How Escanaba got its own movie

For a lot of the country, the name Escanaba first showed up in a movie title — and the man who put it there is from the other end of the state. Jeff Daniels, the actor from Chelsea down near Ann Arbor, wrote “Escanaba in da Moonlight” as a stage comedy, premiering it at his own Purple Rose Theatre in 1995. It’s a deer-camp story: Reuben Soady, at thirty-five, is on the verge of becoming the oldest Soady man in family history never to shoot a buck, which up here is roughly a tragedy. The whole thing runs on Yooper rhythms — opening day treated like Christmas, pasties, accents, and a fair amount of swamp gas.

When Daniels turned it into a film in 2001, he didn’t fake the U.P. on a backlot. Hollywood wouldn’t fund a movie set in a Michigan deer camp, so he raised about $1.5 million from people back home and shot the thing in and around Escanaba over a single March, six days a week. Locals stood in for the cast of thousands: a hallucination scene at the Escanaba High School athletic field drew close to a thousand extras from town.

The places are real and most are still standing. Rosy’s Diner on Ludington Street played itself, no set dressing needed. The deer-camp bar called “the Porcelain Bus” was actually the Swallow Inn over in Rapid River, and the camp exteriors were a family cottage out that way too. The production poured roughly a million dollars into the local economy in one cold month. Twenty-odd years on, people working the front desks around town still field the same question from visitors holding up their phones: okay, so where exactly did they film it?