Transformers 2 Filming At Steel Site

The Morning Call has posted the nice picture that shows the site that Transformers 2 will be filming at in Bethlehem, PA and the location that the recent casting call is for.

From the article:

...the filmmakers transform it into a fictional Chinese city populated by people from the Lehigh Valley.

''This is not Bethlehem or the Valley's first experience with filmmaking, but this is a whole other level,'' Mayor John Callahan said Thursday of the project, a DreamWorks production directed by Michael Bay.

The movie crew will film in Bethlehem during the first week of June and will use the blast furnaces as the scene's backdrop, Callahan said. ''It's going to bring a tremendous amount of excitement to the city,'' especially for any locals who nab walk-on roles, he added.

According to an announcement from Heery Casting of Philadelphia, the filmmakers hope to cast local ''Asian men and women, boys and girls, ages 7 [to] 65'' as paid extras in the movie. In particular, the crew hopes to recruit extras of Asian descent who have military backgrounds.

Callahan said he hasn't seen the ''Transformers 2'' script, but he's been assured this will be ''an important scene for this movie.''

The first public confirmation of the June filming came from Diane Heery of Heery Casting, who contacted The Morning Call to publicize the casting call for Asian extras. The company's Web site also posted the announcement Wednesday.

Ethnically, Bethlehem makes a strange stand-in for China. Of the city's population of 72,500, only about 2.5 percent is Asian, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Across Lehigh and Northampton counties, the percentage is about 2.4.

The percentage of local residents who can pass for Chinese is probably even smaller, because the Census classification of ''Asian'' includes Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and others from all over the continent.

The Bethlehem Steel site was what drew Bay's crew, Callahan said. The Greater Philadelphia Film Office recommended it as a unique place to film, and when the crew came to visit, ''they quickly fell in love with the site,'' Callahan said.