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The dirty little secret about the new Georgia O’Keeffe movie is that it was almost filmed in Michigan.
Can you imagine? One of New Mexico’s greatest icons — and her high desert — immortalized on the shores of Lake Michigan?
“The studio was dead serious,” producer Tony Mark said. ” ‘Go to Michigan,’ they said.
“The movie business is so pragmatic.”
The company that made the film already had a produc tion office set up in Michigan — which offers a whopping 42 percent tax credit — and thought that somehow The Great Lakes State could double for Abiquiú.
“We then had to explain to them and prove that we were able to make the movie in New Mexico, and the advantages of making it in New Mexico would outweigh Michigan,” Mark said.
Of course, Mark had an ace up his sleeve. Mark, who’s made films like “Desperado” and “The Fisher King,” has lived in Santa Fe for 25 years and knew both how important the movie would be to New Mexicans and had the local connections to pull it off.
And all that work has paid off. The film “Georgia O’Keeffe” was nominated for a Golden Globe Award in the Best Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television category. Joan Allen, who plays O’Keeffe, was nominated in the Best Performance by an Actress in a Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television, as was Jeremy Irons in the actor category for playing O’Keeffe’s husband, Alfred Steiglitz.
But “Georgia O’Keeffe” isn’t Mark’s only success story this year. Mark’s other project from this past year, “The Hurt Locker,” is also winning huge praise from the Golden Globes and more.
Producer Joshua Maurer, Mark said, had started work on the film six years ago and got the ball rolling. HBO had lined up to produce it, but when that fell through, Lifetime picked it up as a movie, but with a substantially trimmed budget.
But, by making the film here, Mark said, he was able to hire an almost entirely local crew to make it.
“I made a strong case to show that New Mexico had a level of professional excellence,” Mark said. “You can put together film crews here that can look anybody in the eye, East or West Coast.”
“The Hurt Locker” is the story of some of the bravest people in the armed forces: the folks who disarm bombs. It has earned three Golden Globe nominations, eight Critics’ Choice Award nominations and three Screen Actors Guild Award nominations.
“I thought that Mark Boal wrote a killer script, and I felt Kathryn Bigelow was a real director. But none of us imagined that this is what was going to go on with this movie,” he said.
From coast to coast, the film has earned rave reviews. Its success, Mark said, is because it doesn’t try to present one side or the other in the Iraq war.
“That’s why it’s good. That’s the secret. It doesn’t try and tell you it’s great in Iraq; it doesn’t tell you it’s terrible. What it does say is that these are soldiers and they have this job, and this is what they do and this is what it’s like,” Mark said. “You can take what you want from it. These guys have an endless supply of bombs to disarm, and you can take from that what you want.”
It’s shocking to some that “The Hurt Locker” is such a well-made movie, considering it cost $11 million, when many in Hollywood think it takes $300 million to put together a huge picture with a big-name director, like James Cameron and his “Avatar.”
“I made ‘Hurt Locker’ for what James Cameron spent on breakfast,” Mark said. “I just don’t think movies should cost that much. I think I could have made 20 movies for that. I could have put 20,000 people to work for that.”
