Monthly Archives: June 2016

 Funeral Services Friday, June 10, 2016, at 11:00 A.M., at Habing Family Funeral Home. Condolences and full obituary at www.HabingFamilyFuneralHome.com.

Producer Jordan Foley and a Hollywood crew of 50 came to Gilroy a month ago to find a place that was bleak. Instead, they fell in love a city they say is better to film in than Hollywood.They spent weeks filming the movie Desolate around Gilroy, a dystopian story about life after a severe drought, sort of a “Mad Max” in the South Valley. They found the city randomly, because director Frederick Cipoletti’s wife drove through it on her way from Los Angeles to the Bay Area.They wanted brown hills and open fields, a place where a few survivors battled with villains who wanted to steal land, kidnap women and kill anyone who stands in their way. What they also found was a city they loved.“I can’t say how amazing Gilroy was,” said Foley, 37, who has produced two other movies, Puncture, starring Chris Evans and The Open Road with Justin Timberlake and Jeff Bridges. “This is the best experience I’ve ever had working in any town anywhere. There’s a lot more going on in the city than we could have imagined. This movie wouldn’t have happened if not for the people of Gilroy. I’m almost afraid to tell people how amazing it was because I want to come back without the big studios coming up and changing everything.”A big chunk of the movie’s $700,000 budget was for housing at the Hilton and moving the cast and crew. People told Foley he would save money if he shot in L.A., but he found Gilroy was a big savings because local businesses let him film cheaply and ranchers were generous with their land.“When you factor in what it would have cost with locations and permits and cops and firemen— all the things that come with filming in L.A.—we saved money by coming to Gilroy and got so much bang for our buck and the beauty of it will come out on the screen.”Some of the locations for Desolate include Sandy’s Cafe, Saccullo’s Surplus and Glass, Bamboo Village, Launderland, Farmer’s Feed and Supply, ranches owned by Don Christopher and Bill Derosa and Bolado Park in Hollister. The film used 100 locals as extras.The movie features Callan Mulvey, Tyson Ritter, Mark Kassen, Will Brittain, Natasha Bassett and Juston Street.Mulvey played in 300: Rise of an Empire, Captain America: Winter Soldier and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Tyson Ritter is the lead singer for the alternative band The All American Rejects. He acted in the movie The House Bunny. Kassen was in the TV series Another World. Will Brittain was in the 2013 film A Teacher and is in the new remake of King Kong called Kong: Skull Island, due out in 2017.Natasha Bassett was in Hail Caesar! Juston Street was in Richard Linklater’s latest Everybody Wants Some!!The production did most of the shooting from 2 p.m. to 11 p.m., but pulled some all-nighters in businesses that needed to be open in the daytime.Mary Saccullo couldn’t believe how much they transformed her store into an eerie green and blue lit room. “It was like another world for seven hours,” she said.Foley, who produced the movie with the director and writer Jonathan Rosenthal, said Gilroy’s cooperation really showed up one night when they were staging a shootout by the railroad tracks downtown.“We called police dispatch and said we’d like to fire off 12 blanks right now,” he said. “They said, ‘OK, have fun.’ In L.A. that would never happen. They’d make you have four kinds of police there and the F.B.I. It was amazing.”

Gilroy’s first campus-based public health clinic is open for business, with reduced bills for students and school district employees.

If you want to make America great again, there’s something you can do right away: Vote yes on Measure E and support Gilroy’s schools.With one swoop of your pen and a serious commitment of $60 for every $100,000 of property you own, you can build a new elementary school and fix up degrading middle schools. You can keep all of the district’s schools top notch, which is what we think makes America and our community great.For some reasons that make no sense to us, schools, teachers and taxes have become anathema in this country over the past 40 years. Everyone wants the best services but no one wants to pay for them.If you go back to a time a lot of people think America was great (and we think it’s still great, by the way), you might try the 1950s and 1960s when tax rates, particularly on the rich, were double and triple what they are now. Under Dwight D. Eisenhower, the rich paid 91 percent of their income. Under Richard M. Nixon, it was down to 77 percent. But then it kept dropping as rich people gained more power and convinced a large number of Americans that taxes were bad, particularly taxes on the rich. Back then, people didn’t mind the taxes as much because they knew they were making America great. They were proud of their country and still incredibly rich, despite the taxes.The earlier tax rates afforded us immeasurable greatness. We built a transcontinental highway system. We built the biggest buildings in the world. We went to the moon. We built great schools and free public university systems.But now schools have to raise money by holding their hats out like beggars. What’s happened to this country, where no one asks us to vote to spend trillions on wars both parties later realize were mistakes, but we act like the schools are criminals for wanting to give teachers a living wage and give kids modern buildings and educational systems?How do so many people--some of them wealthier people who send their children to private schools-- figure taxes to help schools are a bad thing? There are exceptions, like Don Christopher, a businessman who puts his funds where his heart is.  We aren’t saying the schools and their administrators are perfect. We’ve spent plenty of time dissecting their faults, poring over every document. We aren’t happy about some of the lack of transparency we’ve seen. We don’t like that they don’t live-stream school board meetings. We don’t like how they rushed this election without time to make a stronger case and can’t  or won’t even name who solicited the highest donations. The list of projects the money will be spent on is not detailed enough. We question some of the ties between contractors and the board. We don’t like the fact that Christopher High School came in so over budget that its promised theater was never built, the track and field needed private funding to be completed and seven years after the building was finished, it needs repairs.But after putting them through the investigative wringer, we see no reason not to put up another $170 million to keep our schools on the cutting edge. (For comparison’s sake, the Iraq War cost $720 million a day.) The bottom line is that we have to support our schools, whatever it takes. To do anything less is criminal. It’s the opposite of making America great.In Finland and China teachers are as valued as doctors and CEOs. Those countries haven’t forgotten the value of great education. Rather than criticizing teachers unions we’d like to see the schools pay the way private companies do. That would guarantee the best and the brightest get the jobs and hold them.If  you want to look at just the bottom line: this isn’t so much a tax as it is an investment. Nothing will make property value go up more than a great school system. Gilroy homes are already a bargain in Silicon Valley. Add more school buildings like Christopher High and more programs like Gilroy High’s biomedical training, and watch the values increase far more than the taxes.

Visitation will be held at Habing Family Funeral Home, on Sunday June 5, 2016, at 1:00 P.M., with Vigil Service at 6:00 P.M. Funeral Mass will be Monday, June 6, 2016, at 10:00 A.M., at St. Mary’s Church. Burial will follow at St. Mary’s Cemetery. For online condolences www.habingfamilyfuneralhome.com.

A memorial service will be held on Saturday, June 11, 2016, at 11:00 A.M., at Gavilan College Theater, 5055 Santa Teresa Blvd., Gilroy, CA. Online condolences at www.habingfamilyfuneralhome.com.