially rueful of a deleted shot of star George Clooney jogging through the intersection of 11th and Howard Streets. Vesay said that footage would have been priceless advertising for Omaha.
In a segment referred to as the “Omaha montage” on the DVD, Clooney is shown setting up housekeeping in a loft apartment above a flower shop at 11th and Howard. He visits a grocery, a pharmacy, a locksmith, a Hertz outlet. He cleans his bathroom in anticipation of his romantic interest, played by Vera Farmiga, coming for a visit.
Then he stands at the foot of an airport escalator waiting for Farmiga.
That’s an Eppley escalator all right, near the south end of the ticket counters. The apartment with large arched windows and brick walls is in Omaha. So is the bathroom, which actually is in the unit across the hall from the one Clooney is shown moving into.
But the grocery, locksmith, pharmacy and car rental unit are all in other cities, including St. Louis and Miami, where tax incentives made it cheaper to film. Nebraska has no film tax incentives.
Vesay owns Production Services of Omaha. His location scouting job included finding the loft, securing location agreements for Old Market filming, laying all the groundwork for businesses affected by filming, finding parking for movie equipment trucks and getting permits to block off Jackson Street between 11th and 12th Streets for a day.
He spent months, starting in October 2008, arranging for what ended up being two days of filming in April 2009. All that for less than two minutes of footage that ended up in the movie, he said.
Other places you’re made to think are in Omaha are not. Clooney’s drab all-white apartment in the movie is actually in St. Louis. So is a stand-in for Eppley airport security. A luggage store was created and shot at Eppley, though.
“In the script, this was going to be pretty cool for Omaha,” Vesay said. “There was a sequence where Clooney’s character commits to living in Omaha. He wraps his head around Omaha, gets on Ollie the Trolley, sees the iconic sights.
“It was never shot. They wrote it out just before arriving here.”
They were going to shoot at the Nebraska Furniture Mart, too, Vesay said.
“The joke in the script was that he (Clooney) didn’t know how to shop. He buys a whole show gallery of furniture, then the movie would cut to the apartment where everything is in place just as it was in the store.”
A scene with Clooney hailing a cab dressed in an astronaut suit, filmed outside the Omaha airport, was intended to be part of a dream sequence that also was cut from the movie. It, too, is part of the DVD extras.
The DVD includes voice-over narration from Reitman explaining why some of the Omaha footage didn’t make sense to include in the story. The video says erroneously that the loft at 11th and Howard is owned by Omaha director-screenwriter Alexander Payne. It’s actually owned by the Mercer family, Vesay said.
To keep the illusion of winter, all the emerging leaves were plucked from a tree at that corner, Vesay said. He said he thought the film company replaced the tree after the shoot.
Contact the writer:
444-1269, bob.fischbach@owh.com
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