“Since I was running into a little trouble in getting other people to go along with my desires and publish my stuff, I began publishing it myself….In the third issue of our fanzine I wrote a story called “The Reign of the Superman.” Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel
O.K., we all know that Superman was born on the planet Krypton and raised on a farm in Kansas, but did you know he was actually created in Cleveland, Ohio—by a couple of high school students?
Writer Jerry Siegel (1914-1996) and artist Joe Shuster (1914-1992) came up with the concept for the concept of Superman while students at Glenville High School. The biggest change in Superman as we know him now from was when he was first created is he was bald and on the side of evil.
“A couple of months after I published this story, it occurred to me that a Superman as a hero rather than a villain might make a great comic strip character in the vein of Tarzan, only more super and sensational than that great character. Joe and I drew it up as a comic book – this was in early 1933. We interested a publisher in putting it out, but then he changed his mind, and that was the end of that particular version of Superman – called The Superman. Practically all of it was torn up, by the way. Joe got very upset and tore up and threw away most of it…Obviously, having him a hero would be infinitely more commercial than having him a villain. I understand that the comic strip Dr. Fu Manchu ran into all sorts of difficulties because the main character was a villain. And with the example before us of Tarzan and other action heroes of fiction who were very successful, mainly because people admired them and looked up to them, it seemed the sensible thing to do to make The Superman a hero. The first piece was a short story, and that’s one thing; but creating a successful comic strip with a character you’ll hope will continue for many years, it would definitely be going in the wrong direction to make him a villain.” Jerry Siegel
It took a few more years before Superman would fully evolve and have his dual-identity of Clark Kent.
“That occurred to me in late 1934, when I decided that I’d like to do Superman as a newspaper strip. I approached Joe about it, and he was enthusiastic about the possibility. I was up late one night, and more and more ideas kept coming to me, and I kept writing out several weeks of syndicate scripts for the proposed newspaper strip. When morning came, I had written several weeks of material, and I dashed over to Joe’s place and showed it to him. (This was the story that appeared in Action Comics 01, June, 1938, the first published appearance of Superman.) Of course, Joe had worked on that earlier version of Superman, and when I came to him with this new version of it, he was immediately sold. And when I saw the drawings that were emerging from his pencil I almost flipped. I knew he had matured a great deal since he had done The Superman, and I thought he was doing a great job on the new art.” Jerry Siegel
If two teenage students growing up in the Midwest during the depression who create one of the great superheroes doesn’t inspire you to write stories wherever you live I’m not sure what will.
P.S. All of the above quotes came from a 1983 interview with Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Tony-winning playwright Willie Gilbert (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) was a student at Glenville High School, as was playwright Jerome Lawrence (Inherit the Wind). They all worked on the school newspaper together.
On this repeat Saturday, I going back to a post I wrote back in 2008. (Back when I regularly wrote posts that were between 1,000-2,000 words.) This one keeps with the Ohio-centered theme this past week. But a few changes have occurred in the five years since I wrote this post. First LeBron James and I both moved to Florida. (Though I’m pretty sure the square footage of his place is bigger than mine.) And there has been a shifting of seats at the table of some of the people I mentioned.
Tarantino and Soderbergh have talked about no longer making feature films. One of the people I left out of those on working on The All New Mickey Mouse Club, Ryan Gosling, was a little off the radar in 2008—but at the end of the day may be considered the most talented one in the bunch. And the most talented guy I went to film school with at the University of Miami, Primetime Emmy-winning director David Nutter (Band of Brothers), directed last Monday’s season 3′s premiere of Game of Thrones—and next Monday’s as well episode I’m told.
The following was originally posted on February 23, 2008:
“One day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart.”
Francis Ford Coppola
It’s hard to mark the beginning of the modern independent film movement. Certainly one could make the cases for the films of John Sayles, Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee, and Quentin Tarantino, but I mark the year of 1999 as the point when things really changed in the film industry.
