Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper perform "Shallows" at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles in a pivotal scene from "A Star Is Born." (Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures)
If you’re among the hordes of people who have flocked to see Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper light up the screen in the latest reboot of “A Star is Born,” you may have noticed that one of the pivotal scenes was filmed at a familiar location.
The film, which shot rousing live scenes on the stage at the Coachella Festival grounds and at England’s Glastonbury Festival, spent several days at another iconic location, even if the name of the venue never makes it onto the screen.
“We get requests all the time from private entities, and Warner Bros. rented the venue for a week and filmed several scenes from the movie there,” said Becky Colwell, general manager of Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre for SMG. “They were here for several days and because the whole movie is based around music, we knew they were using other venues and we were excited to have them here.”
The scenes in question were used to frame Gaga’s breakout performance as Ally, singing her signature duet with Cooper’s Jackson Maine, “Shallow.” In the scene, Maine gives a surprised and reluctant Ally a chance to perform a song she has written in front of thousands of fans.
In Colwell’s three years with the Greek, she said, this was the first time a major motion picture took over the whole site, with a “huge” crew setting up shop all around the venue.
While the production didn’t make any physical changes to the Greek to make it match first-time director Cooper’s vision, the crew did take over some backstage dressing room hallways, where they took down some of the iconic pictures from the venue’s history and replaced them with prop scenery.
“They loved the old rock ‘n’ roll feel here … we’re 89 years old and still striving for that feel,” Colwell said.
While she could not talks specifics, she said the rental rate was “a bit higher” than the usual one, plus some expenses tacked on top.
The one expense the production did not incur was a fee to use the venue’s name in the film or in promotional materials, unlike the 2010 Russell Brand-Jonah Hill comedy “Get Him to the Greek,” which had a higher fee because it used the venue’s name in the title and prominently featured it in the film and ad materials.
“We sit down with everyone (who wants to shoot here) to evaluate the impact on the venue and our community because (“A Star is Born”) wanted to do a lot of nighttime scenes and we’re in a residential area and we have strict rules about noise and traffic,” Colwell said. “We’re really sensitive to trucks coming through the neighborhood, so there are set times when that can happen.”