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Holly-Good

By Beacon Staff

At first blush, Lindsay Good doesn’t come across as the model agent of Hollywood flash.

Bookish and bespectacled, the Flathead Valley native is wry and humble, habituated more to the textured crush of an indie rock show or the couth confines of a museum than the glitz and glamor of a red carpet event. She is dear friends with the members of the band The Killers and joined them on the English tour of their album Hot Fuss.

Her loft in downtown Los Angeles has no television or Internet. She plays the piano, is a voracious reader, does not own a car, and rides a bike that bears an Outside Media sticker, a shout-out to her close friend’s Columbia Falls marketing company.

But a cursory glance at Good’s Internet Movie Database catalogue – and the revelation that she owns a Ryan Gosling cheese platter – belies the subterfuge.

The 1996 Columbia Falls High School graduate’s name appears on the credit roll of some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters in recent years, and her current projects – the titles of which she cannot disclose publicly, lest she be blacklisted – are certain to garner widespread attention.

As the art department coordinator on such big-ticket productions as “Oz the Great and Powerful,” “Date Night” and “Cowboys and Aliens,” Good serves as the liaison between the art department and all other production departments.

She works alongside famous directors with whom she is on a first-name basis, and is responsible for getting their stamp of approval on illustrations and architectural renderings of set designs. She also acts as the buffer between accounting, production, set dressing and props, orchestrating the chaotic daily scrum of a film set.

“I am sort of the first line of defense,” she said on a recent trip home to the Flathead. “The information is filtered through me.”

While working on “Oz,” which was shot entirely in Pontiac, Mich., Good said there were seven sets in production at any given time while others were being constructed, and those stages were rotated six times.

“I have never worked with a team like on Oz,” she said. “It wasn’t like being with your family because we never fought. It was like being with your friends. It can get stressful and there is a lot of pressure, but they were amazing.”

At a young age, Good knew she wanted to work in the film industry, but envisioned herself as a producer. After high school, she attended the University of Las Vegas Nevada, which led to an unpaid internship on a small film set in Portland, Ore.

“I would drive back to West Glacier and waitress at the Highland Café to make money, and then drive back for shooting where we would be on set for 16 hours a day. It was exhausting but it was fun,” she said.

Lindsay Good worked on both “Cowboys and Aliens” and “Oz the Great and Powerful.” | Courtesy Artwork

Next she was hired as a production assistant for the art department on the set of “xXx: State of the Union,” the 2005 actioner starring Willem Dafoe, Samuel L. Jackson and Ice Cube.

She met the right people, gained a reputation, networked and the jobs kept coming.

“I kind of didn’t stop from there,” she said. “It really is all about reputation and personal connections. You have to spend a lot of time with these people, and you want to be sure they are making your environment a better place. But a lot of the time it’s just luck of the draw.”

She travels constantly – “I’m never home” – either for work or pleasure. A yearlong film shoot might be followed by a month-long stint in Barcelona and Budapest, where she visited recently, or a 10-day visit to see family and friends in Columbia Falls.
“As I get older all I really want to do is have fun at work and then travel,” she said.

During the course of a two-year, work-intensive bout of film production, which included the back-to-back projects “Oz” and “Black Sky,” a film that is still in post-production, Good said she was only home for four months. But she didn’t mind the hiatus.

“I like living out of town,” she said. “I’m a no kids, no pets, no plants kind of person.”

Although she works for films produced by mega-studios like DreamWorks Studios, Disney and Universal Studios, her work is all freelance. During production of “Oz,” for example, she worked for Emerald City Productions, the namesake of the fictional capital city of L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz.

Since “Oz,” Good has worked on three films that have not been released, earning credit on 13 films and mounting an impressive resume. With a musical background, she has contemplated transitioning from art department coordination to musical supervision, but said her primary goal is to continue enjoying her profession.

“I care less about career ambitions than about having a good time, and being able to travel and see friends and family,” she said. “I’m really content where I’m at in life right now.”