'Big Screen Boston: From Mystery Street to The Departed and Beyond' by Paul Sherman -- Web special: $12 including shipping!

Book signing at the Mass. Pavilion @ The Big E, Sept. 27

I'll be selling and signing copies of Big Screen Boston in the Massachusetts Pavilion at The Big E in Springfield tomorrow (Sept. 27). So, if you're out there, stop by between your fried dough and your carny rides.

Book excerpt: 'The Blue Diner'

Those really familiar with Boston independent moviemaking know that Jan Egleson mounted the first sustained attempt at making homegrown fiction features in the area. His Billy in the Lowlands and The Dark End of the Street are the best of the "Beanstreet movies" of the late 1970s and early 1980s, well-acted, highly involving pieces of life in the city with an appeal that stretches far beyond our borders. But, after making a combination of TV and theatrical movies in the years that followed, Egleson's return to the indie streets of Boston might be his most purely entertaining movie. It's also a little-seen film worthy of discovery on DVD.

2001. Directed by Jan Egleson. Written by Natatcha Estébanez and Jan Egleson. With Miriam Colón, Lisa Vidal, Jose Yenque, William Marquez, Jaime Tirelli and Jack Mulcahy. Cinematography by Teresa Medina.

AT ROUGHLY THE SAME time Hollywood released What’s the Worst That Could Happen?—an unsatisfying multi-cultural Boston movie— a little independent film was arriving, too. But its multi-cultural Boston is a lot more entertaining and clever than its Hollywood counterpart’s. The Blue Diner is the result of a collaboration between WGBH documentary producer Natatcha Estébanez and pioneering Cambridge independent director Jan Egleson (Billy in the Lowlands). Chance meetings in the hallway at WGBH, where each was working, led to the pair partnering on a bilingual script focusing on a Puerto Rican mother and daughter living in Boston’s Hispanic community.
    Elena (Lisa Vidal) is the daughter and Meche (Miriam Colón) the mother who’s all too eager to remind her grown child how much she sacrificed to come to the mainland to give Elena more opportunities in life. But straddling mainstream American culture and the Hispanic subculture of her neighborhood (with street scenes filmed in Dorchester’s colorful Uphams Corner) is all too much for Elena. Ironically, she feels bad because Meche is pushing her away from her roots, not because her mother won’t let go.
    Bilingual Elena works in sales at a casket company where she’s romantically drawn to two co-workers: Brian (Jack Mulcahy), one of the Anglo bosses, and Tito (Jose Yenque), a South American artist toiling as a casket builder until he can get a visa that will allow him to stay in the country. Magical realism enters the story when the stress of deciding between safe Brian and romantic Tito (whom Meche takes every opportunity to badmouth) causes Elena to have a panic attack. After the attack, she can no longer understand or speak Spanish.
    This cultural amnesia might have been a heavy metaphor for The Blue Diner to bear, but there’s such a breezy, colorful air to the story that it works. Elena’s condition not only forces her to assess her relationship to her heritage. It also forces everyone around her to ponder that relationship, including Meche, who’s been withholding info about Elena’s father from her, and Papo (William Marquez), the Cuban-American cook at the eponymous diner that’s trying to get a loan from a white banker (Ken Cheeseman). Naturally, the truth must manifest itself before Elena’s Spanish reappears, but you never get the feeling The Blue Diner is following a formula.
    That’s because its style is just unconventional enough to feel spontaneous. In the years after The Little Sister, the last of his homegrown “Boston trilogy,” Egleson flitted between PBS productions, network TV movies (including the locally shot Original Sins) and non-Boston features (including 1990’s very funny dark comedy A Shock to the System). Obviously he’s a much more professional filmmaker
in The Blue Diner than he was in 1980 (Teresa Medina’s cinematography and photogenic Vidal make this an unusually attractive movie). But returning to his Boston neighborhood movie roots, Egleson finds another way to inject documentary style into the movie, and that’s by having characters periodically talk to the audience. These inserts aren’t deep monologues or distracting asides within other scenes; they’re totally conversational, and add to the friendly tone of the movie. Estébanez, who died in 2007, created that tone as much as Egleson, and he shares the director’s customary “A Film By” credit with her.
    Part of the handsomeness of The Blue Diner, which played in film festivals but could not secure theatrical distribution before airing on PBS, is in its locations. Circumstances necessitated creativity: when the Museum of Fine Arts (where Meche works as a cleaner) thought twice about letting the movie shoot there, Egleson, Estébanez and their crew let interiors in the Boston Public Library and the Mass. Historical Society stand in for the MFA. Similarly, the real-life Blue Diner (on Kneeland and South Streets) had moved, its space taken over by a new restaurant; what we see here is the outside of that diner (now called South Street Diner) and the interior of Wilson’s Diner in Waltham. The movie also shot at East Boston’s New England Casket Company and in the back room of an Irish bar on Boylston Street in the Fenway, while the scenes in Elena and Meche’s apartment were filmed in Brookline.
►Locations: Waltham; Dorchester, East Boston, Back Bay, Fenway, Jamaica Plain, Boston; Brookline.
►Accents: Sí. But not Boston accents.
►Local color: The bright colors provide a welcome contrast from the stately brick that dominates most Boston movies. The Blue Diner is sunny and summery, unusual qualities for the city and its movies. Avoiding oft-seen locations adds to the refreshing quality of the  genuinely feel-good bilingual tale.

