5-17-96 The Agua Dulce Town Council has established a filming Committee which initially brought the disaster of the “Twister” movie which was ultimately cancelled.
The town council has instructed the film committee, made up of Art Brewer of Agua Dulce Hardware and his wife, Bill Perry, Tana Lampton and Teri Cook, to come back to the council with guidelines of what they consider an acceptable level of disturbance caused by film companies that would be tolerated in the name of user friendly.
One has to look at the fact that the community normally does not benefit one cent by filming going on in the community. The only thing it could benefit are sometimes the small businesses in the community.
But the community such as Acton and Agua Dulce who have people who moved here to get away from the big city also may have moved here to get away from other interruptions such as filming.
On the other hand, filming is interesting to watch and does provide some entertainment and therefore if it's not too disruptive and if the filming companies are cooperative and the community is cooperative then it might be a good fit. The difficulty is finding that level of fit. It is hoped that the town council filming committee can come back to the town council and present some standards that would be acceptable to the community and also to ask the filming companies for mitigation to be paid and benefit to the entire community. The town council is the logical entity to do this because in Agua Dulce they were elected by a fair vote of the registered voters and are the only ones that can represent the true position of the community.
It would seem to be that next time a movie like “Twister” is programed for the community, that they should be approached to decide what the level of bother the community would accept in trade for what level of compensation. “Twister” as you may remember was going to involve running jet engines all night long to blow down sets to duplicate a Cyclone or Hurricane or Tornado type environment.
It would have kept people in the very quiet community awake most of the night, but on the other hand had they made a sufficient contribution to charities within the community, it may have been acceptable. But the deal as cut, essentially was eighteen thousand dollars to the Chamber of Commerce which they claim they might give some of the money to the schools if used for the Library project that Art Brewer was currently championing. It had an awful lot of strings and very much money for that sort of disruption. Normally a movie company that would disrupt a town and keep them up for ten nights in a row would pay ten times that much for the ability to shoot there.