Local Local 'Leftovers'
Austin, Lockhart featured in current HBO series.
You know what’s bigger in Texas? The universe of HBO’s acclaimed series, “The Leftovers.”
The first season of the intense drama introduced us to the splintered Garvey family of Mapleton, New York, carrying on several years after a day upon which 2 percent of the world’s population suddenly vanished.
Police Chief Kevin Garvey struggled to raise his rebellious teenage daughter in the wake of her mother’s defection to a nihilistic cult of silence-avowed chainsmokers called the Guilty Remnant. That group was bent on disrupting those trying to live lives of normalcy in the wake of the event known as the “sudden departure.”
Meanwhile, Garvey’s son was off on his own, following a dubious spiritualist calling himself “Holy Wayne.”
The story, based on a novel by Tom Perrotta (“Election,” “Little Children”), was claustrophobic, repetitive and, while compelling, difficult to watch.
The endless, thick air of depression was not enjoyable. In fact, those who’ve never experienced clinical depression could get a pretty good idea of what it feels like
by watching Season 1 of “The Leftovers.”
In light of this, the second season, like the fictional Texas town in which it set, has been something of a miracle.
“All roads led to Austin”
Miracle, Texas — Population: 9,261; Departures: Zero — is the home of a greatly expanded cast, sunny new vistas, and — dare we hope? — glimmers of hope. As a locale where nobody has vanished, Miracle becomes an expensive and difficult-to-penetrate mecca for those who remain.
But the story’s continuation is not only set here; the season was filmed here, too, much of it in nearby Lockhart.
Series creators Damon Lindelof (“Lost”), Perrotta and their writing staff first came up with the idea of a town called Miracle where no departures had occurred, according to Mimi Leder, the drama’s executive producer, who pretty much guided production here this summer.
“It could have been any state, any place,” Leder says.
She sent location scouts to Austin, Atlanta, Savannah, Ga., and various locations in California.
They soon began to send in photos from the different locales.
“We had a big Austin wall. We had a big Savannah wall,” she says. “The town of Lockhart appealed to us immediately with its historic old buildings and its color palette — the courthouse. We thought, “Wow, this place looks like Miracle.”
Leder and other production staffers paid the town a visit to scope out the locations they had only seen in photos.
“We looked at these places in the flesh with the sun hitting them, the amazing clouds, the big sky that Texas is famous for and it was like, ‘This is it,’” she recalls. “It just seemed like all roads led to Austin.”
Local talent
It didn’t hurt that Austin has established crew talent and a plethora of actors led by local extras casting director Beth Sepko.
“I’m telling you, I had the best time with the Austin crew,” Leder says. “They’re super passionate, super intelligent (and) very story-oriented. It was an amazing experience with one of the best crews I’ve ever worked with.”
For her part, Sepko was responsible for casting local actors including Turk Pipkin (“The Sopranos”) and Katherine Willis (“Friday Night Lights,” “The Returned”).
Pipkin plays a character known only as Pillar Man.
He stands on a platform atop a column perhaps 35-feet-tall in Miracle’s town square, his long white hair and beard — “two hours in hair and makeup,” he says — blowing at the whim of the breeze in concert with his multicolored, silk kimono. In the show, townspeople deliver supplies to the character via a bucket Pipkin draws up with a rope.
“Pillar Man is an ancient character,” Pipkin says. “The idea of a holy man that would go up on top of a pillar in the town square in the middle ages was not uncommon.”
The image is iconic, but the actor is mum about any future significance his character might have to the plot beyond that.
Production staffers offered Pipkin a stunt man who could stand in for him for long shots of the square — apparently getting a person up and down from the structure is an involved process — but he declined.
“Forget the double; just put me up there and leave me there,” he recalls telling them. “Would I rather be on the pillar, watching this show go in the can, or sitting in my dressing room watching a soap opera?”
The perch afforded him a unique perspective on filming, as revealed in a bird’s-eye production clip photo of Pillar Man watching the Garvey family roll into town he posted to his Facebook wall.
Pipkin filmed the bulk of his scenes during the summer. “May and June is when it was really hot,” he says. To keep cool, he drank plenty of water and would send selfies to the makeup people to make sure that his face hadn’t melted off.
Willis’ character, Loretta Carter, debuted last Sunday. Carter is the mother of one of three local teenage girls who went missing in a previous episode.
The role gave Willis the opportunity to act with Regina King and Kevin Carroll, who portray the Murphys.
Her first scenes where shot in June at McKinney Falls, out in the heat with 100 extras. Later scenes were filmed on the square in Lockhart.
While she praises the main cast members as “open and generous” and is a huge fan of many of them — she has especially kind words for Carrie Coon, who plays Garvey’s partner, Nora Durst — Willis has a special fondness for the other Austinites involved in the production.
“The majority of the crew were Austin crew members, who are basically like family at this point,” she says. “Some of the days were very difficult and there was never any complaining about it.”
Both actors were fans of the series in Season 1, before production moved here. Willis, of course, knows executive producer Peter Berg, with whom she worked on both the “Friday Night Lights” movie and series.
“I always want to follow and support anything that any of that group is doing,” she says. “And the fingerprint of this particular series is so unique.”
Pipkin also appreciates the unusual approach of “The Leftovers.”
“There’s no other show on television that I can think of that treats spirituality both with skepticism and respect,” he notes. But his thoughts on the series aren’t all deep.
“What’s really funny is that they built a season — hopefully, many seasons — around a place that everybody wants to move to that’s really, really expensive,” he says, laughing. “Sounds like Austin!”