On Location
Joseph Incaprera is no stranger to tough climates. As co-executive producer for the crime series Tulsa King starring Sylvester Stallone, which premiered this past November on Paramount+, he experienced tornado warnings and freezing cold followed by months of 104-degree heat while filming in Oklahoma. Prior to that, Incaprera was the executive producer for the final two seasons of AMC’s long-running zombie epic The Walking Dead, shooting for weeks under the sweltering Georgia sun.
And before that, he spent close to a decade in New Orleans, where he originally moved to produce the HBO drama Treme, which followed the fictional lives of New Orleanians in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Incaprera is a pro. Just about the only environment he isn’t used to is the waters off Waikiki Beach. “My daughter has been teaching me how to surf on her breaks from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. I’ve been a snowboarder my whole life. But with snowboarding, you’re strapped on the board and the mountain doesn’t move,” laughs Incaprera. “Luckily, Queen’s Beach has been forgiving.”
He’ll also have plenty of time to practice. Incaprera and his wife, costume supervisor Catharine Fletcher Incaprera, bought a house in Wai‘alae Iki this past year amid COVID craziness, sending their daughter Chloe to college, and balancing hectic work schedules. “It’s no small thing to move here so I told my agent I was taking a year off.
He asked if I could afford to do that. I told him I was going to try,” Incaprera says. “My wife was working on the second season of Magnum P.I. and she fell in love with the islands. We had been planning to move to the west coast; Catharine asked, ‘Why don’t we move to Hawai‘i?’” Incaprera says.
“Her and I decided there’s no more version of ‘someday’ for us, so we went for it.” This recent move is the latest chapter of a story that begins in Baltimore, where Incaprera juggled two jobs after graduating from the University of Maryland, College Park. His first gig was working for a video production company in D.C., earning $250 a week to edit marketing videos and corporate promos.
“Some of it was interesting. We followed Bill Clinton during his campaign; I was the guy pinning a mic to his tie. But a lot of it was boring — like preparing CD-ROMs about ‘the future of storage’ or about solid waste management,” says Incaprera. His second job was at Camden Yards, where Incaprera worked on commission as a baseball vendor selling pretzels, hot dogs, and St. Pauli Girl beer in the stands.
At dinner one night, Incaprera and his father bumped into Incaprera’s cousin’s college friend who was working as coordinator on 1994’s Major League II, starring Charlie Sheen. The movie needed help in the production office; eventually, Incaprera was hired to rearrange roughly 10,000 cardboard cutouts of fans in the stadium for different scenes in the film.
“Every time the camera changed angles, me and 20 other kids would run around and move the cutouts, putting different hats and scarves on them,” Incaprera says. “Needless to say, this is way before CGI.”
A year later, Incaprera was hired to assist on the romantic drama Boys, starring Winona Ryder. Standing on a hill from sundown to sunup, his job was to act as a human megaphone and yell “rolling” and “cut” to the cast and crew filming at the bottom of the valley whenever he heard it from the film’s assistant director nearby. “As I watched the sun come up, I thought: Is this what I want to do? Am I really going to be the standing in-the-woods guy?”
While he considered his future in film, the assistant director said that production had wrapped for the day and asked if Incaprera wanted to come back tomorrow. Immediately, Incaprera said yes. “My soul said yes. Somewhere inside me, I knew I liked this.” He had a similar revelation working as a production assistant on Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! While holding an umbrella over Jack Nicholson to keep the actor’s costume from getting rained on, Incaprera passed another assistant wearing a shirt with “film crew” printed on the back. “I looked at it and thought, ‘oh, that’s me.’ I’m on the film crew,” says Incaprera. “It was this weird moment where I decided, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to work in fi lm and TV.”
Incaprera joined the crew of David Simon’s critically acclaimed Homicide: Life on the Street, followed by The Wire, under the tutelage of producer Nina Kostroff Noble. Meanwhile, he kept working on films, such as The Replacements, Minority Report, Gods and Generals, and Live Free or Die Hard, among others. “I just worked my way up from there: second-second assistant director, second A.D., first A.D., production manager, line producer, producer, executive producer…”
When Incaprera is on set today, he’s responsible for more than shouting “rolling” and “cut.” As a producer, he is putting out a seemingly infinite number of fi res each day, whether it’s selecting the best location for shows like Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why or getting Anthony Hopkins to the pig farm set in 2001’s Hannibal, or just making sure that craft service isn’t providing lousy donuts.
Even between projects, Incaprera keeps busy: During COVID lockdown, Incaprera worked to organize testing and personal protective equipment (PPE) logistics that helped get the film and television industry back to work in 2020.
“In this business, don’t always turn down the offer you have for the offer you want because it’s an uncertain industry,” Incaprera says. “You have to be proactive but also aware if an opportunity lands in your lap. Sometimes, a unique and unusual door might have opened for you. Don’t miss it.”