That’s when a group of young guys in Orlando, Florida, created The Blair Witch Project. The graduates from the University of Central Florida shot with a mixture of 16mm film and consumer video cameras and made history. It is still the film with the highest ratio of profit to production cost of any film ever made.
One huge reason is that the filmmakers used the Internet to market their concept in a way that Hollywood easily could have afforded to do if they only had the vision. (They weren’t the only ones to miss the early boat. Bill Gates was not a cheerleader of the Internet at the start.) Hollywood caught the vision soon after the success of The Blair Witch Project, but they’ve been playing catch-up ever since.
I moved back to Orlando from L.A. at the end of 1988 just as the marketing campaign for Hollywood East was heating up. Disney and Universal were building production studios and Chapman-Leonard would follow suit.
Britney, Justin and Christina began doing their thing at Disney, and Nickelodeon found a new use for slime at Universal. Ron Howard’s Parenthood, Wesley Snipes in Passenger 57, and the building that blew up in the opening of Lethal Weapon III- were all shot in Orlando.
I wrote and directed a national radio drama at Century III (known as C-III) at Universal and received my first paycheck writing from Rick Eldridge who would go on to produce Bobby Jones Story; Stroke of Genius. I once was editing a video project at one of the suites at C-III while David Nutter (who I went to school with at the University of Miami) was editing a Super Boy episode he directed in the edit bay next to me. (Nutter went on to direct a Band of Brothers episode as well as some X-Files and has had quite a career in TV.)
Matchbox Twenty, Creed, and yes, The Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync were on the Orlando music scene in the 90′s, Shaq was in command for the Orlando Magic, and Tiger Woods moved to town.
It was an exciting time to be in Orlando. But perhaps the biggest underrated event in that era was under most people’s radar. Valencia Community College lured film professor Ralph Clemente away from the University of Miami. (He still runs the film program at VCC that Steven Spielberg once said was, “One of the best film schools in the country.” 2013 Note: I traded emails with Ralph this week and he said the school was wrapping up shooting its 47 feature film.)
I had an editing class with Clemente at Miami and once got a good grade in part because I edited a montage of found rodeo footage with a Willie Nelson song. Who knew the German born Clemente whose accent sounds remarkably like Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s would be a Willie Nelson fan? Clemente enjoyed telling student to try new things.
Years later a couple of students would be inspired by Clemente to make a mockumentary that hit the Sundance Jackpot. Most people forget that The Blair Witch Project wasn’t even an official entrant. It was a special midnight showing that created the buzz that hasn’t really gone away.
Granted none of the team was a fat girl from Ohio, but it was as a giant step toward to prophetic words that Francis Ford Coppola said on the 1991 documentary Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse:
“To me the great hope is that now that these little 8mm video recorder and stuff now, some–just people who normally wouldn’t make movies are going to be making them. And, you know, suddenly one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart, and you know, and make a beautiful film with her father’s little camera-corder and for once this whole professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever and it will become an art form. That’s my opinion.”
I hope you’ve never been exposed to that quote before. It’s legendary in the micro-budget film world. If I was a fat girl in Ohio who wanted to make films I’d have that quote gold-plated and framed above my iMac.
I don’t know why Coppola picked Ohio as his frame of reference. Maybe he chose it for the same reason I titled this blog Screenwriting from Iowa. Ohio, like Iowa, represents the heartland of America and is more known for farms and football than film. And since I’m throwing around f-words, Ohio is quintessential flyover country.
But Ohio rocks. In part because the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland. LeBron James does his magic in Cleveland. The kings of high-flying dreams, Orville and Wilber Wright worked out of a bicycle shop in Dayton. The list goes on. (Did you know that the Wright Brothers lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa at one time?)
