Last Sunday my kids and I watched Blue Sky's new film Epic, the review of which I have just posted. Thanks to all of these Marvel movies with post-credit Easter Eggs, we stayed throughout the end credits, hoping against hope for a little treat. We were disappointed, but I was struck by a little blurb at the end of the credits that said that the film created thousands of jobs. With the American economy being the way it is, this announcement is an important one for them.
This is the kind of thing I would love to read at the end of movies made in the Philippines; that jobs are created, and that food is put on the table for thousands of families thanks to people who make movies.
When The Bourne Legacy filmed here early last year, filmmaker Tony Gilroy and his crew had nothing but unabashed praise for his Filipino cast and crew members, and did not hesitate to describe them all as consummate professionals.
What makes the shooting of a movie such an attractive prospect for our work force is that there's so much more work that goes into making a motion picture than just the work of cameramen, stuntmen, makeup artists and extras. There's the preparation of the food that people have to eat, the cleaning up of the locations, the building of props or sets, the medical checks for the cast and crew, the driving of cast and crew from one location to another, the guys who fetch the coffee, the balancing of budgets, the contracts, and so on and so forth. A film crew can basically become, or support, an entire community if the production is well-funded.
Of course, the problem with our local film industry, which is very much in the doldrums, is that it is often a conveyor-belt, cookie-cutter affair, with the suits who make movies seeking, by and large, to pander to the lowest common denominator and trying to churn out the cheapest flicks possible in the shortest time possible. There are exceptions, of course, but perhaps one of the reasons our movies are where they are is that people just got sick of spending money on the same homogenized junk over and over again. Fortunately, many of those talented crew members probably get work for TV networks (churning out even more homogenized junk), so at least there's some consolation in knowing that these people are getting work.
But really, a thriving film industry would mean lots of people getting a lot of work doing all kinds of things on a regular basis, whether as crew for a local movie or for the occasional Hollywood blockbuster. Our country has had a long, storied relationship with Hollywood; we've hosted such heavyweights as John Wayne, Gary Gooper, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, Tom Cruise and Martin Sheen to name but a few. Jackie Chan's been here too, if I remember correctly.
The Bourne Legacy, in a way, restored us to our former glory; it was the first Hollywood feature film in a long time which featured the Philippines playing itself, as opposed to doubling for Vietnam or some other Southeast Asian country, that managed to garner some mainstream success; it debuted at #1 in its opening weekend in the United States and managed to gross over $276 million at the global box-office. In short, a lot of people around the world got to see the Philippines onscreen, and the fact that Gilroy had nothing but kind things to say about his crew may very well mean that filmmakers from all around the world may actually perk up and take notice.
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