In the Heights, page 27
A chimi truck was parked in front of the bus. Faded and weathered, it bore the marks of many years of serving customers who queue up for Dominican street food. In fact, until a couple of days earlier, this truck was a plain white box on wheels. Nelson’s team transformed it, right down to the scuff marks and Dominican flag. In late morning, they applied some finishing touches so that as soon as Jon and Alice got the shot they needed on the bus, the truck would be ready for its close-up. It’s as if fifty people were playing an elaborate, expensive game of leapfrog.
When Jon walked over, shooting was delayed not because of the truck but because of its make-believe proprietor. A couple of nights earlier, Jon had spotted a familiar face on a subway platform. It was Luis Salgado, the dancer and choreographer who had introduced him to In the Heights when he invited Jon to see it on Broadway. Jon had always wanted Luis to be in the movie, and that random encounter had given them a fresh chance to figure it out. Now here was Luis, in shorts and high-tops, getting ready to chop up chimi while mouthing the lyrics of a song he’s been singing since 2007.
Jon and Luis talked about the shot with the choreographer, Chris Scott. The three of them were used to these exchanges, having worked together on Jon’s first movie, Step Up 2: The Streets. Jon got a new idea: They should film Luis swinging open the panel on the side of the truck. Chris and Luis agreed. It’s the kind of on-the-spot brain wave that could slow down production. Except that Nelson, having anticipated that Jon might want to try that, had already dressed everything that needed dressing to shoot it. Experiments on how Luis should hoist the panel began at once.
And that was good news for all of them, considering they had four or five days’ worth of reshoots to do and only two days to do them.
The quality of a collaboration makes real, tangible differences to what people create—each of them separately or all of them together. Lin had the extreme good fortune to encounter Tommy, Lac, and Andy in the tadpole stage of his career and the extreme good sense to hang on to them. What they achieved together on Hamilton is unimaginable without the bonds they had forged on Heights. The same holds for Jon, who couldn’t have made Heights without the history he shares with a handful of collaborators, all of whom were with him on set this day: Nelson, Chris, Myron Kerstein, Mitchell Travers, and especially Alice, his longest-standing creative partner, stretching all the way back to his student projects at USC.
Nelson Coates, Jon Chu, Alice Brooks, and Chris Scott
“We practiced for ten years to do this,” he told her.
If the film works, it’ll be because of Lin’s songs and Quiara’s screenplay. It’ll also be because of the collaboration among Jon and his team, a tight group of colleagues who are very different from the stage version’s Voltron—and totally the same.
he mission wasn’t to turn Washington Heights into something new, Jon told them when their collaboration began: It was to capture the beauty that’s already there.
Alice had no trouble seeing it. “I was constantly falling in love with the place,” she says.
When they started visiting Washington Heights to scout locations, the sights, sounds, even the smells felt like home. She had grown up in Manhattan—her father had plays produced on Broadway—in a neighborhood with a strong Puerto Rican presence. She told Quiara that the second she saw the George Washington Bridge rise into view, “I felt like I could breathe.”
Those early trips were a sort of quest: a search for what they called their “Do the Right Thing block.” They wanted to find a single location where they could film most of the action of the movie, just as Spike Lee had filmed much of his masterpiece on a single street in Brooklyn. Samson Jacobson, the location manager, says that his “Spidey sense” kept leading him back to one intersection in particular: 175th and Audubon. It had a bodega diagonally across from a car service and enough room for big dance numbers in the street. It even afforded a view of the GWB peeking over the rooftops to the west. If this isn’t it, then I’m on the wrong job, he remembers thinking.
Everybody agreed: The movie had found a home. Now they had to figure out how to film it.
Capturing the authentic character of a neighborhood is more complicated than pointing a camera at it. What’s distinctive about Washington Heights doesn’t fit neatly in a frame: It has to be selected, composed, distilled. So the existing bodega would get a new awning; the daycare center across the street would get a new facade and become Daniela’s salon. Nelson vowed that every element in his production design would be something he had seen in the neighborhood. Fortunately, he had seen everything: He had walked every street, visited every salon, every bodega.
He did not find this taxing. Like Alice, he calls In the Heights a dream job. He tracked the show from Broadway, where he saw it three times in a week, all along its convoluted path to the screen. When he met Jon to talk about working on Crazy Rich Asians, he nurtured the secret hope that if he landed the gig and everything went well, it would give him a shot at designing Heights.
Nelson did land the gig, and everything did go well. Jon admired the way that Nelson understood what characters needed—all of it informed by the voluminous knowledge he somehow amassed about every aspect of, well, everything.
“I love people who love what they do, the ones who’d be doing this whether they’re getting paid or not,” Jon says. “I get drawn to those people and like making things with those people. And Nelson is that. Fully.”
A few weeks into working on Crazy Rich Asians, Jon asked Nelson what he was doing next. Nelson said he wasn’t sure.
“Would you be interested in doing a musical called In the Heights?” asked Jon.
Nelson, who used to be an actor, said, “That sounds okay.”