And Ohio, like Iowa, has some interesting history connected to screenwriting and movie making: Sundance winner American Splendor, Major League, and the classic family film A Christmas Story. At the time of this writing the ever resourceful Internet Movie Date Base (IMDb) lists a tie for the top rated film ever by its voters as Coppola’s The Godfather and Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption. The later having been shot in Mansfield, Ohio. That site is a character in the film. And you can still take tours there during the summer. (Mansfield State Reformatory in Ohio)
Antioch College in funky Yellow Springs can lay claim to helping to educate Rod Serling before he became an advertising copywriter in Cincinnati before becoming the famous writer & host of The Twilight Zone.
Speaking of Cincinnati, though its influence is probably small, it’s worth nothing that Tom Cruise (who Premiere Mag ranked as the #3 Greatest Movie Star of All Time) attended school briefly in Cincinnati and the highest box office money-making director of all-time (over $3.5 Billion) Steven Spielberg was born in Cincinnati. (And just to pile on George Clooney was raised just over the river in Kentucky.)
The former reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Joe Eszterhas, has returned to his Ohio roots but not before making his mark in Hollywood where he made as much as four million dollars a script. While no one would accuse the writer of Basic Instinct and Showgirls with writing regional Midwestern stories that doesn’t mean he hasn’t written any. In his book Hollywood Animal, Eszterhas mentions a distinctly Midwestern film he wrote that never got made because he was told, “Dirt don’t sell.” Most of the film F.I.S.T. written by Eszterhas (directed by Norman Jewison and starring Sylvester Stallone) was filmed in Dubuque, Iowa.
In his book “The Devils Guide to Hollywood,” Eszterhas offers advice to screenwriters such as “Move to the Midwest.” Talk about counter-culture? (And from a guy who once owed homes in Malibu, the San Francisco Bay area, and Hawaii—at the same time.)
Why would he give such advice? “You won’t be able to write real people if you stay in L.A. too long. L.A. has nothing to do with the rest of America. It is a place whose values are shaped by the movie business. It is my contention that it is not just a separate city, or even a separate state, but a separate country located within America. Real people live in Bainbridge Township, Ohio.”
(Perhaps that’s part of the success of Diablo Cody’s Minnesota-based Juno? Maybe she should write a tell all book and call it, Diablo’s Guide to Hollywood.)
But what does Mr. Eszterhas think about what that does for your odds of selling a screenplay? Glad you asked. These are the words every writer outside L.A. wants to hear:
“If you write a script anywhere and send it to an agent in Chicago or Detroit or Cleveland or wherever…and if that agent sends it to an agent in Hollywood who loves it…you can sell your script. You don’t need to have any connections, you don’t need to have an agent, you don’t need to live in L.A. All you have to do is send your finished script to an agent anywhere. That agent will know another agent in Hollywood and you’ll be in business.” Joe Eszterhas
Keep in mind Eszterhas is talking about the conventional Hollywood agent route, not the additional opportunities wherever you live by various production people who will be attracted to your script.
While not being fat or from Ohio, Zana Briski took a giant step toward Coppola’s vision when the English photographer picked up a handheld DV camera for the first time and made a film in Calcutta’s red light district. Co-directed and shot with Ross Kauman, Born into Brothels, won Best Documentary Feature at the 2005 Academy Awards.
Some people have been asking “Where’s that little fat girl in Ohio?” I think he may have meant Iowa. People get those confused a lot, you know?
But wherever she is she’s on her way. Although she may not make her film using her father’s camera-corder as Coppola suggested, but using her cell phone camera and posting it on the Internet.
Rewind back to 1999 when Steven Spielberg told Katie Couric on the NBC today show, “I think that the Internet is going to effect the most profound change on the entertainment industries combined. And we’re all gonna be tuning into the most popular Internet show in the world, which will be coming from some place in Des Moines.”
As in Des Moines, I-O-W-A. I don’t just make this stuff up, you know? When Couric remarked, “Great, I’m gonna lose my job,” ” Spielberg interjected, “We’re all gonna lose our jobs. We’re all gonna be on the Internet trying to find an audience.” (Speaking of the Internet, to see a fun and original five-minute film actually made in Des Moines view Mimes of the Prairie, which won the 2005 National 48 Hour Film Project.
