NEW FOR WEDNESDAY: Hollywood Coming To Ocean City This Fall?

NEW FOR WEDNESDAY: Hollywood Coming To Ocean City This Fall?
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OCEAN CITY – It was announced this week that there is a possibility that a movie, Ping Pong Summer, starring actress Susan Sarandon, will be filmed in Ocean City this September.

Following Tuesday afternoon’s Mayor and City Council meeting, officials received invitations to a cocktail party on June 28 to introduce the movie.

Ruth Waters, director of sales for the Harrison Group Resort Hotels & Restaurants, sent out the invites as she has been working closely with the project and its director and writer, Michael Tully.

Specifics are up in the air at this point and further details will surface at the conference later this month. Tully and entertainment attorney George Rush will be present at that time.

According to Deadline Hollywood, Ping Pong Summer is set in 1985 and is focused on a teenage boy who is obsessed with playing the game, and hip-hop music, while a family vacation to Ocean City alters his life in some way.

Waters said the film will most likely be shot in Ocean City’s landmark sites, such as Trimpers Amusement Park by the Inlet, H2O nightclub downtown and Paul Revere Smorgasbord on the Boardwalk.

“The director is a really, really, creative cool guy,” Water said.

Tully is a director, writer and actor. He is known for directing Septien in 2011 and Cocaine Angel in 2006, as well a TV movie in 2010, Superego, and a documentary in 2007, Silver Jew.

Councilwoman Mary Knight admitted that she knows little of the film so far but is excited to learn more about it.

“Anything that brings economic development to the Town of Ocean City is exciting,” she said. “As I understand, it will be filmed here, and everybody that will be involved, the catering, the hotel rooms, all of that is economic development … it would be continued development in my mind because hopefully when people see the movie and say ‘that looks like a really cool place to go visit, to vacation, to live’ so I see nothing negative about the project at all.”

Tourism Director Donna Abbott agreed that a movie being filmed in town is thrilling.

“It sounds like a very exciting project to come to Ocean City,” she said. “We love movies, especially family friendly movies with very well-known stars, so I think this is a wonderful opportunity and it sounds like a win-win.”

If the movie does come to Ocean City, it will not be the first time the big screen came calling, as Violets Are Blue, starring Sissy Spacek and Kevin Kline, was filmed in Ocean City in 1985.