Book excerpt: 'Blown Away'

Alas, Boston's Jeff Bridges movie isn't The Big Lebowski, it's something much less special. But it was a big deal at the time, shooting very prominently in recognizable locations during much of the summer of 1993. And it has the most god-awful of all god-awful Tommy Lee Jones performances!

1994. Directed by Stephen Hopkins. Written by Joe Batteer & John Rice. With Jeff Bridges, Tommy Lee Jones, Forest Whitaker, Suzy Amis, John Finn and Lloyd Bridges. Cinematography by Peter Levy.

IT WAS THE MOST expensive, complex and certainly loudest production to have ever come to Boston at the time. But Blown Away, the 1994 Boston bomb squad thriller, is a dud. Alas, sometimes even a raft of local locations can’t improve a run-of-the-mill action-thriller.
    Since the story unfurls as one of those “this time it’s personal” action movies, the big failing is in the lead characters. Blown Away is neither Jeff Bridges’ nor Tommy Lee Jones’ shining moment. Bridges is always dependable for a certain level of performance—save for in The Vanishing remake—but he never totally connects with Jimmy Dove, the Irish revolutionary turned Boston bomb squad cowboy who must confront his past. Next to some of the other characters Bridges played during this very fruitful period for him, which includes The Fisher King, Fearless and The Big Lebowski, Dove is very forgettable. Less forgettable but more dismissible is embittered mad bomber Ryan Gaerity (Jones). Jones has a tendency to overdo his roles, but never has he chewed as much scenery as he does here. I don’t care if the character is half-insane.
    So you can appreciate the stunt work during the climactic fight scene between Dove and Gaerity on a decrepit boat docked at East Boston’s Border Street Pier, but it’s hard to really get into the action because you don’t care about the characters. Blown Away was produced by the same people behind the Chicago-set firefighters film Backdraft and, like its predecessor, it’s very conventional stuff that feels as if it were written by a computer that formulaically inserts emotional baggage, dangerous situations, relationship trouble and occasional good times into the script. If it’s not the strained “old country” backstory that links the two lead characters, it’s the “retired” guy pulled back into danger. If it’s not the periodic tragedies—how many times does poor Jimmy have to run towards someone’s imminent death and not be able to get there in time to help?—it’s the repeated use of Dove’s musician wife (Suzy Amis) and stepdaughter (Stephi Lineburg) as objects in jeopardy. If it’s not the ominous music that cartoonishly accompanies Gaerity’s every move, it’s the fact that, despite the expected “inside” view of the bomb squad, many of the suspense scenes culminate in that old cliché, the snipping of the wire. I mean, c’mon, the heavy kills the hero’s dog in Blown Away (the writers couldn’t do any better than that?).
    Some of the action works well. There’s genuine suspense in the rather playful sequence in which the wife and stepdaughter unwittingly turn on appliances that may or may not be rigged with explosives, and in the scene in which Dove tries to defuse the rigged headphones of bomb squad colleague Anthony (Forest Whitaker). In fact, most any time Whitaker is onscreen things are interesting. Although making this “new guy” character a real Boston townie might have upped the amount of local color here (since there’s no such character in the movie), Whitaker supplies a needed energy, and Anthony’s quest to discover what’s behind the bombings gives the plot a little nudge. Cocky Anthony and wizened Dove are initially suspicious of each other, but a mutual respect develops between the two and theirs turns out to be the only genuine relationship in the movie. The lack of connection among its characters is a reason why, arriving a scant month after Speed, Blown Away was a real also-ran as a “mad bomber” thriller, lacking the cleverness or chemistry of its competition.