As Morgan Freeman’s famous character Red says, ”Hope is a dangerous thing.”
Last year Oberlin was voted the “Best Hometown” in northeast Ohio by Ohio Magazine. The city of just under 10,000 people was founded in 1833 by two Presbyterian ministers, and just happens to also be the place that helped develop two top Hollywood screenwriters. And while the city sits between Cleveland and Toledo it’s interesting to head over to Europe to see the original roots that links Oberlin to the Oscars.
Oberlin, Ohio was named after Jean-Frederic Oberlin (1740-1826) who was a German minister who worked to build a better community in the Le Ban de la Roche region in France. (Known for his work in medicine, agricultural, helping to build roads, bridges and oraphanages—along with his spiritual teachings.) The J.-F Oberlin Museum in Waldersbach is dedicated to celebrating his 59 years of ministry work in the remote valley.
Oberlin College was established in 1833 by the same two ministers who founded the town. According to Wikipedia, Oberlin was a key stop for the Underground Railroad in assisting escaped slaves and the college ”was the first college in the United States to regularly admit African-American students, beginning in 1835.” And while Oberlin College is strong in the arts, and today has a Cinema Studies program, the school’s most successful screenwriters majored in different disciplines.
Two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman was an English major at Oberlin before he wrote the novel Harper which led to a career in Hollywood. His best known films are Marathon Man, The Princess Bride, Misery, All the Presidents Men and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Goldman also wrote the insightful bookAdventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting.That book includes the entire screenplay to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Though first published in 1982, it’s the first book any inspiring screenwriter should read. Here’s how Goldman introduced Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) in the screenplay.
A MAN idly walking around the building. He is BUTCH CASSIDY and hard to pin down. Thirty-five and bright, he has brown hair, but most people, if asked to describe him, would remember him as blond. He speaks well and quickly, and has been all his life a leader of men, but if you asked him, he would be damned if he could tell you why. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Written by William Goldman
The other screenwriter from Oberlin is Mark Boal who majored in philosophy. While the much respected Goldman is on the tail-end of his career, Boal who graduated from Oberlin in ’95 is at the front end of his career but already has four Oscar nominations for his work writing and producing Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker, resulting in two-Oscar wins.Here’s how Boal introduced Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) in The Hurt Locker:
Working the joystick on the laptop is SERGEANT J.T. SANDBORN, a type-A jock, high school football star, cocky, outgoing, ready with a smile and quick with a joke…or, if you prefer , a jab to the chin. Think Muhammad Ali with a rifle.
I couldn’t tell you another connection between Goldman and Boal, but for the sake of this blog, two great screenwriters passing through the same small city decades apart makes it a city of interest. And a reminder that talent comes from everywhere.
Love my ma, love my pa But I just love ole Arkansas Arkansas lyrics from the musical Big River
“I remember I was in junior high school and I was going to write a short story about mobsters, or New York mobsters. I think I had just seen a Scorsese film. And I told my dad that. And he was like, ‘You haven’t ever been to New York.’ And I said, ‘Nah, but that’s where mobsters live.’ And he basically said, ‘Why don’t you write something about Arkansas?’ And a window in my mind opened, and I realized all of a sudden that I had access to something that was interesting, that the rest of the world couldn’t write about, because I was the one there.
