When
Beau Chaput pulls out of his driveway in Gwinn to head to work, coffee in hand, he doesn't head to an office, mill, plant, or mine. Instead, he makes his commute to a movie set.
Chaput is a camera operator who specializes in steadicam work and has been working in the film industry since 1998, making a name for himself in productions like
Into the West, The Astronaut Farmer or more recently,
Crazy Heart for which Jeff Bridges won an Academy Award for Best Actor.
He established himself with good contacts and steady work in New Mexico -- and then decided to take a leap of faith and move back to the U.P. with his family. Chaput is no outsider to the U.P.; he was born in Ishpeming and grew up in Gwinn, graduating from Gwinn High School.
"A lot of people thought I was crazy, absolutely crazy, when I talked about moving up here," he says. "But Michigan is just booming for business."
Most recently, Chaput finished filming on
Salvation Boulevard, a drama filmed downstate and starring Pierce Brosnan and Jennifer Connelly. Before that, he worked on,
A Year in Mooring, filmed near Traverse City.
Since the state began offering major tax incentives to productions that film in Michigan in 2008, the lists of films made in the state have grown to dozens each year, according to the Michigan Film Office.
Chaput says he came back to his hometown because he wants to help develop the U.P. as a viable filmmaking location -- and he sees a strong possibility for that with the tax incentives.
"I want to bring the commute closer to home," he says. "I'm out to make two movies a year here, actual movies that make money and entertain people." To that end, Chaput is producing a script to be filmed in
Marquette County starting in 2011; the first of what he hopes will be many for his small production company,
Brigade Films.
The film is also small, with about a $400,000 budget, and will begin shooting in September of 2011, filming in 3D, Chaput says.
"It's called The Pumpkin Brigade. It's a Halloween movie that takes place all in one day, and we're really going to be using the fall season here to its full potential," he says. The movie will be filmed mostly in Gwinn and Marquette, with some locations around Marquette County as well.
"I want to spread the shooting out a bit, as much as we can within reason," he says. "You can cheat Marquette for a quite a bit bigger town, say 50,000 to 60,000 or even up to a 100,000 size town or city. The only thing you have to go elsewhere for is the really big buildings." In the late 1950s,
Anatomy of a Murder, arguably the best Hollywood movie ever to use Michigan locations, was shot in Marquette and Ishpeming.
Marquette County is one of 136 Michigan "core communities" in which productions can get up to 42 percent of their expenses back as a
tax rebate, and 19 of those communities are in the U.P. The maximum rebates come from using Michigan crews, vendors and companies in the production.
"For my movie, it's extremely important. I'm telling the investors, look, we'll invest this money, the movie goes into the can, we turn in our receipts and get 42 percent back very quickly, within a few months of completion of filming," Chaput says.
However, the U.P. hasn't been home to very many film productions even with the high incentives, and that's not for lack of effort, says Ken Droz, communications consultant for the
Michigan
Film Office.
In the last two years, a horror movie called
Offspring did some second unit filming near Munising, while Discovery Channel TV show
American Craftsmen shot scenes around the Mackinac Bridge and across the U.P.
"We'd like more films in the U.P., and we definitely show producers all the options," Droz says. "I think it'll happen pretty soon, but it's all depending on the film and what they want to see."
The trouble isn't with attracting big-budget movies, but more the mid-size and smaller productions, Chaput says.
"A $6- to $10-million movie could roll up here with no problem, because they'd bring everything with them," he says. While they would hire some locals as assistants, the larger movies are more self-contained. But films on a tighter budget have occasionally turned down the U.P. as a filming location because of the lack of local crew and resources.
"Although we've been scouted, and people think it's incredible up here, they want to shoot here but they have to bring a big company, far away from what they're usually doing," Chaput says. "That's why we want to do more of a home-grown business up here. We want to make it not a huge, exotic location shoot, but more of everything in one place. Starting to develop a small film crew base is really going to help us out."
He hopes to give producers more reasons to choose the U.P., by helping to develop a trained crew base and provide some opportunities for local residents to familiarize themselves with the film industry. For one, he's organizing a production assistant workshop in June, to help give people some idea what working on a film is like and, hopefully, make them better candidates for production assistant jobs when a film does come to the area.
Those who are interested in the workshop can
email Chaput for further details.
Chaput says now that Michigan has made its big move to take its place as a location for the film industry, he hopes that they don't make the decision, as some other states have in the past, to discontinue the incentives once they show results.
"If I have to follow the movie business around, I will, but I really want to live here, and make my own business regardless of the incentives," he says.
Kim Hoyum is a freelance writer based in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Her credits include contributor to Geek Girl on the Street as well as a regular writer for Marquette Monthly. Hoyum is a graduate of Northern Michigan University where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts in writing.