Hooray for Mollywood
As some of you may know, Michigan’s Govenor Granholm recently approved tax incentives to lure movie production to Michigan. In the last few months there’s been a few hollywood-related stories appearing in the news and local blogs. This includes news of a Drew Barrymore-produced movie filming in Ypsi and the possibility that a major studio will buy Ford’s Wixom assembly plant to turn it into a soundstage.
Yesterday I got my own first-hand experience with this “new” industry. I was driving home along Hines Drive yesterday, and at one point near the sledding hill in Westland, I saw WDIV’s news truck there next to some kind of small road-side stand in a parking lot. I couldn’t get a good look at the stand, but it looked like it was selling either fireworks or propaganda posters. This was odd, and it made me think back to a traffic report from the day earlier in which they mentioned an intersection being closed for filming. I didn’t pay too much attention to that traffic report the first time, but on the second play-through it sounded like it was on Merriman, which is a major road in the western burbs.
Further down the road there were a bunch of vehicles parked with people milling about including a flat bed truck with equipment in it, which, given the previous day’s traffic report, I thought could be film equipment. Among the vehicles was an old commercial truck (big and boxy), painted light blue with a huge hotdog on top. The truck had writing that said “Weiner Wiz” (or “Weiner Whiz”), and spraypainted along the side in big black letters was “FAGGOT”. At this point I was sure this related to film, since no one ever drives trucks with big hotdogs on them unless they’re the Weinermobile, which itself is a hotdog-shaped car.
After some light searching, I found this article about the filming from the 9/10/08 Westland Eagle. It looks like it’s going to be called “Ms. January” and will be a road-trip movie filmed entirely in the state. The description and stars associated make it look like it’s definitely a B-list movie, but any movie that includes trucks with giant hotdogs and homophobic slurs spraypainted on it can’t be that bad, can it?
