Say ‘Cheese’

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 personally hosted a barbecue of bratwurst--the sugary pork sausage that has become one of the state’s hallmarks--for all comers on the tennis court of the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn in North Hollywood.

“This is wonderful,” exulted the delighted governor. “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,” Thompson added. “There’s a bicoastal bias, an ignorance of the Heartland.”

The goal: to induce a flood of nostalgia among Badger State-born writers, actors, producers and directors. State officials hoped it would get them reminiscing about their home, inspiring more shoots in Wisconsin, whether it appears in screen backgrounds as itself or as a stand-in for Alaska or Antarctica.

Maybe it’ll work. During the party, a producer walked up to Stanley Solheim, director of the Wisconsin Film Office, and said he had a major star, $1 million and 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,” replied Solheim, whose job it is to sell the state as a shooting site to filmmakers.

The idea was not only to sweeten the state’s finances with the money spent by film crews, but--more importantly to Wisconsin--to improve the state’s image nationally and 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 runaway success neighboring Minnesota has had both 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 500 pounds of cheese, washing it down with 30 cases and eight half-kegs of beer.

Ernest Borgnine, a non-Wisconsin native who has developed ties there, had to duck his head to get through the door of his Rolls-Royce while sporting an enormous plastic bratwurst hat. Others wore cheese hats--a mocking Wisconsin response to the slur “cheeseheads.”

The state has plenty of past connections to the film business and some 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.

On a darker note, “Psycho” and “The Silence of the Lambs” were both inspired by Eddie Gein, the crazed murderer discovered in a small Wisconsin town in the 1950s.

There’s only been one film so far about more recent mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, who hailed from Milwaukee. “They didn’t call us for help,” Solheim noted.

Whether bratwurst and beer will drag Hollywood to the Midwest is yet to be seen, observed producer David Zucker, who did the “Naked Gun” films. He, 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,” said Zucker, a Milwaukeean who sometimes sticks a little in-joke in his films for hometown audiences: The street signs show real Milwaukee streets.

“If the film business wasn’t headquartered out here, I never would have left,” Zucker said.

Wisconsin is indeed an unknown land for most other producers, Zucker agreed, with an image ranging from blank to off-base.

The old “Laverne and Shirley” TV series, supposedly depicting the lives of two female brewery workers in Milwaukee, opens with shots of row houses unknown there. The characters speak in an accent that could be New Jersey but is unknown in Wisconsin.

“Happy Days,” about merrily innocent teenagers in Milwaukee in the 1950s, gets a grade of zero for accuracy from some who actually were teenagers in Milwaukee in the ‘50s.

Leaving aside the absence of regulation teenage angst, there is no reference to the city’s weather, no frozen car batteries ruining a date, no overcoats and snow boots with the prom dress, no exhilarating spring thaw.

When did the Fonz ever lament that his beloved motorcycle had been under a snowdrift the past six months?

“That was one of the odd things about ‘Happy Days,’ ” Zucker agreed. “There was never any snow in their Wisconsin. The people out here who do those shows just never think of what the weather does to life back there.”

Wisconsin in the summer and early autumn is lovely and picturesque, but yes, the winter weather is surely one reason there are no operating film studios in Wisconsin, Solheim said. Aside from the Finland-gray winter light, it can be just plain chilly shooting outdoors for much of the year.

“Two years ago, they had Julia Roberts bathing in Devil’s Lake making ‘I Love Trouble’ with Nick Nolte,” Solheim said. “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.”

Unable to heat a lake, much less the state, for Hollywood’s convenience, Wisconsin is trying to capitalize on the climate. “We’re in the running now for a film that takes place in Antarctica,” Solheim said.

One encouraging sign may come from neighboring Minnesota, which has even colder, snowier, longer winters.

Minnesota began bettering its place in the national image tournament with Mary Tyler Moore’s plucky career woman and the success of Garrison Keillor’s reverse-hip “Prairie Home Companion” radio show and books. Although Keillor actually lives in Wisconsin and commutes to St. Paul for the show, none of his charm seems to have rubbed off on Wisconsin.

Helped by a state film office with a bigger budget and a larger pool of experienced film crew workers and studio facilities, Minnesota has attracted at least 42 feature films since 1990, including “Grumpy Old Men,” “The Mighty Ducks” and “Fargo.”

Film companies dropped more than $23 million there in 1995, when Wisconsin’s take was $600,000.

Most of that came from “Fever Lake,” a product of the state’s lone film studio, built on the site of a Girl Scout camp near Eagle River in the far northern forests.

“A guy who immigrated from Estonia gradually built a studio up there and used to make about one picture a year, usually horror films he sold in Europe. The last one was ‘Blood Harvest’ starring Tiny Tim,” Solheim said.

The studio eventually closed, went through other owners and now sits unused. “It has two lakes, an indoor heated pool, 850 acres, lots of electric power.

“One of the films made there, which hit the drive-in circuit, was called ‘The Great Spider Invasion.’ Last time I was up north, there was still a giant spider on the roof of one of the buildings.”

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The Badger State vs. Los Angeles

Number of plastic surgeons:

Los Angeles area: 1 to every 27,770 residents

Wisconsin: i to every 75,210 residents.

Number of films shot per year:

Los Angeles County: 500

Wisconsin: 1

Median home price:

Los Angeles area: $175, 900

Wisconsin: $98,000

Dairy cows:

Los Angeles area: 312,000

Wisconsin: 1.5 million