Hoosier pride

Gary has discovered a new path to wealth. Encourage movie makers to come and film your urban decay, blight and rot:

Last year the action blockbuster “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” filmed at Gary's abandoned City Methodist Church, which is falling apart from the inside out. The year before, “A Nightmare On Elm Street” also shot scenes there.

In 2010 Gary was the location for 24 films. With 26 productions already shot, 2011 is a record year for Gary's nascent film industry.

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Unable to afford the costs of demolishing its eroded buildings, Gary has been left with an abundance of outsize, abandoned structures that have proven to be a destination for urban explorers, photographers and filmmakers.

For the new Transformers film, director Michael Bay turned a former cement plant on the edge of Lake Michigan into Chernobyl.

“In a sense it's kind of like the right place for all the wrong reasons,” said Cohn, who scouted locations in Chicago and Gary for the Transformers production. “There are still locations that offer a window into the past and its faded glory. And faded glory is still a visually interesting backdrop to filmmaking.”

In 1997, Clement opened the Gary's film office to capitalize on that interest.

“We started to see that there was value in our infrastructure,” Clement said.

Since then, Gary has been used as a location in dozens of productions, including the films “Pearl Harbor” and “Soul Survivor” and the History Channel show “Life After People.”

“When they are bombing Tokyo, they are bombing Gary, Indiana,” Clement said of Gary's role in “Pearl Harbor.”

The director of the Gary Office of Film and Television says the city's goal is "not to become a theme park of urban decay." It is just "making lemondade" out of all those old0building lemons, even though there are "somer esidents who don't get it" and "are of the mindset that we should not be airing our dirty laundry."

The city stands in for a bombed-out Tokyo and provides a "window to faded glory" and the guy sounds almost proud of it.