Party Seeks to Draw Hollywood to Wisconsin

Wisconsin came fishing Sunday for its native sons and daughters who have gone Hollywood, hoping to entice them back to make movies and TV programs showing the green pastures, great lakes and old brick cities of their birth state.

Gov. Tommy G. Thompson hosted a barbecue of bratwurst--the sugary pork sausage that has become one of his state’s hallmarks--on the tennis court of the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn in North Hollywood, and opened it to all comers.

“This is wonderful,” exulted Thompson. “We come out here from Wisconsin and 800 to 1,000 people show up for our party. They’re storming in the gates.

“There really is a lack of knowledge of our state. There’s a bicoastal bias, ignorance of the heartland, and we’re here to show the film people that if you want ambience, if you want a different atmosphere and the flavor of a place with four seasons, Wisconsin has got it.”

The point: to induce a flood of nostalgia among Badger State-born writers, actors, producers and directors. State officials hope to get them reminiscing about their home state, inspiring more shoots in Wisconsin, whether it stars as itself on-screen, or serves as a stand-in for Alaska or Antarctica, as it now is.

The state has a long history with the film business, and some film-famous native sons. Orson Welles came from Racine, Don Ameche from Kenosha and Jeffrey Hunter from Shorewood. Spencer Tracy and Pat O’Brien attended the same Catholic boys school in Milwaukee.

Less positively, “Psycho” and “The Silence of the Lambs” were both inspired by Ed Gein, the murderer who popped up in a Wisconsin town in the 1950s.

So far there’s only been one film about more recent mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, said Stanley Solheim, director of the Wisconsin Film Office, adding that “they didn’t call us for help.”

Ron Howard, who starred in “Happy Days,” one of the few TV series set in Milwaukee, sent his regrets for Sunday. Ernest Borgnine, a non-Wisconsin native who has developed ties there, had to duck his head to get into a Rolls-Royce while sporting his enormous plastic bratwurst hat. Others wore cheese hats--a mocking Wisconsin response to the slur “cheeseheads.”

The sales job appeared to be working. In mid-party, a producer walked up to Solheim, whose job is to promote the state to filmmakers, and said he had a major star, $1 million, a script set in Wisconsin “but some of the other guys involved want to shoot it in California. Can you help? We need a theme park, a small theme park as a location.”

“Got just the thing for you in Green Bay,” Solheim said.

The goal: to not only sweeten the state’s finances with the money spent by film crews, but--more important to Wisconsin--to improve the state’s skewed (or nonexistent) national image, and to lure more tourists to its hotels and resorts.

“People are still going to Austria because of ‘The Sound of Music’ and to Montana looking for the scenery they saw in ‘A River Runs Through It,’ ” Solheim said.

One probable spur is the comparative runaway success of neighboring Minnesota, which has been attracting film companies and moving up several notches on the national hipness register.

The attendees, many wearing University of Wisconsin red shirts, disposed of more than 1,200 bratwurst and uncounted half-kegs of beer while a rock band played. “Four of them are Disney executives from Wisconsin who just volunteered to play here,” Solheim said.

*

Whether all this will drag Hollywood to the Midwest is yet to be seen, said producer David Zucker, who did the “Naked Gun” films. He and his brother Jerry and former partner Jim Abrahams among them made “Airplane,” “Police Squad,” “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and “Ruthless People.”

“I’d like to shoot back there just because I like Wisconsin. If the film business wasn’t headquartered out here, I never would have left,” said Zucker, a Milwaukeean who sometimes sticks a little joke in his films for hometown audiences: The street signs have names of real Milwaukee avenues.

Winter weather is one reason that no film studios operate in Wisconsin, Solheim said. “Two years ago, they had Julia Roberts bathing in Devil’s Lake making ‘I Love Trouble’ with Nick Nolte. They scouted that location in the summertime but shot the scene in mid-October when the lake is almost ice.

“They were trying to figure out how to heat the lake, but just couldn’t do it. . . . It’s obviously not the same as shooting in California.”