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Lights, Camera, Wicked Action

By Lee Ostaszewski

Hollywood East? Is that what Massachusetts is becoming? There’s no doubting the movie industry has found the Bay State. Not that we were hiding from them or anything. Tax breaks and union cooperation has helped make us the new favorite location for filmmakers. We’re America’s answer to Vancouver.

So many movies are being made around here nowadays. We’re getting almost blasé about it when we learn that a movie is being shot on location nearby. But it hasn’t gotten quite to that point. At least not yet.

We are still starry eyed about the whole process. We don’t care that traffic is tied up because Meryl Streep or Bruce Willis is making a movie. After all, it’s Meryl Streep or Bruce Willis! They are famous people! We’re thinking: “Meryl Streep is filming a movie in a town that’s next to the town that’s next to the one I live in. How wicked cool is that?”

This is similar to the stage of denial we are in during the first snowstorm of the season. That’s when people are actually excited about snow. It’s the let it snow, let it snow, phase.

Wait about seven to ten years and we might change our thinking about the movie industry. The same way we are fed up in late March with snowstorms. That’s when we stand out in our driveway with our snow shovel raised and yell to the gods to stop smiting us. Except that usually only makes it snow harder.

The difference is that instead of yelling at the gods we will be stuck in traffic directing our anger at the closest thing to us. “Another BLEEPIN’ movie!” you scream at your steering wheel. “I’m stuck in BLEEPIN’ traffic because Matt BLEEPIN’ Damon is filming what? The tenth Bourne BLEEPIN’ sequel? BLEEP all of them.”

Before we know it, other aspects of our lives will begin to parallel the southern California lifestyle: we’ll arrive late and leave early to sporting events, hire personal consultants for advice on every aspect of our lives including proper colon health, build homes on mudslide prone hills. We might even leave Red Sox players alone

when we see them in a restaurant.

Nah! That last one won’t ever happen.

We might, however, consider electing former actors for governor. California does all the time. So if Ben Affleck ever approaches asking you to sign a nominating petition, run away.

Still, if we ever reach the point when we don’t think it is bizarre that a drunken celebrity, say of mid-level rank like a Nick Nolte or a Lindsay Lohan, drives their car in Boston across a crowded Government Center Plaza because, “In L.A. that much open flat pavement constitutes a parking lot,” then we must rediscover our inner New England Yankee spirit and kick the whole Hollywood lunatic bunch out.

It could get that bad. After all, the movie industry is here to stay. In fact, it’s growing. Just the other week, the town of Plymouth approved the building of a movie studio. It is being located on land that is currently a golf course.

I know what many are thinking. “What? They’re destroying pristine golf course land? For a movie lot? Wasn’t there an old growth forest, or some homes, the town could have taken by eminent domain and leveled? Wouldn’t that had been the right thing to do?”

Golf course preservationists will understandably be upset by the news. These people often ask themselves, rhetorically as they search for a ball they hit into the woods, “Do we want to pass on to our children a world without fairways and bunkers and tee boxes? What sort of post-Apocalyptic hell would that be?”

The mind tends to wander to dark places when one is searching in the woods for an errant golf ball.

Don’t expect the protests to end with merely rhetorical questions. Golf activists in plaid pants and clashing polo shirts will undoubtedly try blocking the bulldozers while singing re-written folk songs, “They paved 18 holes of paradise, and put up a sound stage...”

But the reality is that the movie industry is coming to Massachusetts and we can either resist it or we can stand up proudly and ask, “Could you please read this screenplay I wrote? I think you’re going to love it.” ■