A good fixer/producer is optimistic, realistic, stubborn, smart and imaginative. An even better fixer has friends or relatives in conveniently high places. Jose Ludlow and Mark Pittman represent the latter.

When MJZ director Rupert Sanders needed to find an abandoned jail to shoot the point-of-view “Captivity” for Toy, New York and Activision’s Wolverine video game tie-in, he turned to Kinema Films founder Jose Ludlow, who has been producing commercials and features out of Mexico City for 15 years.

“Finding a jail in Mexico [to shoot in] is very, very difficult,” he explains. A shortage of prisons in Mexico means jails are overcrowded and dangerous places. “You can’t say, ‘Excuse me, can I shoot in this jail?’ No fucking way. For security reasons they don’t let you.”

Ludlow, 57, who’s had to source everything from midget wrestlers to beer-drinking donkeys and a vintage Colombian riverboat for various feature projects, found an unfinished jail in a neighboring state that fit the director’s vision to a tee: high concrete walls and watch towers with a big, empty prison yard.

To secure the location, Ludlow did what he does only when he’s tried everything else: he phoned his uncle, who happens to be the chief of police in Mexico City. “When Rupert saw it he said it’s like it was made just for him,” he says.

Sanders’ producer, Laurie Boccaccio can attest to Ludlow’s pull. “He called his uncle who had to get on a helicopter to fly somewhere to have a meeting with somebody who could get the go-ahead,” she says. “When there’s only one location and no backup and everybody loves it, nobody usually has that connection to the government, and Jose did. He’s the most connected guy that we’ve met.”

Cine South, Mexico EP Mark Pittman, a line producer on foreign jobs south of the border since 1980, can lay claim to friends in the highest places. Formerly a University of the Americas professor, he once pulled out the business card of Miguel Alemán Valdés, president of Mexico from 1946 to 1952, to bring equipment across the border from Texas because there were no temporary import forms at customs.

“[Alemán] just said, ‘Be sure to see so-and-so at the border and give him my card’,” he says. “I met him at the university. We presented an advertising campaign for the university in cooperation with the airlines and at that time he was in charge of the Mexican tourist council. He was a very, very colorful character.” Q

www.filmmexico.com    
www.kinema.com.mx