CityBeat - News off the beaten path
By Tony Seaton
Huntington News Network Writer/Producer
This is a good one. Stop me if you've heard it. Big Hollywood movie crew comes into a small town, rearranges the downtown to look like the period the movie is set in, brings in vintage cars, charms the locals, spends lots of money, uses the local university for many scenes and wows the girls with good-looking guy actors.
Sound familiar? It should, Hollywood does that all the time when filming movies they want to have a certain 'look' that's not easily achieved on a studio lot. You just don't hear about it much unless it's your town.
But what if I told you the school's name in this particular town was Marshall? Marshall COLLEGE.
Confused? Well, apparently, so are the makers of the as-yet-unnamed new Indiana Jones movie, starring Harrison Ford as the swashbuckling hero, for the fourth and, they say, final, crack of the bullwhip.
Not knowing, or caring, I guess, that in 1957, the year this movie is to be set, there WAS a Marshall College, right here; they are using Yale in New Haven, Connecticut as Marshall College. Yale's classic architecture made it Director Steven Spielberg's first choice for filming, according to the New Haven Register in Connecticut. The shooting there will yield 10 to 15 minutes of 'Ivy League-looking' footage the paper reports.
We should be flattered, I guess, but supposedly, they used our name because the producer is Frank Marshall. Marshall estimates that they will have spent between $8 million and $9 million in the Greater New Haven economy before they are done.
And the citizens of New Haven will probably have a similar experience to the one Huntington residents had just a few months ago. Told you it was a good one.
