Filmmakers raise glasses to acidic townsfolk

By Borys Kit

SONOMA, California (Hollywood Reporter) - Rows upon rows of grape vines crest the hills in this sunny countryside as a 1970s Gremlin rolls down the road with the gracefulness of a pear, then putters to a stop with a flat tire and a cloud of dust. Alan Rickman gets out, curses and begins flinging out the tire iron and jack.

"Cut!" director Randy Miller yells. "That's a cut!" seconds the assistant director. "Cutting!" shouts the key grip working down the line.

"Anywhere you turn, it's absolutely spectacular," Miller says, looking around from the side of the road. "Some of this scenery is like an old George Stevens movie."

Miller is shooting "Bottle Shock," a drama that uses as its backdrop a true 1976 incident in which a Chardonnay from a little Napa Valley winery called Chateau Montelena, run by Jim Barrett and his son Bo, won a tasting competition in Paris, thereby putting California on the wine map and resulting in the democratization of vino.

The indie, which stars Bill Pullman, Chris Pine and Rickman, is shooting here in wine country, using the real Chateau Montelena as well as other wineries around Napa and Sonoma counties. Sonoma and its surrounding countryside was favored over Napa because of its more rural and quaint qualities.

ANTIQUE AREA

"Sonoma hasn't been transformed into a chain-store filled city," said Jody Savin, one of the film's producers and Miller's producing partner and wife. "It still looks antique and older. Napa has changed and has been developed and looks more like a modern city."

In the wake of the success of 2004's "Sideways," which uncorked a boom in tourism on the central California coast and increased the popularity of pinot noir, you would think that hosting a movie about wine would be a cause to pop open the champagne. Yet a few weeks earlier, "Bottle" almost ended up being run out of town.

Surprisingly, wine country doesn't have a film commission to help coordinate shoots -- Sonoma and other municipalities let their city councils decide on permits in open-door town meetings. While "Bottle" was attempting to secure permission from wineries to shoot on their land, the filmmakers also were looking for a location to double for Paris, where the film's climactic taste test occurs. Just four weeks before the shoot, they realized that they could turn Sonoma's unique town square into a 1970s City of Lights.

In 2000, Rob Schneider movie "The Animal" overstayed its welcome in Sonoma and since then, the town had grown wary of Hollywood. As soon as the townfolk heard that a shoot was coming, a group turned against the production, arguing that it would disrupt tourism at the height of the summer season. Compounding the problem, an early draft of the permit application was sent out to local businesses in which every street mentioned was misconstrued as a request to close that street. A petition went out to stop the film from coming to town.

ON TRIAL

Miller and his team took matters into their own hands. Location manager Chris Munday and his assistant met with storeowners to get them on their side, mixing charts with plenty of charm. It worked, and in a Capraesque moment, the people who had circulated the petition showed up to the city council meeting to say that they were giving the film a reprieve.

That, however, still meant that the filmmakers had to win over the stone-faced city council.

Recalls Miller: "It was a mix of people. One guy was wearing a bow tie and another had flip-flops. And yet you could see that they were of the makeup of, 'I don't know if we like this whole movie thing in our town."'

Says Munday: "I had been to city council meetings in Whittier and other cities where it's 'OK!' and the permit is rubber stamped. Here, we were definitely under a microscope. I felt like I was on trial and being cross examined."