Why Small-town Alberta Was Perfect For Filming Jason Reitman's ...

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For a short period in the summer of 2019, a tiny coffee shop in the small Alberta town of Crossfield became a key meeting place between Hollywood and the locals.

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Early in the morning, members of the crew who were in town shooting Ghostbusters: Afterlife would descend on The Side Street Cafe on Nanton Avenue to meet with the town folk. The cafe does appear briefly in the film. But more importantly for those shooting the mega-budgeted production, it became a place for reliable intel.

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“We’d go there at 7 o’clock in the morning and meet all the local farmers who would come,” says Bruce Brownstein, supervising location manager for Ghostbusters: Afterlife. “There would be 10 guys at one table and their wives at another. We’d have our list of questions: ‘Who owns this property?’ ‘What do you think of this or that?’ ‘Would this crop grow in this place do you think, or should we grow something else?’ ”

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Crossfield is just one of many Alberta small towns, hamlets and rural areas that can be seen in the film, which opened this week. Shot in the summer and fall of 2019, the production used sound stages at the Calgary Film Centre for some interior shots and a Wal-Mart in the city’s northeast. But, for the most part, the look of the film is defined by some of the province’s most distinct, non-mountainous and non-urban settings: the vast canyons in the Badlands near Drumheller, the rolling foothills near Turner Valley, massive blue skies and the quaint small-town streetscapes of Fort Macleod and Crossfield.

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Afterlife is writer-director Jason Reitman’s continuation of the franchise his father Ivan started with the 1984 classic. The film is meant to be a love letter to the original. But one of the ways the younger Reitman makes it his own is by flipping the setting from New York City to small-town Oklahoma. The story involves Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon), the daughter of departed ghostbuster Dr. Egon Spengler (played by the late Harold Ramis), dragging her kids Phoebe and Trevor (McKenna Grace and Finn Wolfhard) to Summerville, Okla. That’s the dead-end town where Egon lived out his post-ghostbusting life as an eccentric recluse in a creepy farmhouse. After his death, the family spends the summer in the small Oklahoma town and his grandkids uncover his past adventures hunting ghouls and how it relates to the strange happenings that seem to be overtaking Summerville. While the look and feel of the original was defined by iconic locales in the Big Apple and the chaos those otherworldly menaces caused in a crowded modern metropolis, Reitman’s look is defined by wide open spaces, winding country roads, lonely grain elevators, rickety bridges and small towns that seem from another era. These were all things Alberta could offer.

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