And it just seems like, you have an idea, and it feels kind of fake or false or movie-ish, but when I drag it down to Arkansas and place it there, it starts to feel realistic and grounded and I’m accountable for the realism, because I know these people and these places and I have to get it right. And that’s a good thing, because so many southern films are affectations that it’s good to feel accountable to some kind of realism.” Writer/Director Jeff Nichols (Mud) Hollywood Reporter 4/26/13 Jeff Nichols, “Mud: Director” Eschews Hollywood for the Southby Jordan Zakarin
Though Jeff Nichols currently lives in Austin, Texas (and recieved his educated at the North Carolina School for the Arts) two of his first three feature films (Shotgun Stories, Mud) take place in Arkansas where Nicholas was born and raised. (The third, Take Shelter, is set in a small town in Ohio.) I finally saw Mud over the weekend and it reminded me a little of Tender Mercies, a little of Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn, a little of A Perfect World, and even a little of Stand By Me. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Nichols getting an Oscar-nomination for his script. And if he ever wins an Oscar he’ll join fellow Arkansas native Billy Bob Thornton who won an Oscar for hisSlingblade (1996) script.
And considering that Winter’s Bone(Mud’s country cousin) was set in a world on the Missouri/Arkansas border and the 2011 Oscar-nominated doc & Arkansas-centered Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory documentary there is some excellent (and gritty) work coming out of that region.
P.S. Other film related artists with roots to Arkansas and in the Arkansas Hall of Fame include Johnny Cash, Academy-Award wining actress Mary Steenburgen, and actress Lisa Blout (An Officer and a Gentleman) who won an Oscar in 2001 for her role in producing the short film The Accountant. And to top it all off one of the most financially successful writers in history—John Grisham—was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Now that I think of it, there are traces of Grisham’s The Firm in Mud. (The movie version of The Firm was shot mostly in Memphis, but some in Arkansas)
P.S. Still looking for the perfect quote from Portland filmmaker Gus Van Sant to finish out my Oregon focused week, so I’m open to any quotes you have from him—or links to interviews with him. I’ve read a lot so far but nothing has struck the right cord yet.
“Somebody who worked as a crime reporter for two years in Raleigh-Durham is gonna have a lot more interesting things to talk about than some 22-year-old kid who grew up in Brentwood, who wants to be a writer because he likes the way the life looks.”
Writer/Director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, The Bourne Legacy) Deadline Hollywood interview with Mike Fleming
“A Hollywood producer interrogated me. ‘Are the film rights avalable?’ he asked. ‘Well, yeah,’ I said. ‘But you know it’s a book of poems?” Sherman Alexie
On phone calls he got after great reviews of his first book The Business of Fancydancing
“In the 60s…all the hippies were trying to be Indians.” Smoke Signals
Movies on sale at the 2012 Meskwaki Pow Wow
Sherman Alexie helped put the Indian in the indie film movement back in the late 90s with his script Smoke Signals.Alexie’s script was based on his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven. The movie was produced and directed by Chris Eyre and won the Audience Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. The film was advertised as “the first feature film written, directed and produced by Native Americans.”
Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. Eyre is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.
Alexie left the reservation and became a New York Times bestseller, a produced screenwriter, and winner of the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. These days he lives an urban life (as he says 60% of American Indians do)—in his case in Seattle.
“The class I took [at the University of Washington] that really got me instantly was a poetry writing class. I’d never read anything written by an Indian—I had no idea we actually wrote about our lives. And the teacher, Alex Clow, handed me this anthology of contemporary Native American poetry called Songs from This Earth on Turtle’s Backand I took it home that night and read all 400 pages straight through, and then read it again, and read it again. I read that thing everyday probably for two years. Stunned that you could write about our lives as a reservation Indian. About poverty, beauty, pow wows, and fry bread, and backward driving cars. I had no idea that my small life would appeal to anybody. And it was with that anthology and those other Native American writers that came before me that I realized that my story might be important. “ Sherman Alexie Conversations At KCTS 9
The American Indian Film Institute will host the 37th annual American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco this November. (Films are of or about North American Indian or Canada First Nation Peoples.)
P.S. Chris Eyre, the director of Smoke Signals, has gone on to direct episodes of Law & Order,Friday Night Lights, and shared a DGA Award for directing the TV movie Edge of America.
