Monday, March 24, 2008

Where's Johnny?

Hollywood has descended on Crown Town. The movie "Public Enemies" is currently filming. It's a little flick about a crime wave in the 1930s that included bank robberies by John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd. It turns out that John Dillinger robbed a bank in East Chicago, IN and ended up in the county lockup in Crown Point. The jail was supposedly escape-proof, but our guy John busted out, stole the sheriff's car and drove off to Illinois.

Of course, stories like that always translate into great movies. Johnny Depp has been cast to play John Dillinger, Christain Bale is Melvin Purvis. To add to the authenticity, the part about Dillinger busting out of prison was filmed on location at the old Lake County jail in little ol' Crown Point.

Filming took 3 days and suddenly life in our town stood still. There were people that waited outside the jail from 6 in the morning to 10 at night. We don't have that kind of time, so we just wandered down to the set to gawk at the gawkers. Here's what we saw:

The Italian restaurant across the street from the jail.  Johnny ate here one night before filming

The gawkers waiting around

The jail/set

We bumped into Leona, a co-worker from the bank.  She was one of the crazies who was there all day

I wanted to see this equipment in action!

And 10 minutes after we went home, guess who showed up for work:

While I didn't take this picture, it is from when he showed up the first day of filming

4 comments:

  1. I love Johnny Depp, but his best parts are the weirdos he plays - like in Sweeney Todd and the Headless Horseman.

    Cool that your little town is famous. I hope everyone raised their prices for a week and made a killing off the crazy California people.

    CHristina

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am so jealous!!


    Lauren

    ReplyDelete