Only months later did Nelson admit that he had been chasing the movie forever.
“Dork,” Jon replied.
There’s a parallel in the granular precision that Lac brings to the movie’s music and Nelson brings to its design, except that for Nelson, “granular” isn’t metaphorical. He wanted Usnavi to have a map of the Dominican Republic in his bodega, so his team made it using actual sand from the actual D.R.: A crew member brought it home from his honeymoon.
“My friends all joke, ‘Tomorrow on Oprah, production designers who care too much,’ ” Nelson says. “Call it obsessive, I don’t know. It’s what I love to do, and I want to do right by the characters and the communities that are being represented.”
His experience on Crazy Rich Asians bolstered his feeling that little details really matter. If they’re done right, they make people feel seen and respected. And that representation affects how people are treated once the credits roll.
Mitchell Travers feels the same way, which is why he pushed as hard as he pushed to design the costumes of Heights. He admired what Lin and Jon had already created and felt sure that their collaboration would do some genuine good in the world. I probably won’t ever get a chance to do something like this again, he remembers feeling about the chance to work with them.
Leslie Grace
A look inside the creative process of NELSON COATES, film production designer
He tried to design the costumes without thinking too much like a costume designer. He got inspiration from sitting outside in Washington Heights, watching people pass by. He also told his team to spend time getting to know the actors before rolling out the clothing racks—especially the extras from the community. He wanted to reflect their lives, their energies, their stories. (Jon, applying a lesson from Crazy Rich Asians, took a similar approach to the actors’ hair: He left more time to capture the beauty of curls. “Let’s make sure we can see her eyes. Let’s light it a little bit better instead of rushing through it or saying, ‘Just change your hair because it’s getting in our way.’ ”)
The neighborhood turned out to be an eager collaborator. As the shoot was about to begin, a man approached Mitchell.
“M’ijo, m’ijo,” he said. “I heard you need shoes.”
Mitchell said he needed a million shoes—he had dozens of dancers on set every day.
“I’ll take care of you,” the man said.
By the time Mitchell got back to the wardrobe truck, the man had set up two full tables of sneakers. Mitchell bought the lot—and used them all. The process repeated with a woman selling jewelry and a woman selling scarves.
Mitchell loved it. “It was the best, because I would say, ‘I need—’ and the neighborhood would say, ‘Here.’ ”
The traffic back and forth led to a certain porousness around the edges of the set. The actors and producers, having foregone many of the trailers where they would normally hole up, spent a lot of time on the sidewalks. Mara Jacobs, who was on set virtually every minute of every day, would go for walks when she needed to make a private phone call. She got used to seeing people from the neighborhood bring the crew homemade food, especially when its favorite son was around.
Mitchell Travers, Myron Kerstein, Alice Brooks, and Nelson Coates
“Washington Heights has two mayors: One is Lin-Manuel Miranda and the other is Luis Miranda,” says Anthony Bregman, who was also on set nearly every minute of every day. So was David Nicksay, one of the film's executive producers. So was Quiara.
It could be dreamy on set, but that doesn’t mean it was heaven: the rainouts, the heat, the push-pull over parking. Now and then, guys on motorcycles made a point of roaring by the set. All the same, Lin, Quiara, Jon, and most of his team say that Washington Heights in 2019 was the best summer of their lives.
So you can understand why it would be bittersweet to return on a cold February morning. Almost every trace of their summer had been erased. In real life, as in the movie, Daniela’s salon was long gone. The most conspicuous sign that they had been here was a mural painted on the side of the bodega: a lonely sailor in a little boat under a Dominican flag. (See the photo at the top of page 237.)
It’s been said that a true New Yorker walks the streets, looking at the buildings, remembering what they used to be.
n the second day of reshoots, the action shifted to the lobby of an apartment building a few doors down from where Abuela Claudia used to live.
The super of the building was standing alone, holding his mop. A dozen people stared at him. He stared back. Down a hallway, a resident was singing in Spanish.
“Rolling!” somebody shouted. “Action!”
The opening number began to play. The super started mopping.
“Have more fun!” Jon told him. “Have more fun!”
They finished the take. Members of the film crew made some adjustments, then started again. “Instead of happy—sad,” Jon said this time. “It’s hard work.”
On a later take, Jon said, “Now the most fun. Dance a little while you do it.” And the super did. And now people cheered him on, and he seemed to be enjoying it.
“Say ‘In the Heights,’ ” Jon said. “Louder.”
In the midst of this, a young woman stepped out of her apartment, slalomed around a camera operator, the building’s super, and the director of Crazy Rich Asians, pushed open the door, and went about her day, without having turned her head or broken her stride.
PRODUCTION DESIGNER
I love putting little Easter eggs around the set—details that will be meaningful to the people making the film. I think of them as blessings.
