Downtown Elburn goes back to 1955 for backdrop in HBO TV series shoot
Elburn is just about ready for its close-up, as a backdrop for a scene in a new HBO television show.
Workmen have spent the past few weeks turning the interior of the former Ream's Meat Market at 128 N. Main St. (Route 47) into a 1950s-era diner, to be featured in "Lovecraft Country."
There also will be a chase scene from that point north on Main involving a Studebaker and a fire engine.
Main will be closed from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday from the railroad tracks north to Shannon Street.
Police request that drivers wanting to cross the railroad use the Anderson Road bridge.
Businesses will remain open; production assistants and private security workers will direct patrons when they can enter and leave, as takes start and end.
Oscar-winner Jordan Peele's Monkeypaw Productions is one of the companies producing the show.
Peele won "Best Screenplay" for the horror movie "Get Out!," which he also directed.
The show began filming this week in Chicago.
It is based on the novel "Lovecraft Country."
The horror-genre drama is about a black man driving across the country in 1955 to search for his missing father.
The novel deals with the institutional segregation of that time under Jim Crow laws.
"Lovecraft" refers to author H.P. Lovecraft, who is noted for the horror fiction he wrote in the early 20th century.
Actors Courtney Vance, Jurnee Smollett-Ball and Jonathan Majors star in "Lovecraft Country."