Say It Isn't So (2001)

SAY IT ISN'T SO began production in the California towns of Long Beach, Camarillo and Pomona. The latter, located some thirty miles east of Los Angeles in the basin's Inland Empire, doubled for Gilly's hometown of Shelbyville, Indiana, which is an actual suburb of Indianapolis and director J.B. Rogers's hometown.

Production designer Sidney J. Bartholomew, Jr. created some eye-catching sets in Pomona. He built two key sets — Gilly's animal kennel and the interiors of Mega Kutz, the kitschy, art deco hair salon where the klutzy Jo waxes stylish — in in abandoned Pomona storefronts.

After almost three weeks in Pomona, the company moved north to Vancouver and the majestic Pacific Northwest for the remainder of the ten-week shoot for scenes set in Oregon and on Gilly's transcontinental odyssey to win back his love.

Sites around Vancouver included Britannia Beach (Dig's waterfront shack), Surrey/White Rock (Jack Mitchelson's sprawling 34,000 sq. ft. mansion), the Riverview Hospital (an actual home for the mentally challenged) and the village of Squamish, nestled amidst the Tantalus Mountains, all of which portrayed the fictional Oregon town of Beaver.

It was on the streets of Squamish that Rogers staged one of the film's biggest sight gags, and one certainly not for the squeamish: a sequence where Gilly gets his hand caught in the bowels of a cow. Veteran makeup effects artist Tony Gardner, who created the zip locked scrotum and Puffy the Dog in "There's Something About Mary," and his team at Alterian Studios devised came up with gag, employing an animatronic cow for a scene where Gilly loses Jo's engagement ring in the poor bovine's innards.

Other outlandish Gardner creations included a unique device that could represent the future of law enforcement weaponry: "The Disabler," a male chastity belt complete with a metal cup, leather straps and a padlock, which Gilly wears after his (false) arrest by the Beaver police for sexual deviancy. Gardner also fashioned a gag involving a zaftig pair of breasts impaled with gargantuan gargoyle nipple rings.

---