“Comedy gives us license to be outrageous,” Daniels says with a chuckle. It’s not just about deer hunting, it’s a spiritual quest with hunting as a metaphor.” Jeff says, “I’ve described it as Jeremiah Johnson meets Dumb and Dumber, but Escanaba in da Moonlight is basically a hero’s journey, where Reuben is guided by his Indian wife, ‘Wolf Moon Dance’ (Kimberly Norris Guerrero), who is a better shot and very woods-wise. As a result, in Albert’s Finnish dialect, ‘Dat year camp was as tense as a moose’s butt durin’ fly season.'” His father, Albert, (Harve Presnell) and the others all want to help Ruben break his jinx. If Reuben doesn’t get one this year, he will be the oldest person in the Soady family to not have bagged a buck, except for an uncle who is missing a few screws. “The lead character is Reuben Soady (played by Jeff), who is 43 and has never shot a buck, so he’s a ‘buckless yooper’ (“yooper” stands for resident of the Upper Peninsula or UP). “It’s basically the story of five people in a deer camp,” Jeff explains. Many of the investors were people who saw Escanaba in da Moonlight performed as a play, first at Jeff’s Purple Rose Theater, or at the Gem Theater in Detroit, where holds the record as the longest-running play in Detroit history. No one in Hollywood wanted to fund a movie set in a Michigan deer camp, so Jeff and his producer partner Bob Brown went out and raised $2.3 million from people in Michigan. For his first film, he chose one of his most successful stage plays, Escanaba in da Moonlight, a comedy set in a deer camp in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Jeff’s next step was forming a production company, Purple Rose Films. They filled the house, night after night. After he founded the Purple Rose Theater Company, he began writing plays, and performing them with local talent. Daniels’ Purple Rose Theater is flourishing.ĭaniels has guts. People said that if he founded a theater company in Chelsea, an hour’s drive away from Detroit, it would flop. When Jeff moved back to the Midwest, people said he’d lose his career. But, after 10 years of film and stage acting in New York and LA, in 1988 Jeff brought his family back home to Chelsea, Michigan, whose only other claim to fame is being the home of Jiffy Mix. Like a lot of kids from small towns, Jeff took off for the big city when he decided he wanted to be an actor. Currently, Jeff is starring in The Newsroom series on HBO, and a sequel to Dumb and Dumber, Dumb and Dumber To, is in the works. That’s why he created perhaps the funniest hunting movie ever made, Escanaba in da Moonlight.ĭaniels has appeared in over 70 feature films and TV shows including The Hours, Blood Work, Dumb and Dumber, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Speed, 101 Dalmatians, Pleasantville, Arachnaphobia, and the television mini-series The Crossing where he played George Washington leading his men across the Delaware. Not only a time to get together with old friends and go after a big buck, a deer camp is a modern version of the secret society of the past, with its own set of rules, and often a lot of good-natured humor. One good way to get in the right spirit is to watch a real gem of a movie that continues to “have legs” as they say in show biz, over 10 years after it came out. Jeff Daniels’ “Escanaba in da Moonlight”: The Deer Camp Comedy That Lives Onįall is in the air, and if you’re a deer hunter, that means thinking, planning and dreaming about deer camp.
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