It's always a thrill for the locals when a commercial film crew comes calling, shooting a movie right there in their own back yard because there's just something about the place that they couldn't capture anywhere else. For the residents of Trona, California (population 1,800 and change), the thrill was all mixed up with the honor of having the star of Urban Legends: Final Cut declare that their town was "the worst place I've ever seen. And I've seen Third World poverty." Hart Bochner, the actor and writer-director of the forthcoming Just Add Water, actually prepared his new project with Trona in mind. He discovered the town years ago when a film he was working on in Bakersfield came to Trona for some night shoots. Apparently the sheer horror of it all — "It was beyond bleak and beyond heartbreaking and almost comical in the personality of the place, where at the center you have this decay where people are forgotten, and surrounding it was all of this exquisite beauty" — was something he needed to address as an artist in order to exorcise it from his psyche.
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