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Spoilers May Be Below!
Page 20
Spoilers May Be Below!
From The Star Tribune
Lights, camera ... rebates?Jerry Holt, Star Tribune
Location movie scout Anne Healy left and Mary Flaa photographed William's Arena on the University of Minnesota.
Minnesotans have launched 'Project Johnny Depp' to lure Hollywood filmmakers again after the state lost out on the star's new film to Wisconsin.
By COLIN COVERT, Star Tribune
Minnesota's ground-breaking "Snowbate" tax-incentive program, which once made the state a top location for moviemakers, has gone from the cutting edge to the bottom of the barrel.
While a grassroots group pushes for stronger incentives, films that could have been shot here -- such as George Clooney's new movie, "Leatherheads," set in Duluth but made in the Carolinas -- are going elsewhere. And so are Minnesota film professionals.
Anne Healy, a St. Paul-based location scout, hasn't worked on a Minnesota shoot in three years. Her most recent assignment? Finding shooting venues in Wisconsin for "Public Enemies," a $100 million film starring Johnny Depp as 1930s gangster John Dillinger.
"I was driving them around in the van, and I felt awful," she said. "All I wanted to do was drive them to Red Wing. It would have been perfect, but I couldn't even mention it."
The film chose Wisconsin in January, after the state enacted a 25 percent tax rebate on film production expenses -- now the national standard, compared with 15 percent in Minnesota.
Healy is the point person for Project Johnny Depp, an ad hoc coalition of film professionals, hotel owners, restaurateurs and others who have been pressing state officials for more competitive incentives and a larger appropriation.
At $1.3 million available over two years, Minnesota's fund is the third-smallest in the nation.
On a major film such as Depp's, "the crew could be in a hotel for three to six months," said Scott Fischburg, vice president of sales for the Graves Hotel in Minneapolis. "That's a huge block of revenue. Restaurants, drugstores, clothing, everything you need living somewhere is impacted in a positive way as well."
Pressure also is coming from a larger nonprofit trade group, Shoot in Minnesota, which has hired lobbyists to "educate the Legislature that the stature we had as a robust production center is fading," said executive director Dave Halls. "And we believe there's a return on this investment."
Wisconsin has seen about $25 million in production expenditures in just two months, said Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton. "I don't think I could point to another program that's had that kind of effect."
She estimates that half of the money spent on film production stays in the community.
"The biggest misunderstanding was that it was corporate welfare," Lawton said. "No one becomes eligible for these incentives until they've dumped money into our state. And jobs do begin to be built. A camera company has opened in Milwaukee, and a sound studio, and an expansion of another filming studio."
A community in retreat
In Minnesota, the infrastructure has shrunk since the 1990s boom that brought such productions as "Grumpy Old Men," "Fargo," "A Simple Plan" and "Jingle All the Way." Prop houses have closed, four cinema equipment companies have shrunk to one, and jobs have migrated to other states.
Minnesota's lack of an effective incentive package is "not a frequent topic among film people, it is the topic," said Minneapolis film makeup artist Mary Flaa. "People look at Minnesotans winning Oscars and they think we're still on the map. Well, we're not, because those projects weren't shot here."
Despite a pool of acting and technical talent deeper than any nearby state's, Minnesota has been "left in the dust" economically, said David Burton Morris of Deephaven, who has more feature films to his credit than any other Minnesota-based director.
Lucinda Winter, executive director of the Minnesota Film and TV Board, was gratified recently when Warner Bros. called with the news that Clint Eastwood will scout the state and others for a $20 million film about an auto worker. But she had to tell producers that current projects have exhausted her funds. Winter is asking the Legislature for an added $2.6 million to run the program until June 2009.
"I'm in the second year of this program, and it's just starting to work," she said. "With the Coen brothers coming here [to film this fall] it'll be the first studio feature since 'North Country.'"
Even though that Oscar-nominated 2005 film was set on the Iron Range, Minnesota only got 15 percent of its production spending, she noted. "They shot the rest of it in New Mexico" because of that state's greater incentives.
