What town was The Longest Ride filmed in?

Lights. Camera. Action.

Crews with 20th Century Fox spent the day Monday on Wake Forest University’s Reynolda Campus filming scenes for an adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ bestselling novel, “The Longest Ride,” to be released this spring.

In the movie, a young cowboy played by Scott Eastwood falls in love with a Wake Forest senior art student.

“Wake Forest has been the setting of a number of major motion pictures, including ‘Brian’s Song in 1971’ and ‘The 5th Quarter’ in 2010,” said Kevin Cox, Wake Forest’s director of communications and community relations who was the University’s liaison with 20th Century Fox. “We are pleased to have reached an agreement that would allow the crew to spend the day with us and showcase our beautiful campus on the big screen.”

Moviemakers worked on campus from dawn to dusk filming exterior and interior scenes — bringing with them large trucks, trailers, cameras and a 130-person crew. Much of the filming took place on or near Hearn Plaza and inside Scales Fine Arts Center (in a classroom as well as the hallway outside the Mainstage and Ring Theatres). Both Reynolda Road and University Parkway campus entrances were filmed.

Wake Foresters and community members were invited to be among the 75 extras used during filming.

“It was an interesting experience to be a Wake Forest student playing a Wake Forest student,” says senior Kristi Chan. “The most surreal scene for me was shooting in Scales. I’m a studio art major, like one of the movie’s main characters. When we shot in one of the Scales classrooms, I sat in the seat I usually sat in during class, and they gave us all pretend art history tests. I looked at the exam and realized I had previously taken almost the exact same exam my sophomore year. ‘Good,’ one of the crewmen said. ‘Then you shouldn’t have a problem passing.'”

Students, faculty and alumni are all excited to see the film in April.

“Having a small part in it is fun for us, and we’re all looking forward to seeing us in the picture,” Cox said during an interview with Time Warner Cable News.

In addition to filming on campus, bull-riding scenes were filmed at Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum, also owned by the University.

JACKSONVILLE | The filming will go on — it just won’t require as many extras as expected.

“The Longest Ride,” a movie adaption of a Nicholas Sparks book of the same name, has been filming in nearby Wilmington. Shooting scheduled to take place in Jacksonville this week included a major rodeo scene that would have benefited area nonprofits. However, the production crew decided to instead move that part of the filming to Winston-Salem.

Plans for the scrapped Jacksonville rodeo shoot included filling the stands with unpaid extras in turn for donations to area nonprofits, including the USO of North Carolina’s Jacksonville center.

Deb Fisher, director of the Jacksonville USO, received an email from Thurman Burgess at 5:30 p.m. Sunday stating that the filming had been relocated. Fisher said Burgess is with a group called One in Christ and finds the extras for the movies. Once he is paid by the film crew, he pays the nonprofits who supply the extras.

The organization had 400 volunteers sign up to be extras for the movie, a move which would have brought the nonprofit $10 per volunteer, Fisher said.

Burgess wrote that he shared the news with an “apologetic heart.”

“It has been a long time since I have been so disillusioned, disappointed and frankly embarrassed. ... I tried in good faith to make a win-win situation for many and I and truly sorry this attempt did not pan out. I am very sorry you wasted your time and energy on this but at least on both of our accounts we knew we tried. Please again accept my apology. I hope we meet again on a more successful venture,” he wrote in the email to Fisher, which The Daily News obtained a copy of.

Fisher said she was disappointed when she saw the email.

“I was really disappointed because some of the troops took the day off of work. … That doesn’t give us much time to react and get the information out to the people who signed up for it,” she said.

Fisher plans to look at the related third-party agreement to see if the USO will still get any of the $4,000 they hoped to receive.

“I would assume that we probably will not see a dime of that money,” she said.

Burgess did not immediately reply to a request for comment from The Daily News.

The film, based on the book of the same name released last September, follows two love stories: one told through the memories of a 90-year-old man fading in and out of consciousness thinking back on his life with his late wife, and the other a new romance blossoming between a young college student and a handsome bullrider.

Previous reports by the Sun Journal’s sister paper, The Wilmington StarNews stated that for four days of upcoming rodeo-set scenes, Marty Siu Casting was looking for up to 1,000 local residents per day to fill the bleachers. Three days of filming were to be done in Jacksonville with one day in Winston-Salem.

Marty Siu, who handles extras casting for the film, said the production has since scaled back on its need for extras, reducing an estimated 4,000 to around 1,600.

Siu said the reduction can be attributed to the outdoor conditions of the shoot in Jacksonville, which are expected to include 90-plus degree heat.

A shoot set for Thursday night in Jacksonville will be the only day when the nonprofit-supporting volunteers will be needed on set, which Siu said will mean less money than participating organizations initially planned on receiving.

The unpaid extras will be entered into raffles for prizes such as televisions and iPads.

Following this week’s filming in Jacksonville, the production will move to Winston-Salem, where 1,800 extras will pile into an air-conditioned, indoor arena for several days of filming.

Producer Marty Bowen told The Daily News that while the major bull riding scene would be filmed in Winston-Salem because it has the “best indoor venue that we could use during production,” there would be five or six scenes of varying size filmed in Jacksonville using about 200 to 300 extras.

Filming will remain underway at Lazy H Ranch and Arena until Friday, Bowen said.

Loretta Hancock, who owns the ranch with her husband, said the ranch became involved in the film after production crews saw photos from a church fundraiser for an ill church member on its Facebook page.

“They contacted me somewhere around the first of April wanting to get some pictures out here just to see if it would fit what they were needing,” Hancock said.

Throughout the next couple months, Hancock said crew members took photos and measured, as well as looked at other locations.

At one point, she thought Lazy H was out of the running; but she says God had his hands all over the ranch’s involvement in the film.

“The God-sent blessing there was when we got this bit of good news we were standing in the man’s yard whose wife had just passed away from Lou Gehrig’s disease … It’s just been a true all around blessing. There have been some true God winks in there,” Hancock said.

Another God wink, she said, was when the director was wearing a John 3:16 shirt during Monday’s filming.

Hancock, who is a fan of Nicholas Sparks’ books, said she originally thought the message left on her machine about the possibility “was a joke.”

“When you hear Nicholas Sparks you’re thinking ‘wow,’” she said.

She said that such a possibility never crossed her mind in 1999 when she and her husband were clearing the land to build the ranch.

“It’s just a blessing. I can’t begin to describe how it has felt to be considered in this small town and the magnitude of the people that came through this place and watching all the (professional bull riding) trucks pull in here,” she said.

The filming, she said, isn’t affecting day-to-day business in the ranch since it mostly hosts horse shows on a monthly basis these days, though it has hosted bull riding events in the past.

“We just had to move some chickens so they didn’t crow during the movie,” she said.

Now Hancock gets to watch as the pages of a book she enjoyed comes to life on her property.

“It’s different from what he’s written before, but two love stories where they clash, it’s beautiful,” she said.

Hancock said she’s been hanging out and watching the filming, anticipating what’s going to happen, noticing what’s changed from the book and what remains the same.

The movie is expected to be in theaters April 3.

The casting company stated on its Facebook page that they had 201 paid extras and 115 volunteer extras show up for filming Monday in Jacksonville. It was not known if additional extras would be needed for Wednesday, Thursday or Friday.

For casting information, visit Facebook.com/MartysCasting.

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