prison break could season 3 be halted

By JOE O'CONNELL / Special Contributor

A map in the Prison Break production office shows where the television

fugitives have ended up around the country, but it's likely they need

a second, smaller map of North Texas to track the production itself.

That's good news for local cast and crew awaiting the fallout of a

potential writers strike.

For the currently filming third season, Prison Break is packing up and

shooting more outside of the area, but the show's second season was

almost entirely shot here, and the producers have included a little

North Texas love letter on the season two DVD box set via a featurette

called "Turning Dallas Into America."

"We knew we had to play a number of different locales across the

country," executive producer and writer Paul Scheuring says in the

featurette. "We needed to have desert, a big city and a bayou. We

needed to have wide-open plains and also parts of Latin America and

New Mexico."

Show producer Garry Brown, who knew Dallas from working on Walker,

Texas Ranger, suggested taking a look at North Texas. "My first

thought was Dallas has only one look," Mr. Scheuring says on the DVD.

"It's like J.R. and people with tall hats. I was quite wrong."

The kicker was the ability to travel 30 to 45 minutes in any direction

and find the right look, even Panama, which was accomplished by taking

a set used to portray Iraq in the television film Saving Private Lynch

and adding some palm trees.

However, third-season filming may halt if the Writers Guild of America

decides to go on strike Nov. 1 when its latest contract expires. The

last time a strike occurred was in 1988. The WGA threatened a similar

strike in 2004, teaming up with the Screen Actors Guild (whose

contract expires in July 2008). This led to a flurry of filming

followed by a lull and a glut of unscripted reality-television

programs. Many believe the WGA will delay a strike, if it occurs at

all, until January or later to pull in SAG again. But the threat is

enough to send the film-television industry scurrying.

Janis Burklund, head of the Dallas Film Commission, is courting a lot

of film projects aiming at January starts, but she expects the strike

could lead to more North Texas reality shoots. "Those folks tend to

like Dallas," she says of reality producers, "but we won't know for a

while."