Last summer, I interned at the largest newspaper in the state of
Delaware. I realize that’s more or less equivalent to
bragging about being the tallest midget, but the detail is
important, as you’ll see in a moment.
One week the big news around the office, and perhaps around the
state, was that a film crew had arrived to shoot a bona-fide
Hollywood movie on the sunny, sandy beaches in Delaware’s
southern third. (Yes, Delaware is big enough to break up into
thirds.)
The film, a romantic comedy, starred Matthew McConaughey and
Sarah Jessica Parker, practically ensuring that a pair of movie
stars would be walking around in their swimsuits.
The story was so big that the newspaper ran a recap after they
left, quoting various locals who witnessed the event. It ran on the
front page. Of the biggest paper in the state.
Imagine my surprise, then, when “Failure to Launch”
opened in theaters last weekend and I found out it was set in, of
all places, a suburb of New Orleans. The same weekend, “Ask
the Dust” opened in theaters. It was set in Los Angeles but
shot almost exclusively in South Africa.
The same weekend, the Dallas Film Commission launched a major
campaign to make sure the film version of the TV show
“Dallas” will be shot in, well, Dallas.
The campaign’s slogan, which requires no further
punchline: “Shoot JR in Dallas!” Hats and T-shirts are
available for sale on their Web site.
As any tourist who’s taken the Universal Studios Studio
Tour knows, movies are not always shot in the locations where
they’re set. In fact, they rarely are.
Most Hollywood studio movies are filmed in Los Angeles, which
explains why so many movies are set in Los Angeles and why all
those movie stars live out here in the first place. And you thought
it was the weather.
However, a growing business has emerged in which cities give
film studios tax breaks if they film movies on location, away from
a studio. It saves the film companies money, and it provides
exposure to other locations while creating jobs at the same
time.
It seems like a win-win situation, but there’s something
almost silly about the situations it creates.
“Failure to Launch” does not take place in Los
Angeles and isn’t shot in Los Angeles. But it wasn’t
shot where it’s set. “Ask the Dust” takes place
in Los Angeles and is in large part about Los Angeles, but was
technically shot in the Eastern Hemisphere. Dallas is fighting for
Hollywood to shoot “Dallas” in Dallas, but it looks
like “Dallas” will be shot in New Orleans.
This situation makes Hollywood’s well-documented love of
Vancouver seem rational. After all, as far as I can tell, Delaware
is mostly famous for the traffic jams on its road between New York
and Washington, D.C.
I’m a big fan of verisimilitude, and if I’ve been to
the location in which a film is set, I can usually tell if the film
was shot there. One of my favorite things about “Do the Right
Thing,” one of my favorite movies, is how clearly you can
tell that even the interiors were shot in real-life Brooklyn
apartments. For a more recent example, think about this: What would
“Match Point” have been like if Woody Allen
hadn’t packed up and shot the thing in London?
I can’t be the only person who notices such details. A
movie like “Failure to Launch” could be set anywhere
““ why set it in New Orleans if you’re going to shoot it
in Delaware? If the studio got a tax deal to shoot in Delaware,
then why not change the setting of the film?
Similarly, if a movie is specifically set in one location, so
much so that it can’t be changed (think
“Dallas”), why even consider shooting it somewhere
else? Once producers make the assumption that it’s possible
to shoot a movie outside its setting, they in effect question the
necessity of setting in their own movies.
It comes down to this: If the script says location A, but
location B is cheaper, wouldn’t it make sense to change the
script? If location A is so important to the movie that it
can’t be changed, why consider location B in the first
place?
As far as I’m concerned, “Failure to Launch”
may be the first movie to take place in Delaware. Now that’s
front-page news.
Tracer has heard every “Dela-where?” joke ever
invented. If you think you have a new one, e-mail him at
jtracer@media.ucla.edu.