Hollywood Hits the Hammer!

Our city has enjoyed an increasing number of movie shoots over the past few years. Wikipedia's list of big name Hollywood actors who filmed in Hamilton in 2006 & 2007 include: Don Cheadle, Jeff Daniels, Michael Keaton, Harvey Keitel, Eugene Levy, Shirley Maclaine, Michael Madsen, Steve Martin, Edward Norton, Chris O'Donnell, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Plummer, Randy Quaid, Tim Roth, Martin Sheen, John Travolta, Mark Wahlberg, Christopher Walken, Sigourney Weaver and Robin Williams. Some of the better-known films with Hamilton locations that have come out in the past few years are: Long Kiss Goodnight, X-Men, Four Brothers, and Cinderella Man.

With all this movie action going on, it's almost embarrassing to admit that we've never gone to observe a shoot before. So, when we heard that The Incredible Hulk was shooting downtown, we were determined we were going to check it out! As luck would have it, our schedule for the filming days made it tricky to get down there, but in the end we squeezed it in. It was actually very difficult to get anywhere remotely close to the shoot, there were cops and crew everywhere guarding the site, and they had guardrails up for quite a distance around the filming area. In the end, we found a multi-floor parking garage we could sneak into and watch the action from a few floors above ground. All the scenes being filmed here were night scenes, so it was difficult to get any good photos. A section of the street had been transformed to look like a section of Harlem in New York, and they had a number of yellow New York cabs in the street. We watched for about an hour; most of it was just them setting up props and lighting. We got to see them set a jeep and the shell of a burned-out bus on fire (if you look very closely at the photo you can just make out one of the smaller fires), and they engineered a small explosion. That's about it. Still, it was neat to watch the behind-the-scenes work of what goes on during the filming of a movie. Nathan was very disappointed that we didn't get to see any really big action shots (they have apparently been sending cars flying down the street, but I think they're doing that stuff in the middle of the night when next to noone is around). We are eagerly awaiting the 2008 release of the movie, so we can look for the scenes they filmed here.

This definitely whet our appetite for movie-making and we'll make more of an effort to try and catch more movie filming in the future!