    For all the Boston locations on display, this is not a movie in which the city becomes a character in the story. It’s not that specific. But there’s an impressive cross-section of the city here, from movie-familiar Longfellow Bridge and Fenway Park to the Charles River Dam Bridge and Charlestown (including the St. Francis de Sales School). In Cambridge, there’s the Harvard-Epworth Church and M.I.T. The movie also ventures to Gloucester’s Wingaersheek Beach (for one of the sillier Jones sequences). Because so much of the action takes place outside, only some of it—including the Dove-Gaerity fight climax and the backyard scenes—was filmed in a studio back in Los Angeles. The best area locations mix the different looks of Boston, especially the Copley Square exploding-van sequence, with the action framed by such structures as Trinity Church, the John Hancock Tower and the ornately decked-out top floors of Boylston Street office buildings.
►Locations: Back Bay, Charlestown, Beacon Hill, East Boston, Boston; Cambridge; Gloucester.
►Accents: Problematic stuff. John Finn, as the bomb squad captain, is the cream of a poor crop. Bridges struggles with his dialogue, sometimes flattening out his a’s in a quasi-Boston accent, other times talking in a more generic dem-and-dose workingman’s voice and occasionally in a faded Irish accent; it’s as if no one quite decided what this Irish native who moved to Boston and has tried to lose his accent should sound like. No one else in the bomb squad tries to sound local: sometimes they’ve even been given character names designed to excuse them from an accent, like Cortez (Chris de Oni) or Bama (longtime Bridges comrade Loyd Catlett), while Forest Whitaker, who was the last person cast in the movie, said in interviews that his character, who was written as Italian-American in the original script, was (like the actor) from New York. On the non-Boston front, Jones’ Irish brogue is totally over the top but, for better or worse, the actor plays everything about him that way. Jeff Bridges’ dad Lloyd, playing his uncle here, does a more convincing brogue.
►Local color: It’s a change from the norm, with so many pre-Good Will Hunting movies interested in only one sort of Boston: academic/medical, ethnic neighborhoods, etc. But the variety within Boston spices Blown Away. Another nice juxtaposition place a runaway-car action sequence on staid Beacon Hill’s Joy Street.
►Off the set: Blown Away had a very reverberating effect on some of the neighborhoods where it filmed, especially East Boston. When the moviemakers took an old tuna boat named Sarah, refitted it, renamed it The Dolphin, used it as the villain’s lair and blew it up on the East Boston side of Boston Harbor, the 24 pounds of gunpowder, 1,700 feet of depth cord and 540 gallons of gasoline turned out to be even more explosive than imagined. Despite the predictions of reverberation consultants, evacuation of the two blocks closest to the blast, mass boarding-up of windows and the distribution of 4,000 pairs of earplugs, the production received over $100,000 in insurance claims from East Boston residents, along with countless complaints. The evacuees put up at the Ramada complained about the pizza dinner served to them, Al’s Shoe Store put up a sign in its broken window saying “Blown Away Blew Us Away” and the East Boston Chamber of Commerce lamented that no local window-replacement companies were hired for the cleanup. The explosion really was something. I was standing on the opposite, Charlestown side of the Harbor and could feel the heat when the crew set it off. Bridges, Jones and Whitaker were, of course, nowhere near the scene at the time.
►Don’t blink!: Look for future Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding, Jr. in the classroom training scene.