Senate chairman in favor
An amendment to a current bill would lift the rebate to 20 percent for films that spend more than $5 million in Minnesota within 12 months.
The state's nearly billion-dollar deficit makes it a tricky sell, but Sen. Richard Cohen, DFL-St. Paul, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said his goal is to "fill the deficiency of the film board rebate, and the governor's budget gives me some room to do it." No one has voiced opposition, he said.
Minnesota's old Snowbate program, pegged at 5 percent from 1997 to 2000 and 10 percent in 2001-02, brought in nearly $58 million in production spending while refunding about $2 million before it was axed in the state's last budget squeeze.
Between August 2006, when it was revived, and June 2007, the program generated $6.8 million in spending (including $3.7 million in payroll) while paying rebates of $818,000.
Some economists are concerned about the long-term effects of an incentive "arms race." They argue that a policy favoring new businesses disproportionately burdens existing businesses. If all states eliminated incentives, the reasoning goes, they could direct scarce tax dollars to traditional public services, and films would be made in the most fitting locations. But with other states (and nations) tilting the playing field, doing nothing means forfeiting the competition.
Rep. Ann Lenczewski, DFL-Bloomington, chairwoman of the House Taxes Committee, generally opposes corporate subsidies because they don't often bring in new revenue. But she's receptive to the film rebate because its costs and benefits are easy to track, and it "probably can attract business that isn't already in the state."
Winter views the current moves with guarded optimism.
"People want to stimulate the economy and grow jobs," and this type of program is "very quick in terms of economic results," she said.
Wisconsin's lieutenant governor, from her vantage point in a budding film mecca, couldn't resist a wry jibe at Minnesotans.
"As a friendly neighbor from Green Bay, I would say just sit tight," she said. "You're doing fine. We'll handle this."
From The Daily Page
Johnny Depp makes people cry in Wisconsin
Spot a celebrity, shed a tear
Kenneth Burns on Saturday 03/22/2008 12:18 pmHe shook this town up when he came, the youthful-looking fortysomething who, on a platform of change, drew throngs of admirers and roused weary young Wisconsinites out of their winter doldrums.
Okay, I made up the part about a platform of change. But I'm talking about, of course, Johnny Depp, whose arrival in the Badger State -- for the filming of Public Enemies, an old-time gangster movie -- set off a frenzy rivaling the one that greeted Barack Obama's socko appearance at the Kohl Center.
My mind was blown when I read Rod Melotte's account of the shoot earlier this week in Columbus. Melotte reports that hundreds -- hundreds -- of people had turned up at dawn on a cold Monday morning to take in the action. If I'm even awake at dawn on a cold Monday morning, I'm probably thinking about getting back to sleep.
Many of the onlookers had surely come for the sheer spectacle that is the Hollywood machine in action. It probably felt like the circus had come to town. But others, clearly, were there for Depp and Depp alone. Here's how Melotte describes one fan's reaction to a sighting of the star:
The first time he passes, a young woman says over and over, “OH MY GOD IT WAS JOHNNY DEPP!” She borrows my cell phone to call her mom and is sobbing while telling the story of just how close she was to the actor.
Sobbing!
Which is weird, and possibly an overreaction.
Understand, I think Depp is a fine actor. Thanks in no small part to his long-running collaboration with the idiosyncratic director Tim Burton, Depp is a rarity among American film performers, an actor whose thoughtful integrity remains largely uncompromised.
Fifteen and more years ago I was moved by him in quirky, small films like Ed Wood and What's Eating Gilbert Grape? And he is still smartly challenging viewers with films like the recent all-singing, all-throat-slashing Sweeney Todd, as well as 2004's The Libertine, about a seventeenth-century English poet who paid tribute in verse to dildos and crab lice.
Of course, Depp would not be a household name if not for the Pirates of the Caribbean films, and that series is probably how the weeping young woman in Columbus knows Depp best. (Unless she was a big fan of The Libertine.)