“Daniel Boone, American folk hero and trail blazer was our mascot while developing Pilgrim Song. Not only is his name synonymous with the great outdoors, he also settled the land that is now known as the Commonwealth of Kentucky.” Writer/director Martha Stephens
It would have been nice to be in Louisville next week instead of last week, that way I could attend the Fly Over Film Festival. This year the signature event of the Louisville Film Society will be held June 7-10.
A film I’d most like to see is Pilgrim Song written and directed by Martha Stephens. She’s a Kentuckian from Ashland in the far north-eastern part of the state, which just happens to be the same general area where the Hatfield and McCoy family feud took place that I wrote about in yesterday’s post.
“I grew up on the banks of the Ohio River on the Kentucky side of things. My hometown is dying now, although it was once a place of industry and power. Springsteen could write a real heartbreaker about its overall decline. When I was small, my grandmother spun many a yarn. She mostly quoted old folk songs, told tall tales full of regional colloquialisms. I guess I’ve always loved stories. The idea of telling my own stories through the means of filmmaking is the only occupation that has ever appealed to me. I went to the North Carolina School of the Arts School of Filmmaking and majored in directing. It was there I wrote and directed short films. ‘Passenger Pigeons’ is my first feature film. Martha Stephens 2010 Indiewire article
That film, Passenger Pigeons, won the “We Believe in You” award when it premiered at the 2010 SWSW Film Festival. Her latest feature film debuted at SXSW this year and features a lead actor from Louisville, Timothy Morton.
“A winding, ephemeral jaunt through the Appalachian backwoods, Pilgrim Song is so well-executed and carefully made that it almost appears effortless. The film follows James, a recently unemployed music teacher who decides to spend his first days of unemployment questing down Kentucky’s Sheltowee Trace Trail…Pilgrim Song continues to establish Stephens as the rare American director able to transform realism into poetry.” Dan Schoenbrun Filmmaker Magazine
When asked about the writing process for Pilgrims Song by Dan Schoenbrun she replied:
“Going into the writing process, my co-writer, Karrie Crouse and I decided we’d start with a boundary of our narrative space. This space would be divided into three separate units of space, serving as the three acts. We begin the film in metro-Louisville, move to the trail, and end with our main character entering the humble world of a father and son duo wrestling with abandonment and financial constraints. Within these three spacial acts, we allowed ourselves to do whatever felt natural. Many of the scenes on the trail came together through researching the Sheltowee Trace and reading thru-hikers’ online journals of their experiences on the trail. The story had always had this persona of a homespun patchwork quilt. The writing process was pretty organic and not over-thought.” Five Questions with “Pilgrim Song”Director Matha Stephens/Filmmaker Magazines
P.S. Though Ashland, KY only has a little over 20,000 residents today, over the years it’s produced its share of people in the entertainment business including Naomi & Wynonna Judd (who as the singing duo The Judds have recorded 14 number one county hits and sold over 20 million albums), writer/director Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging, Southland, and Nicholl Fellowship for her screenplay Lost Highway), actress Alberta Vaughn (who apperaed in more than 100 films, including Randy Rides Alone with John Wayne), and long time TV game show host Chuck Woolery— all who were born in Ashland.
Even though I’ve traveled to all 50 states in the U.S. and have been to every major city and most midsized cities, I’ve never been to Kalamazoo (metro pop. 326,589). I have been to Grand Rapids, Michigan and South Bend, Indiana— so I’ve been close. But did you know there’s been some big league talent from Kalamazoo? Hollywood talent.
Since this is a blog on screenwriting why don’t I start with one of the highest paid screenwriters in the history of motion pictures—Terry Rossio. Born right there in Kalamafrickin’zoo before he went on to pick up major checks for co-writing Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and the upcoming The Lone Ranger.
Novelist Edna Ferber whose work made it to the big screen many times including Cimarron, Show Boat, and Giant (which starred Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean)—yep, she was born in Kalamazoo.
