Your Friendly Neighborhood Teamsters
Wondering who to thank for all those celebrity sightings this year? Start with these guys.
In this age when $100 million blockbuster movies are routine and a few stars eat up half the budget, the closing credits are a quaint anachronism. How many people actually sit through that endless scroll of grips and best boys? Besides, it's not as if getting the film made hinged on the guy driving the equipment truck to the set.
Yet in Boston this year, it did. The parade of red-carpet Hollywood stars seen around town would have gone elsewhere if not for a group of anonymous blue-collar support people. Without their willingness to do their jobs quietly, there would have probably been no Morgan Freeman here, no Cameron Diaz, no Meg Ryan, no Christopher Walken, and none of those big bucks they spent on hotels and clothes and meals.
Let us take a moment to salute the well-behaved Teamster.
Boston's Hollywood boom got a big boost with the passage this year of a beefed-up motion picture tax-incentive package. A city that had been forced to see the streets of Toronto as lame on-screen stand-ins for its own was suddenly a bargain for studios. But when Nick Paleologos, the state's film honcho, went to California to drum up business, studio execs groaned about Teamsters shaking them down during previous Boston shoots. "They complained about Teamsters peddling their own scripts, trying to get themselves roles in the movies, leasing their own private equipment, destroying stuff, not arriving on time," he recalls.
Paleologos crafted a standard response: "There was a civil war, and the good guys won." He touted the arrival of Sean O'Brien, 35, the newly elected president of Teamsters Local 25, who promised a new day. It's too soon to evaluate O'Brien's impact on Local 25 as a whole, but the professionalism of the Teamsters working on the eight significant films shot in Boston in 2007 helped overhaul Boston's image in Hollywood.
For proof, look at Sony/Columbia, which was so happy with its experience shooting 21, a movie set partly at MIT, that it returned to shoot Pink Panther 2, a movie that isn't even set in Boston, but in France.
Can Boston as a stand-in for the streets of Toronto be far off?
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