So to summarize: His serious work notwithstanding, Depp is mostly loved by silly young people for a series of silly pirate films, and only a silly young person would burst into tears at the sight of a celebrity. Right?
Except I'm not so sure. Something similar happened to me a few years ago, and I wasn't all that young. Neither was the celebrity in question. In fact, he was 72.
It was an overcast summer night in 2003 when I went to Wausau to hear country music legend George Jones sing. He performed at the Wisconsin Valley Fair, where I sat in bleachers hundreds of feet from the outdoor stage. There was a cheesy warm-up act. Jones looked old. He sang songs that were hits in the 1950s. At 32, I seemed for the most part to be the youngest person there by 20 years.
And from the moment he started singing, I couldn't stop crying. Seriously. I was badly dehydrated by the show's end -- which, for what it's worth, was punctuated by the most violent summer thunderstorm I've ever been caught in. Since my teens I have thought George Jones was pretty wonderful, and I wept at the sight and sound of him.
So I identify with the young weeping woman in Columbus. Our popular entertainers can exert an awesome emotional pull on us, whether they're moaning incomparably sad country songs, as George Jones does on his records, or looking incomparably beautiful on a 30-foot-high movie screen, as Johnny Depp does, in whatever role.
And when we are in the actual presence of these entertainers, that emotion can't help but come out -- sometimes, in tears. They're not tears of sorrow, obviously, but they're not quite tears of joy, either. They're a reaction that simply says: that is the person who moves me. That person standing freaking right there!
I understand it. So, perhaps, do those men who cried on sports radio call-in shows when Brett Favre retired. We get very invested in our celebrities.
Actually, if I'd been standing with the young weeping woman in Columbus, maybe I would have been weeping right along with her.
From KCC Chronicle
Actor Depp set to come to Aurora
By ERIC SCHELKOPFAURORA – The City of Lights should be glowing a little brighter next month when Hollywood star Johnny Depp comes to town.
Depp plays John Dillinger in the movie “Public Enemies.” The movie deals with federal agents trying to take down notorious American gangsters John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd during a booming crime wave in the 1930s.
The Paramount Theater will stand in for Chicago’s Biograph Theater.
Filming at the theater is slated for April 6 and 7.
Dillinger was killed by federal agents as he stepped out of the Biograph Theater on July 22, 1934.
“They liked the beauty and historical accuracy of the theater for the time period,” Paramount executive director Diana Martinez said. “It is very exciting for the city of Aurora.”
The Paramount Theatre opened Sept. 3, 1931.
Designed by nationally renowned theater architects C.W. and George L. Rapp, the theater captures a Venetian setting portrayed in the art deco influence of the 1930s.
Dave Fulton, publicist for “Public Enemies,” said he could not discuss details of the film.
“We have not seen a signed contract [with the Paramount]. We feel it is a little premature to comment on this,” Fulton said.
Fulton also said he could not discuss when Depp would be at the Paramount for filming.
“We are not allowed to talk about specific dates because of security details,” Fulton said.
“Public Enemies” also stars Christian Bale as FBI agent Melvin Purvis. Academy Award-nominated director Michael Mann is heading up the film.
From Today's TMJ4
Raw Video: Johnny Depp Movie Mania
Charles Benson
COLUMBUS - The buzz is growing surrounding "Public Enemies." Filming for Johnny Depp's new movie started Monday, and now an entire town is star struck.Emily Kreilkamp, 14, and her mom Renee were back in Columbus Wednesday checking out the movie set for a second night.
However, nothing will beat Tuesday night's experience. Kreilkamp got an autograph and a hug from Depp.
"He asked me my name and he gave me a hug and he called me sweetie," Kreilkamp explained.
Click on the link under related content to see an interview with Emily Kreilkamp.
What was he like?
"He was shorter in person. He didn't look like Captain Jack Sparrow," Kreilkamp said.