McG who directed We Are Marshall and Terminator Salvation as well as executive producer on The O.C. and Check—born in Kalamazoo. Actor Tim Allen (Home Improvement) attended Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo where he majored in television production and worked as a DJ on the school radio station.
You can visit this IMDB link to see others in the film business with a connection to Kalamazoo, but perhaps the biggest name, highest achiever from Kalamazoo really does play in the big leagues. That would be Derek Jeter who has played shortstop for the New York Yankees for the past 18 years. His list of accomplishments is astonishing; Rookie of the Year, American League MVP, All-Star Game MVP, World Series MVP, Golden Glove, and collector of five World Series rings. Recently he became just the 28th player in the history of baseball to cross the 3,000 hit plateau.
Jeter moved to Kalamazoo when he was four and played baseball at Kalamazoo Central High School where he was named USA Today’s High School Player of the Year his senior year in 1992. According to Wikipedia, when the Yankee’s were reluctant to draft Jeter because they thought he might take a scholarship to the University of Michigan, Yankee scout Dick Groch said, “The only place Derek Jeter is going is to Cooperstown.” And when Jeter’s career is over, he is in fact a sure bet to head to Copperstown, New York—home to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
Once again proving that talent comes from everywhere.
P.S. According to the Kalamazoo Public Library, Kakamazoo appears to be a Native American word from the Potawatomi tribe and the word is generally believed to mean something like “boiling pot,” ‘where the water boils,” or “reflecting river.” The name of the village of Branson was changed to Kalamazoo in March 1836. A 1823 Atlas identifies the area as “Kikalemazo.”
Since I’ve been kicking around Michigan recently on this blog I thought I’d find a quote from a Detroit son. Producer/director/actor/writer Scott Spiegal went to Wylie E. Groves High School in Birmingham, MI with Sam Raimi. He and Raimi wrote Evil Dead II, he directed Hostel: Part III, and acted in both Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. The lesson: Chose your high school friends carefully.
“Detroit is not for sissies, you better have your act together when you’re in Detroit. Detroit is a tough city, very very tough. There are great people there & there are some not so great people there. The movie industry has been incredible for the economy of Detroit. To see people working there was pretty awesome. There was some stuff happening there but I think they cut the incentive for the studios. Still it was cool to see some dough coming to the local economy but if they can’t get the crime problem under control…you can’t let your guard down for a moment and that’s whats really frustrating…Sometimes you just get lazy here in L.A. because the climate is so easy. There is some crime but it’s in pockets spread out all over. I don’t know, I guess I just really love the warm weather out here. Even the crime out here seems not as tough as in Detroit!” Scott Spiegel 2011 Interview by The Black Saint at Horrornews.net
Though both Spiegel and Ramai live in L.A. these days they have returned to Michigan to shoot films. Last year Ramai shot Oz: The Great and Powerful at Raleigh Michigan Studios in Pontiac. The film stars James Franco, Michelle Williams and Rachel Weisz and the script was written by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire. It will be released next year.
P.S. Back in 2009 I spoke at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI and afterwards was asked by a reporter if I thought if the idea to turn old car factories into movie studios would work to attract feature film production. My reply was that it wasn’t wise to try to build an industry around film incentives—because incentives come and go. And that the only jobs guaranteed with the studios being built was actually construction workers building the studios. What do I know? I just a court jester in Iowa. Well, maybe you can add prophet to my title, because the Michigan great film incentives went away and in March of this year AP reported that Raleigh Studios has “defaulted on a $630,000 interest payment and could do so on another payment after failing to attract enough feature films.”
Maybe we’ve taken those inspiring words from the cornfields of Iowa in the movie Field of Dream—”If you build it, he will come”—too far. Where does the money come from if Raleigh Studios defaults? AP reports, “If the studio can’t make the payment, the State of Michigan Retirement Systems is obligated to cover it. The retirement systems invested in the $80 million project.”
