We’re Being Gaslamped

What the hecque?? We get on the plane to Québec and land in San Diego’s Historic Gaslamp Quarter???

….or, they could be filming a new Ryan Reynolds/Kenneth Branagh action/adventure movie called “MayDay” just down the block.

We haven’t seen any movie stars yet, but we had a lot of fun poking around at the “Mollywood” (my coinage) transformation of rainy Montréal’s Gay Village into sunny last-century San Diego.

Of course, if your story’s location is Southern California, you gotta have palm trees, right?–in this version, coconut palm trees with actual coconuts on them!–which, as we Angelenos know, you won’t see in SoCal only because falling coconuts kill people.

There aren’t any palm trees in the Gaslamp District anyway, it’s mostly ficus-looking trees. Who did the research on this movie??? Why weren’t we consulted???

But palm trees–any kind of palm trees–are standard movie shorthand for everywhere in SoCal, Hawaii, or Miami, right? So truck ’em on in, coconuts and all!

(According to the CBC article linked above, some of the locals have asked if the coconut palms could stay. They have no idea what they’re asking, of course, as they’ve only ever experienced movie palm trees–you know, the kind that require no maintenance, don’t bomb cars and people with their deadly fronds and fruits, or spectacularly go up in flames every Fourth of July).

The sideways “Heath” sign in the above photo would shortly be installed on the building opposite, which is playing “Hotel Heath” in the film. Various other storefronts had their signs swapped out for the movie, all in English, which made them stand out in this era of Québec premier Francois Legault‘s War on Anglophones (the anti-English language-use laws, about which I’ve previously written and will again as there are new developments, especially per commercial signage).

Québec has campaigned hard for many years to attract U.S. movie production–and they’ve been successful. A huge state-of-the-art studio was built north of town, and when we wander in the summertime we constantly see shoots happening in Montréal’s parks and streets. Cheaper local labor, tax incentives, and the favorable foreign exchange rate make Montréal very appealing to filmmakers with tight budgets.

As for us, we were amused to find this little bit of “San Diego” at the end of our Montréal street. I guess you can take the girl out of California, but you can’t take California out of the cinema dream machine.

And that’s a wrap!!