Fillmore Paves Road to the Future with De-Californication
By Richard Rushfield
Clearly being California is not working out for us. But if we were less California, might that?
The town of Fillmore thinks so, and they’ve got movie studios backing them up. According to the AP:
The tiny Southern California town of Fillmore has removed 20 palm trees from downtown sidewalks in hopes of luring more filmmakers.
Film Commission Chairwoman Catherine Elias tells the Ventura County Star (bit.ly/PIG1Bz) that film permit proceeds had dropped from about $70,000 a few years ago to about $10,000 in 2011.
The town nestled in citrus-growing country markets itself as “Any Town, U.S.A” and features mom-and-pop stores and an old movie theater, but the palms were a problem for location scouts and production companies.
Casting yourself as Any Town seems a brilliant move for any California community. In fact, the best path forward for the state as a whole might be not simply a rebrand or a reboot, but a full scale identity change. Is there any precedent for a state entering the witness protection program?
If all of a sudden, we were en masse to just say – What bankruptcy? What crumbling infrastructure? What illiterate population? What producing more criminals than we can afford to lock up? That’s all California…No no no. We’re not that state. We’re Corpus Sierra! Look, do you see any palm trees around here?!
It’s a long shot, but sometimes very big problems call for very big lies.
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