“It wasn’t going to work”: why Ron Howard was forced to swap Pennsylvania for Buenos Aires
As a filmmaker who’s never caused any issues during seven decades in the business, Ron Howard isn’t someone you’d associate with experiencing any sort of pushback when embarking on his next shoot.
He just seems like the kind of guy who’s too damn nice to say no to, and even if you turned him down the first time, he’d probably find a way to weaponise that all-American charm of his, wear down the defences, and get his way. However, if there’s one thing he can’t compete against, it’s the captains of industry.
On paper, a culture-clash comedy doesn’t have the potential to ruffle too many feathers. Well, it did at the time, and it hasn’t aged too well since some of the jokes are borderline xenophobic when viewed through a modern lens, but it wasn’t something Hollywood would bat an eyelid at in the mid-1980s.
Howard’s fifth feature, Gung Ho, unfolds largely in the fictional town of Hadleyville, Pennsylvania. When a local automobile manufacturer is bought over by a Japanese company, Michael Keaton’s foreman travels to Tokyo to try and broker a deal that ensures the workers won’t lose their jobs under their new corporate overlords.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t get exactly what he wished for, with the Assan Motors Corporation being denied the right to unionisation, getting paid a pittance, and largely placed in an unwinnable situation. None of that seems as though it would force the director to relocate to Argentina for much of the location shooting, but he revealed that he faced plenty of resistance on home soil.
“None of the American companies would allow us to film,” he explained. “The script was about the Japanese coming in and taking over the auto industry in a way, and politically, it wasn’t going to work. So we went to Buenos Aires and found a plant that was manufacturing cars, only about 40 a week or so. And we went down there with a suitcase full of dollars and managed to get the approval.”
While he makes that sound suspiciously like a bribe, that probably wasn’t the case. Still, it feels distinctly bribe-adjacent, at the very least. “At the last minute, we had to pony up more money, and it was a really tough go,” the director elaborated. “The studio almost pulled us out of there because they would not make any under-the-table payments whatsoever.”
Definitely not bribes completed, Howard finally had a place he could use to shoot the interiors of his fictional plant, albeit on the condition that, even though it was technically being used as a Pennsylvanian building, no American flags were placed anywhere, with the Argentinians politely suggesting that they were “a little worried about our workers and how they’re going to respond.”
He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was sitting on a potential powder keg, intimating that “just under the surface there was some tension there,” making him a very relieved man when Gung Ho called it a wrap in Buenos Aires, leaving him “glad to wrap it up and get home,” all because the American manufacturers refused to sanction a fictional comedy about a Japanese takeover.
