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WEEK: March 25-31, 2013

WEEK: March 11-17, 2013

  • Sunday, March 17th – Red Widow 1×04 The Escape with Radha Mitchell, Goran Visnjic and Wil Traval.
  • Sunday, March 17th – Welcome to Storybrooke circa 1983 on Once Upon a Time 2×17. Except if you’re an outsider. Then not so welcome. And you might end up the target of a high-speed chase by Sheriff Graham (Jamie Dornan) & Regina (Lana Parrilla).
  • Sunday, March 17th – News of Rainn Wilson (The Office) cast as lead in Hart Hanson’s CBS pilot Backstrom.
  • Friday, March 15th – Once Upon a Time films Jennifer Morrison & Michael Raymond-James on Third Beach in Stanley Park for 2×21
  • Friday, March 15th – Arrow films flashback scenes with Stephen Amell & Katie Cassidy & Oliver’s parents at Harbour Cruises in Coal Harbour for 1×21.
  • Friday, March 15th – The Killing films in Langley.
  • Friday, March 15th – CBS pilot Intelligence starts filming at Deer Lake Park in Burnaby. Josh Holloway not on set.
  • Friday, March 15th – Cult 1×04 with Matt Davis on The CW.
  • Thursday, March 14th – Vancouver played Toronto for Motive 1×06 Detour with scenes filmed at the Victorian Hotel as a Toronto apartment building and Belkin House as a Toronto police station.
  • Thursday, March 14th – Continuum‘s Eric Knudsen & Ian Tracey film at Catch-122 restaurant on West Hastings downtown.
  • Thursday, March 14th – CW pilot The 100 w/ Thomas McDonell as one of 100 juvenile delinquents sent back to Earth after nuclear war starts filming on its Langley set.
  • Thursday, March 14th – Supernatural films in Riverview in Coquitlam.
  • Thursday, March 14th – News that Arrow‘s Stephen Amell, Colin Donnell, Willa Holland, Paul Blackthorne & showrunners, & Falling Skies‘s Drew Roy, Sarah Carter, Seychelle Gabriel & showrunner Remi Aubuchon will be at WonderCon in Anaheim in late March. Schedule.
  • Thursday, March 14th – News that Amanda Tapping of Sanctuary, Stargate SG1 will direct second season’s 12th episode of Continuum.
  • Wednesday. March 13th – Psych‘s Big Foot episode directed by star James Roday airs on the USA Network.
  • Wednesday, March 13th – FOX pilot Human starts filming inside empty bank building on West Pender downtown. Karl Urban on set. Productions signs BELLY pay tribute to Fringe.
  • Wednesday, March 13th – Continuum films in Woodward’s Building downtown.
  • Wednesday, March 13th – Once Upon a Time films scenes at the Steveston Cannery and on Moncton St. with Jennifer Morrison, Michael Raymond-James, Robert Carlyle, Emilie de Ravin and David Anders (on his knees as he tweeted).
  • Wednesday, March 13th – Constellation Award nominations for Continuum, Fringe, Once Upon a Time, Primeval: New World, Supernatural, Jared Padalecki, Jensen Ackles, Read More »WEEK: March 11-17, 2013

YVRShoots Series – ALCATRAZ Wraps 1st Season With Bullitt-Inspired Car Chase

Published March 26, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

In 1963 the prisoners on Alcatraz disappeared. Now they’re coming back. You won’t believe what happens next on Alcatraz. – teases FOX’s Alcatraz Highlight Reel for the two-hour season finale tonight, almost all of it filmed in rain-drenched Vancouver, except for two-and-a-half minutes of a Bullitt-inspired car chase filmed on the sun-drenched streets of San Francisco.

The 13-episode first season of Alcatraz tells the saga of a secret agency dedicated to finding and catching inmates from the infamous San Francisco prison gone missing 50 years ago and reappearing today. It stars petite blonde-bobbed Sarah Jones as police detective Rebecca Madsen; Jorge Garcia from Lost as her partner, Alcatraz expert Dr. Diego “Doc” Soto;  and Sam Neill as Emerson Hauser, her mysterious boss with a past life on Alcatraz. The fourth person of interest in this secret squad is Hauser’s equally mysterious partner Lucy Banerjee, played by Parminder Nagra of ER, who was shot by the sniper convict Ernest Cobb during the second episode and then revealed to have her own past life on Alcatraz as hasn’t-aged-a-day psychiatrist-to-the-inmates Dr. Lucille Sengupta.

Showrunners teased several big moments ahead of tonight’s finale during the Alcatraz panel at WonderCon over the March break, including Lucy’s reintegration back into present day after finally waking up from her coma. Below is Parminder Nagra filming scenes with Jorge Garcia and Sam Neill in late February outside Belkin House downtown dressed as the MacAlister Institute. In the second photo there is little to suggest the romantic attachment which formed between Nagra and Neill’s characters in their past lives on Alcatraz, when Hauser was a young policeman. But I only caught part of their reunion.

The bigger reveal about tonight’s finale is that Sarah Jones’s Detective Madsen will chase after and confront her Alcatraz inmate grandfather Tommy Madsen in a Bullitt-inspired car chase filmed for three days in San Francisco (it took the crew of Bullitt nine days to film the original chase for the 1968 movie). I’d hoped that they’d use the Highland Green 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback that Jones’s character Rebecca Madsen has been driving in Vancouver — the exact colour, make and model of the Mustang that Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt — but I guess there wasn’t time to ship it down to San Francisco for the shoot or to rebuild it so that it could do the stunt driving.

FOX promo photos show a Deep Impact Blue 2013 Mustang GT speeding down a San Franciso hill.  Sarah Jones did fly down to film scenes there but a stunt double did the driving. Jones hadn’t filmed in San Francisco since the pilot, which I wrote about in my first #YVRShoots series post on Alcatraz.

Read More »YVRShoots Series – ALCATRAZ Wraps 1st Season With Bullitt-Inspired Car Chase