New Film Is Making Waves

Navy Distances Itself From 'Annapolis,' Which Opens Tomorrow

(Ron Phillips - Photo By Ron Phillips/A/uchsto)

In the movie version of Annapolis, the streets are gritty, the shipbuilding industry is bustling, and brooding blue-collar workers look with envy and resentment toward the midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy.

If none of this sounds exactly like Maryland's colonial capital -- or even remotely close, for that matter -- no wonder: Disney's Buena Vista Pictures moved production to Philadelphia two years ago after failing to win script approval from the Navy and after securing better tax benefits in the City of Brotherly Love.

Now, as "Annapolis" opens nationwide tomorrow, denizens of its namesake city -- still fuming at losing the film -- won't see much they recognize. Neither will students and graduates of the Naval Academy, which the film purports to be about.

The State House dome never makes an appearance, nor do the academy's white marble buildings and its iconic copper-domed chapel, which attract more than 1 million visitors a year. The chief industries in the real Annapolis are politics and tourism, not shipbuilding.

"We're a capital city that is known nationally, and I would have thought because of our popularity they would have used the themes from the city," Mayor Ellen O. Moyer (D) said. "Otherwise they could have used any city. It could have been Annapolis, Iowa, if there is such a place."

Mike Miron, the city's economic development director, says he won't see the film. "Everyone kind of blamed the academy for wanting to have editorial review of the script, but in hindsight, I think they were right," he said.

The Navy, too, has been doing all it can to distance itself. A service-wide e-mail from its Office of Information in the Pentagon cautioned: "Navy personnel should avoid the appearance of support to the film as members of the Department of the Navy.

"Anyone attending a screening or promotional activity for the film should not attend in uniform."

Academy faculty, staff and students received similar instructions. Midshipmen, whose lean figures and crisp uniforms add as much to the city's ambiance as its historic buildings, can wear their uniforms if they go, said Cmdr. Rod Gibbons, academy spokesman.

"Midshipmen who want to see the movie are certainly able to do so," Gibbons said. "They just can't take part in any promotional events."

The movie follows the tribulations of Jake Huard, played by James Franco, an undisciplined ship welder and would-be boxer who dreams of wearing Naval Academy whites despite middling grades.

Allowed in by a sympathetic admissions officer, he is quickly thrown into a world of discipline and hazing and, of course, falls for a beautiful upperclassman who happens to be his superior officer -- something forbidden at the real and fictional academy.