"I had just gotten out of college and went down to this big audition for
extras. It was in a high school gymnasium. There were about 3,000 people
there." Seated in the bleachers were a few members of the production
crew: the location manager, production manager, and publicist. They
asked Baxter what he was doing at the audition, and that if he really
wanted work, to give them his name and telephone number. He later
received a call offering him work as a production assistant.
"I hadn't really thought about film until I took that job. I was making
$25 bucks a day and no per diem." Toward the end of the first week, he
was sent to Washington, D.C., with the rest of the production. There he
shared a hotel room with two other crew members, still making only $25
a day. Filming returned to Richmond for another month, and then went
on to West Palm Beach, Florida. Baxter was again asked to go along. The
offer paid for airfare and hotel accommodations, but included neither a
wage increase nor per diem. He took it. The final location was in New
York and although Baxter was invited to continue working on the film,
the budget would not allow him a hotel room. Fortunately, he had made
friends with crew members who lived in the city and they offered him a
place to stay. "It was a great experience. I didn't make any money, but I
got to see all the different jobs available. I was smitten by the time I
returned to Richmond. I let it be known to other production companies
that this was a business I wanted to be in."
Baxter found work as a production assistant with several local produc-
tion companies. About nine months passed, and the same location
manager who had hired him for Kennedy called to offer him an assistant
location manager position on The Murder of Mary Phagen miniseries.
Baxter continued to make connections, establishing a reputation for
being dependable and hard working, while he scouted locations for local
production companies. He was hired as assistant location manager when
the NBC miniseries Gore Vidal's Lincoln came to Richmond. Three weeks
into the shoot, the location manager was let go and Baxter was offered
the job.
"Trying to be a location manager outside of New York or L.A. is a
catch-22 in a major way. Nobody is going to hire you if you don't have
experience, and how are you going to get experience if nobody is ever
going to hire you? They took a chance."
As production on Lincoln wound down, one of the show's producers
offered him the job of location manager for the Disney Channel's Goodbye,
Miss 4th of July, shooting in Tennessee. When that show wrapped, Baxter
returned to Richmond to serve as location manager on the television
movie My Name Is Bill W, starring James Woods and James Garner.
Three-quarters of the way through production, Baxter had a near fatal
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