1. Rosario’s Car Service: The license number, LM&QHOB2008, means “Lin-Manuel Miranda & Quiara Hudes on Broadway 2008”
2. Nadal Apartments: The last name of Lin’s wife, Vanessa
3. Hudes Hardware: For Quiara
4. Bolero record: This record plays during the dinner scene. The name of the singer, Luisa Mundi, is inspired by Lin’s abuela
5. Lacamoire Motors: For Alex
6. Usnavi’s map of the D.R.: Hanging behind the cash register, it incorporates actual sand from the island, plus items from the bodega such as MetroCards and keys
7. Piragua cart: The subway train carved into the wood comes from a sketch of the show’s logo that Lin made in a college notebook (see photo, page 5)
Jon decided they had what they needed. Everybody applauded. He high-fived the super, then posed for a selfie, both of them beaming.
As the crew streamed onto the sidewalk, headed for the next shot, the super, Juan Pichardo, resumed his day. He had worked in this building for fourteen years, he said, ever since he arrived from the Dominican Republic. He had shown the production team some apartments in the building, then got a call asking if he himself would like to be in the movie. He had said that sounded fine. He wasn’t doing anything unusual for the cameras that morning—it’s his motion picture debut, he says—just mopping the way he always mops.
Asked how he feels about the prospect of millions of moviegoers all over the planet watching him do his job as part of a montage honoring the too-frequently-overlooked day-to-day work that people do to provide for themselves, their families, and their neighbors, Juan smiles.
“That’s nice,” he says. “That’s good.”
He doesn’t go to a lot of movies, he says. But his stepson was very happy to get a selfie with an actor when the movie was on the corner last summer.
Back to that corner, and a few doors down, reshoots were in full swing. It was warmer than the day before, so there was no more need for puffy coats—and anyway there wasn’t room. To minimize the time they’d lose shifting the whole apparatus of filming from one location to another, they had taken over three apartments on the same floor of a single building. Hallways are narrow in the prewar buildings that still dominate this part of the city. Crew members got very nimble at crab-walking past their co-workers.
The atmosphere in those apartments, where Jon was filming vignettes of domestic life, was strange in some ways—movie people have more tape measures than you would expect—and deeply familiar in others. The air of quiet productivity, a lightness that conceals how intensely everybody is concentrating, felt like tech in one of Tommy Kail’s collaborations with Lin. Artistically speaking, it’s a kind of cold fusion: extraordinary things happen while remaining at room temperature.
What explains this vibe? Different people on Jon’s team have different explanations.
“Here’s the amazing thing about Jon,” Mitchell says. “Jon gives you the widest arena to create in. But he’s such a creative genius, I think, Well, I have to keep up with Jon. So then I really throw myself into it and push myself.”
Alice says everybody worked as hard as they worked because of the material: Lin and Quiara wrote something that she would be proud to take her family to see. But Jon also fostered a cohesion unlike any film she has done. “Every single person was making the same movie,” she says. “Usually it’s, ‘Oh, I know how to do this better.’ It felt amazing to be part of a project where everyone felt their ideas were heard.”
On the sidewalk outside, where they were able to extend both arms, Chris and Nelson theorized that the history they shared with Jon and each other was important. It would be either very difficult (Chris’s view) or totally impossible (Nelson’s) to make this movie without it. The collaboration Jon fostered on Heights, they were finding, wasn’t a grudging arrival at decisions that everybody could live with. (His strict “No assholes” hiring policy surely helped.) Collaboration meant staying open to new ideas, to discovering what might be possible if they fully trusted one another. Chris says that Jon implicitly asked them: “What could we all do together?”
To illustrate the point, he takes out his phone and begins playing a video: a rehearsal of the number that probably captures more than anything else in the movie how this group brought their taste and spirit to Heights. It is not a race-the-clock achievement like shooting “Carnaval del Barrio” in a day. It’s a months-long test of their collaboration: how well they could conceive, design, and execute something that seemed worth doing precisely because it would require all of them to stretch in order to succeed.
“I never thought we would actually get there,” Jon admits now when he thinks back to making “When the Sun Goes Down,” the showstopping number that arrives late in the movie. “But we got there.”
heir approach to the song was sparked by Jon’s insight into Nina and Benny’s relationship—and, really, every relationship: “When you’re in love, gravity doesn’t mean anything.”
He knew that other musicals had turned weightlessness into choreography: Think of Fred Astaire dancing across the ceiling in Royal Wedding. “How you do it outside—that’s a whole other thing,” Jon says. That would be something new and badass. It would also be a subtle way of underscoring one of the story’s themes: that life isn’t lived entirely in your living room. We exist in communities, in neighborhoods, on streets—and, sometimes, four stories above them, at a ninety-degree angle.
Jon’s idea to have Benny and Nina dance up the side of a building might strike you as a little crazy, gravity being what it is. But Alice and Chris didn’t think so. A decade earlier, the three of them had collaborated on the web series The LXD: The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers. Its thirty episodes offered them a laboratory to push the boundaries of how you can tell stories with dance. Those experiments are a big reason why Jon knew Alice was the ideal director of photography for Heights: Sure, she could shoot a number in any style with maximum flair, but she could also resist the temptation to turn the numbers into music videos, and focus on the human reality of the story.
