FORCES OF NATURE and THE GENERAL'S DAUGHTER set reports

Here's a spy report from Savannah, Georgia where they are shooting FORCES OF NATURE and THE GENERAL'S DAUGHTER!!! Boy, that's two really high profile films shooting there. Cool. Anyway, I'm gonna go to sleep now, see ya around mid-afternoon...

I just got home from a visit to Savannah, GA where both "Forces Of Nature" and "The General's Daughter" are shooting.

This is general information of what I saw, probably not worthy of posting to the site, but I wanted to pass it along anyway.

The "Forces of Nature" crew had a set located on a vacant lot off of Broughton Street that had been recreated as a "used car" lot. The overall appearance was very funky and decrepit. There were vintage autos with rust and age parked along the walls with cheap prices soaped on the windshields. Banners dressed with lightbulbs created a magical sideshow/quirky atmosphere. One actress on the set was dressed in colorful clothing ala Eryka Badu, complete with towering headwrap. Crew members did some kind of cosmetic work on storefronts on the other side of the street, some scaffoding was raised over several of these.

We waited amongst crowds during an evening shoot for cameras to roll or the principals to show, but lighting setups with overhead cranes were taking very long to set up and we had to leave.

Local TV news coverage of the stars in town showed Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock hanging out in the daytime at the Broughton Street set, one segment showed Affleck rollerblading to the set.

Gwyneth Paltrow must have been in town with Ben, as she appeared in a five-second video segment at the end of a local news broadcast for WSAV Channel 3. She and a group of children shout into the camera "Watch yourself, Savannah!"

The local TV news reports also had video of the nighttime KMart shoot at off Victory Drive, which another local reported to your site.

The Savannah Morning News paper had front page pictures of John Travolta on the set of "The General's Daugher". Some fans watching the set shoots reported waiting three hours to see their first glimpse of him while shooting in town. One woman reportedly called out to him to "do the 'Michael' dance", which Travolta immediatley performed. (What...Ever...) One newspaper photo showed Travolta wearing (in a suit) between John Benjamin Hickey (in US Army officer's uniform) and the director, Simon West.

Shooting had moved to Beaufort, South for a week's time to shoot a wedding scene, then shooting was to resume at Savannah State University. The campus was doubling as a military base for the shoot. Several building's exteriors were being painted to resemble red brick, a massive undertaking for the design crew.

"The General's Daughter" shoot also moves to a local restaurant on Tybee Island called The Crab Shack for an entire week of shooting (I think it's the week of 8/10 - 8/14). A friend of ours who worked there told us that the owner had offered the staff either paid vacation or to be paid to work on the set for the duration of the shoot.

The restaurant is also a waterfront marina, some extra docks were to be built by the crew to augment the exisiting ones, which were pretty short. The owner was told that the crew would be building chicken coops by the waterside, but they later changed their minds.

The restaurant's exterior is very old grey wood and looks intentionally ramshackle. There is a large outside dining area overlooking a marshland waterway. This area has trees which provide a natural capony of huge overhanging branches, which are hung with overturned crab baskets fitted with yellow lights. White christmas tree lights cover the trunks of the trees and branches giving the area a fairy tale appearance at night. It already looks like a Hollywood fantasy set!

Sorry I don't have much hard news about the shooting or plot, but I wanted to give you what I knew from a recent visit.