Reply #42: From another Detroit boy, this commercial is bullshite. [View All]

[kwassa]

and I am the same age as you.

The only thing nice about Detroit is the suburbs, and some of the cultural institutions downtown. The massive decay and emptiness within city limits is nowhere to be seen in this commercial.

Yes, I've been in the restored Fox theater, just like Eminem. My father spent his career working for GM, and we lived in Detroit and other places around the country. He finished up at the Clark Street plant of Cadillac, where the employees had to escorted by security guards back to the parking lot in order to be safe. A family friend, also GM, was mugged in the doorway of the GM headquarters building.

The city has half the population that it had when we were kids. That's a fact. It is a one industry town, with nothing to fall back on, and to a large degree the auto companies that built Detroit also tore it down by moving auto production out of the city and abandoning the plants there.

The commercial shows the Diego Rivera murals in the Detroit Institute of Arts of the working people on the assembly lines. I used to go down there for film series in the late '70s. Even back then the neighborhood right behind it was very poor and scary.

I worked on a movie filmed at the Chrysler proving grounds, which are way out of town, by the way, out towards Ann Arbor. I worked on many industrial films for the auto companies then, actually.