The Ask the Dust crew recreated 1930s L.A. in South Africa. Downtown Los Angeles was shot on a plate and incorporated into the final composite. All images © Paramount Pictures. Courtesy of Double Edge Digital.

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In today’s congested, horn honking megopolis known as Los Angeles, with its parking lot freeways and smoggy skies above, it is hard to imagine a much simpler time and place, when orange and eucalyptus groves stretched from the heart of the city to the Pacific blue ocean, where the red cars were the primary mode of transportation, and Hollywood had hit its prime as the lure for thousands of people longing for health and wealth, fame and fortune.

Academy Award winner Robert Towne (Chinatown, Tequila Sunrise) has brought this bygone era to life once again as writer/director of the period love story Ask the Dust (opening March 10 in L.A. and NY and wider March 17 through Paramount Classics). Set under the brutally sunny skies of Depression-era Los Angeles, Towne’s interpretation of novelist John Fante’s masterpiece focuses on a city exotic and vulgar, glamorous and raunchy — a place of heat and dust. Ask the Dust stars Colin Farrell as Arturo Bandini, a son of Italian immigrants who dreams of becoming a famous novelist and marrying a beautiful blond, and Salma Hayek as Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress who longs to marry a white man and shed her last name. In a time when Anglo-Chicano relations hang by tattered threads, Bandini and Camilla collide with one another, fighting the city and themselves to make their dreams come true.

With all the real-life L.A. locations long gone, the crew recreated Depression-era Los Angeles under the sunny skies of South Africa. All of the key sets were constructed in Cape Town, where production designer Dennis Gassner and a host of visual effects maestros turned a South African high school soccer field into 1930s Los Angeles, replete with cable cars and period architecture. A back lot set comprised two city blocks with a cross street, ending with a faux Bunker Hill and tunnel. The back lot set reached as high as 40’, with the wide establishing shots becoming a combination of 2D and 3D matte paintings composited together. The production shoot lasted 58 days with an enormous amount of planning and research detailed ahead of time. According to visual effects producer, Andrew Midgley, the number of shots initially ranged between 30 and 33, and ended up with 48 in all, including about 10 lens-flare and wire-removal fix-it shots.

Vfx producer Andrew Midgley (left) was responsible for 48 shots in all, along with David Drzewiecki, who found amazing black-and-white process plates that became the inspiration for many scenes in the movie.

Visual effects supervisor David Drzewiecki oversaw the project in conjunction with Glendale-based 2D/3D effects house Double Edge Digital taking on the majority of the key scenes. With a modest budget of $400,000 allocated for all of the visual effects, the team had to be choosy about how to best put the money on the screen. Drzewiecki quickly became the man searching for archival footage of Depression-era Los Angeles to use as reference material. What Drzewiecki discovered from the Producer’s Library Service collection were amazing black-and-white process plates shot by the Hal Roach company circa 1936, which became the inspiration for many scenes in the movie.

High resolution scans of large format photos also provided the foundation for the matte paintings. “The main objective for the entire visual effects team was to be as historically accurate as possible,” recalls computer graphics supervisor Neil Atkins. Enormous attention to detail was paid by the 2D and 3D artists, as well as the matte painters, including the ornate detail on the exterior of buildings, red car cable wires and the view of downtown Los Angeles in the background. City Hall was the tallest building in L.A. at the time, and was featured in various scenes throughout the film. “There were a lot of little details we had to overcome, such as how high the telephone poles were in actuality vs. how high they visually had to be for the screen,” notes Atkins. “We had to achieve a technical compromise while still adhering to as much as possible to old Los Angeles. If, for some reason, we were unable to make it historically accurate, we tried to make it technically and visually appealing.”