That's because he's bad guy John Dillinger.
The movie isn't just the buzz in Columbus...it's all over the Internet from YouTube to blogs.
Renee Kreilkamp and her daughter are checking out all the Web postings.
"We are, we are and last night when we got home we were really checking it out," Renee Kreilkamp said.
Even on nights when they're not filming, downtown Columbus is busy with people who just want to see what a real Hollywood set looks like.
Behind the make believe Alfred Ruby's Shoe Store is Cheryl Hegge's real hair cutting business.
She's got pictures of Johnny Depp and she's hoping he will stop by.
"Yeah, I shook his hand. He autographed a T-shirt and he said he would come down for a haircut. I'm still waiting for him," Hegge said.
From Channel 3000
From Carasun first posted on the Zone
From NWI
Local law officers in spotlight in `Public Enemies'BY MOLLY WOULFE | Friday, March 21, 2008 |
Look for the "Public Enemies" cast and crew to descend on Crown Point early next week. And Johnny Depp, starring as Depression-era gangster John Dillinger, will be in good company.
Actress Lili Taylor and two Chicago stage vets have bagged the roles of local authorities tied to the bank robber's infamous 1934 escape from Lake County Jail. Director Michael Mann is expected to film several scenes on location at the old jail, 226 S. Main St..
Taylor, 41, will play Sheriff Lillian Holley, who donned her husband badge's in 1933 after he died in the line of duty. Lake County's top cop was thrust into the spotlight when Dillinger stole her brand-new V-8 Ford during his getaway.
Holley, who died in 1994, never lived down the robber's nose-thumbing stunt.
"If I ever see John Dillinger again, I'll shoot him dead with my own gun," she said at the time. "Don't blame anyone else for this escape. Blame me. I have no political career ahead of me and I don't care."
Taylor ("Six Feet Under," "The Haunting," "Rudy") has forged a career playing complex women. She's also worked with Depp before. The Glencoe, Ill., native played an accordionist-heiress who caught the eye of fish-warden Depp in "Arizona Dream" (1993).
Ironically, two "Prison Break" vets have been tapped as local lawmen involved in Dillinger's case.. John Lister, 41, will play Judge William J. Murray, who presided over the felon's arraignment in the old courthouse (now the Hall of Justice, 220 S. Main St.)
A Scot by birth, Lister grew up in West Lafayette and earned a degree in theater from Ball State and a Master's of Fine Arts in acting from Michigan State University. The 6-foot-2 actor has been a fixture on Chicago stages for over a decade, appearing in "The Crucible" (Steppenwolf ), "A Christmas Carol" (Goodman) and 10 Chicago Shakespeare Theatre productions. He played a guard in "Prison Break." Lister, starring in "As You Like It" at the Writers' Theatre in Glencoe, has already shot a few scenes for "Public Enemies" in Wisconsin.
So has Alan Wilder, 54, who played a chaplain in "Prison Break." Director Mann has tapped the solid character actor as prosecutor Robert Estill, who famously posed for a photo with Dilllinger. The much-reprinted image would ruin Estill's budding political career.
An original member of Steppenwolf Theatre Co., Wilder has appeared in more than 55 of the ensemble's productions, costarring in "Sonia Flew" and "The Diary of Anne Frank" last season. TV credits include "Fraiser," "Murphy Brown" and "Mad About You."
Da Coach and Da Rocker
Arena football makes for odd suitemates. Take rocker Jon Bon Jovi and guitarist Richie Sambora hanging out in Mike Ditka's suite when the Chicago Rush took on the Philadelphia Soul at Allstate Arena (Bon Jovi's team rocked Ditka's 60-49). The Rush take on John Elway's Colorado Crush at home Saturday. By the way, local boy James Baron (Gavit High '91) is back for a second stint with the Chicago team. The 6-foot-4 lineman, a standout at Virginia Tech, has inked a two-year contract.
Daily Blog of the "Public Enemies" author Brian Burrough
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