For filmmakers, Los Angeles is basically infinite. It is a mega-city that contains every other city within it—indeed, seemingly every other Earthly landscape is hidden somewhere in plain sight—whether it's a street that looks like Manhattan or a county park that literally looks like another world. In Los Angeles, something as simple as an empty parking lot can be transformed into a virtual window, a portal or gate through which film or TV crews can pull distant visions of another location. Around that corner could be Chicago, London, or even Seoul.


But who finds these locations, and how did they get so good at it? Location scouts are under-appreciated masters of the city, as blogs like Scouting NY make clear. Los Angeles, though, has a particularly deep and complex field for its location scouts to choose from, as Nathan Masters explores in his newest post for Southland.