Imagine getting paid to find great roads, striking vistas, and interesting towns and landscapes. Imagine also the work required to integrate those roads and vistas into movies and TV shows. Actually, you don’t have to imagine – you can talk with Cal Club Region’s Joe Akerman.
We first met Akerman at last year’s United States RoadRally Challenge® in Lancaster, CA. A retired TV and film-industry location manager – someone who searches for, finds, and manages the real-world locations that give a movie, TV show, or commercial its essential look and feel – Akerman was serving as chairman for the 2024 USRRC and rallymaster for Thunder Road, one of the weekend’s three National rallies.
Known for organizing (in the words of a longtime Cal Club and Santa Monica Sports Car Club colleague) fun, precise, and mistake-free Monte-Carlo-style rallies – Akerman “did some rallying in college” but became enamored with the sport after moving from Florida to California to attend USC’s film school.
“When I got out of film school, I went to work as a staff person at production companies, reading scripts, taking meetings, doing summaries, making lists of actors who were available,” Akerman explains. “I got into rallying while I was a staff person, and people who knew me also knew I did rallies.”
Fast-forward a decade. Akerman had added script-writing to his CV, expanded his rallying horizons with National touring RoadRallies, and continued his weekend hobby of exploring Southern California’s back-country roads simply for the fun of it.
“In the mid-’90s, I was asked by a producer of TV commercials, ‘Hey, Joe, we need a road that’s got such and such – Joshua trees, hills, maybe some big powerlines, but no telephone poles. Know any locations like that?’”
Because of his experience with rallying, as well as his love of exploring the Southern California countryside, Akerman did, and he found the perfect location, to the delight of the producer who made the request.
That request led to others, and eventually to a request from a producer to scout locations for a Dust Bowl movie, Akerman recalls.
“He asked, ‘Would you like going around Central California and taking pictures of all the little towns? We’re looking for a town that we can use for 1930s Oklahoma.’
“I said, ‘That’s going to cost me a lot of money.’
“‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘We’ll pay you.’
“You can imagine what I thought,” Akerman continues, “You mean, I’ll get paid for what I do already? That was my first paying job as a location scout.”
From location scout to location manager was a natural step, Akerman notes. He learned how to close roads, negotiate with county road departments, the California Highway Patrol, local police departments, and city and county public-works departments.
“The organizational skills you need as a rallymaster translate very well to working as a location manager,” Akerman observes. “You need a library of roads and local knowledge. You need the ability to anticipate problems. You need good planning skills.”
If, for example, “you are going to put something on the side of the road, you will need a permit, and you will need to know who issues that permit. I got good at it. It was like having a large toy set, my own Hot Wheels – doing car chases, car crashes, car-to-car shootings. That’s what I did for 30 years.”
Akerman’s numerous movie credits include films such as the vampire movie Van Helsing, the con-artist movie Playing God, and Terminator 3.
(Someday ask Akerman about Van Helsing, and the effort required to find and deliver a dozen double-dump-truck loads of sanitized dirt, as required by a forest-service permit, to turn a three-quarter-mile section of paved forest road into a nighttime mountain dirt road outside 19th-century Prague, all for a classic chase scene.)
“For Terminator 3, for one of the big chase scenes, it took 6,000 signatures from all the businesses and residents along the street,” Akerman recalls. “It took an army of location people to get those signatures, and it took an army of people to run it during filming. I believe it took four weekends to shoot, because we could only film on Sundays.”
Akerman’s TV credits are wide-ranging also, including Revenge, Entourage, Fear Factor, Code Black, Body of Proof, and House – “a really good show,” Akerman says. “It was produced by NBC Universal, but it was aired on Fox TV and was based at Fox Studios as well. I did a lot of shows for ABC Studios also.”
For the concluding episode of House in 2012, Akerman also was responsible for finding the perfect location for the series closing shot.
“The producers wanted something big for the last scene, and it was hard to find, since it needed to play as New Jersey but be filmed in California. We ended up in San Luis Obispo County, on a road called Las Pilitas. It has an old metal bridge that has been bypassed by new construction. This is the kind of thing you need to know. You can’t just close a main road. To do your job, you’ve got to find vestiges of the past. They flipped out. They loved it.”
“How in the world did you find this location?” Akerman says he was asked.
RoadRallying, of course.
Want to try RoadRally for yourself? Head to scca.com/roadrally for more information.
Photo caption: Joe Akerman with son Ethan checking the scores following the 2024 USRRC’s Thunder Road.
Photo by James Heine
