It’s funny sometimes how dreams turn out. Let’s say you’re a hairstylist, discovering a knack with the shears at the tender age of 11, dreaming during your teenage years of doing hair in movies just like Vidal Sassoon, spending your twenties knocking around the western U.S. and making a few attempts to break into the L.A. hair scene. Eventually it becomes pretty clear that you have to “know somebody” to ever make that work — and quite frankly, you don’t. So you head home to the Midwest, eventually settling down with a wife and two daughters and work at a salon, giving beautiful cuts that maybe make us ordinary folks at least feel like movie stars as we strut out the front door.

Who would have ever thought that 25 years later, Hollywood would pack up and come to you?

Clifton Chippewa certainly didn’t. Of his transition to Ann Arbor, he just says, “Reality wore on,” flashing a smile and giving a little conspiratorial shrug that brings to mind the wild young dreams we all had, now accommodated or adapted or discarded as we made our way through the decades.

His casual manner, soft-spoken and peppered with occasional zingers, belies the fact that his return to the Golden State this weekend is as triumphant as could be: He’ll be walking the red carpet at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards and awaiting the results of his three-person team’s nomination in the category of “Outstanding Hairstyling for a Miniseries or a Movie” for the Michigan-made TNT film “Gifted Hands.” (The Cuba Gooding Jr. flick is also up for Outstanding Cinematography, Outstanding Makeup: Non-prosthetic, and Outstanding Sound Mixing.) The Creative Arts Emmys, held the week before the marquee Emmy Awards, focus on the behind-the-scenes and technical aspects of television.

The Michigan legislature may have, in part, been hoping for such recognition when it passed a series of laws last year designed to make our state one of the most financially attractive places in the Union to film a movie. According to the Michigan Film Office, we now offer an across-the-board refundable tax credit of up to 42% on Michigan expenditures, with more credits available for infrastructure and workforce development. And it seems to be working, since the office lists 30 movies made here in 2008 — and even California’s Governator has been feeling enough pressure to institute that state’s own (less generous) tax incentive program effective in 2011.

In a great circle-of-life moment, it turned out to be the same “it’s who you know” system which kept Chippewa out of the L.A. movie hair scene that brought him into ours: a friend asked him to come onto the Detroit set of the 2001 HBO movie “61*” to help with the hairstyling needs of 465 extras. For those like me who may not know, a film’s hair team often consists of just three people: the department head (what a great title for a stylist, no?), a key hairdresser and a position known simply as the third. So when the cast member count inches up, they need help, and because the incentive program offers a better credit for hiring Michigan workers, it’s common to ask the locals for recommendations. Although the process is slightly complicated by union requirements (Chippewa is a member of International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees local 38), he says the 172 principal actors and nearly as many stunt doubles on his current film “Red Dawn,” have given him the opportunity to pass along the good fortune to another colleague or two.

It turns out that this is a bonus not just for those seeking work, but for those providing it, too. Chippewa has heard the surprised phrase “Wow, you guys are nice” from non-locals on nearly every set he’s worked on, leading him to theorize with a smile that “They’re used to a lot more backstabbing.” Although he quickly tempers the gentle gibe by explaining that the pool of union talent is so much larger in Hollywood that it naturally breeds fierce competition, he does note that he’s seen outsiders’ perceptions of Michiganians and the Midwest in general transform before his very eyes.

“Sometimes they get here thinking, you know, we don’t know anything,” he says (with the tiniest eye roll), but “most of them have really enjoyed it. And the ones who didn’t, well, they weren’t going to enjoy anything. Wherever they go, there they are.”

Here’s another thing you might not know about film hair: Chippewa says 85 percent or so of it is wigs. “So you can forget what you know from salons!” he jokes. Well, not really — he goes on to say that the wig for a main role can cost “anywhere from $5,000 to $12,000, so you only get one shot at cutting it and it better be right. Or you’re unemployed!” His secret for great, period-perfect cuts? Turner Classic Movies.

“You have photos,” he explains, “but they’re flat. You might get a side view, but you rarely see the whole back of the head,” whereas film provides a good rear view pretty much each time a character leaves the room. He’s worked on every period from the 1950s to the present, and he’d love to get his hands into styles from the 1920s and 30s.

Actually, Chippewa’s in no danger of forgetting about “real people” hair, since he still sees clients at Salon…in the City two days a week. But combining that with his film work leaves him with a punishing seven-day-a-week schedule that he’s not sure how long he’d like to keep up — in fact, he was so busy on the set of “Flipped” that he didn’t even know he’d been nominated for the Emmy until he checked his messages on the way home and wondered why a reporter was calling.

When the department head hairstylist from “Gifted Hands,” Julia Walker, finally got through to him and told him to pack his bags because they were going to California, “I was so excited,” he laughs, lighting up at the retelling. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to call my wife!’ but then I thought, ‘No, I want to see her face!’ So I drove home like a crazy person, and then I got there and - nobody was home but the dogs. So I just ran around the house a couple of times, the dogs running right with me.”

To his knowledge, his team is the first in Michigan to win a nomination for hairstyling and he’s the first Michigan Native American to be nominated at all, but those words are hardly out of Chippewa’s mouth before he follows it up by saying that he hopes the attention brings work here. Does he think the film industry might truly help our sad state? “Definitely,” he says, “if we just give it a chance. If the studios come — there’s one opening and four total — it could be 20,000 to 25,000 jobs.

“I’m happy for Michigan more than myself. I think it’s one for the team.” Well, hey — we'll be rooting.

The 2009 Creative Arts Emmy Awards, hosted by Kathy Griffin, will be held on Saturday, Sept. 12 at Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles, Calif. and broadcast on E! networks on Friday, Sept. 18 at 1 p.m.

Leah DuMouchel is a free-lance writer for Annarbor.com.