St. Louisan returns home to make Clooney film

It’s a long road from St. Louis to Hollywood, and even longer by way of Washington. Now the long and winding road has returned Michael Beugg to his hometown, where the one-time White House aide is working as executive producer on the new movie “Up in the Air.” ….

……A decade later, tax incentives approved by the real governor of Missouri have helped lure the production of “Up in the Air.” The film is being directed by Jason Reitman, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the hit “Juno” and with whom Beugg worked on the political satire “Thank You for Smoking.”

In the script, based on a novel by Walter Kirn, the Clooney character flies to 11 cities to fire people; but Beugg said that shooting in so many actual locations would be prohibitively expensive.

“A studio would not be fond of a budget that calls for moving the crew to a new city every four days,” he said.

Reitman, Beugg and the other producers sifted trough websites from localities competing for film business, hoping to find a city that could simulate multiple places. Although Beugg was a quiet advocate for St. Louis, the choice was Reitman’s.

“We visited Albuquerque, Omaha, St. Louis, Detroit and Chicago,” Beugg said. “Jason immediately appreciated the look of St. Louis and that there was a large airport that had worked with some other recent film crews.

“So we went from thinking St. Louis might be a good place for a few scenes to thinking it could double for the majority of the locations in the script. And then when we told the head of production at Paramount that St. Louis was the leading contender, it turned out she had worked here on Steve Soderbergh’s ‘King of the Hill’ and had a good experience.”

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