Tab/CNC/Gatehouse/whatever-the-hell-they're-called coverage

Fast Eddie Symkus' article on Big Screen Boston ran in several of the Tab/CNC/Gatehouse/WTHTC weeklies last week. If your local paper did not carry it, give them a call and suggest that they do!

Book excerpt: 'Black Irish'

Brad Gann's Black Irish, a good little movie that had a very limited theatrical release last year and is not yet out on DVD, gas just become available for viewing on iTunes. Here's the excerpt from Big Screen Boston about it.

2006. Written and directed by Brad Gann. With Michael Angarano, Brendan Gleeson, Melissa Leo, Tom Guiry and Emily VanCamp. Cinematography by Michael Fimognari.

WRITER-DIRECTOR BRAD GANN isn’t Irish and he isn’t Bostonian. But his Black Irish, a coming-of-age tale set in South Boston, is a modest success, partially because it has a light touch with its Irish “isms.” The family at its center, the McKays, is the result of a marriage between an Irish-American (Brendan Gleeson) and an Irish immigrant (Melissa Leo). While some movies portray the Boston Irish as if they live in an Irish bubble far removed from everyday American life, Gann does not, and such an approach gives his movie a universal reach and a resistance to nagging clichés.
    After all, its first images are of 15-year-old Cole (Michael Angarano) throwing a baseball into a painted strike zone on a schoolyard wall. There’s no doubt he’s American through and through, even if he is an altar boy contemplating studying for the priesthood. Part of the premise of Black Irish is that Cole is too nice for his rough-and-tumble family: an emotionally remote, hard-drinking dad who’s always searching for work, a mother who’s lost control of her husband, a big brother (Tom Guiry) who’s a belligerent jerk and a big sister (Emily VanCamp) whose life has been derailed by an unplanned pregnancy. It’s typical of the movie that Kathleen’s pregnancy doesn’t result in stereotypical hysterics from her Catholic parents, even when she’s thinking of having an abortion. Instead, the pregnancy is just another obstacle to be maneuvered around, like making ends meet and keeping Terry, the big brother eager to pull Cole down to his level, in check. Such problems mesh when the price of “sending away” Kathleen to a home for unwed mothers (from which she soon bolts) means Cole has to leave his Catholic school for Terry’s public school —jeopardizing his seminary plans and forcing him to have to make a different, better baseball team. He’s more concerned about the latter.
    Amidst all these little dilemmas is the main one, and that’s whether “good kid” Cole can retain his essential goodness. Angarano, who has the dark features of Shia LaBeouf, and Gann convey Cole’s goodhearted nature without making him too naïve (the running gag of Cole leaving a little trail of accidentally dead animals in his wake prevents him from being goody-goody). Aside from his outrage during one scene in which he sees his father humiliated, Cole is pretty levelheaded, and he’s an engaging underdog.
    Cole’s levelheadedness epitomizes the entire movie’s restraint. Gann has enough faith in his words to let his cast underplay the drama. Some of the characters have brief near-monologue moments, including Cole’s mother and his brother, but they’re not delivered as “big moments.” And when you have an actor as sturdy as Gleeson (1997’s The General) you don’t need to get fancy. As several crises come to a head and other opportunities arise for the characters, Gann’s restraint becomes especially effective in the optimistic yet open-ended resolution.
    Black Irish is not as hardcore a South Boston neighborhood movie as Good Will Hunting or Southie. It makes use of several local businesses, though, including Skip Scaro’s Barber Shop, the Galley Diner and Casper Funeral Home, while some of its baseball action is at Foley Field (also seen in Good Will Hunting); the other baseball diamond, seen at the end of the movie, is at Tufts. But the movie mixes and matches a variety of neighborhoods: the family’s house is in Dorchester, school scenes take place at East Boston High (as does the police station scene) and the church is St. John’s Episcopal Church in Jamaica Plain (with the church office scene done in the mansion at Borderland State Park on the Sharon-Easton border). Waltham’s Ristorante Marcellino is also central to the story, as is Roxbury’s Jewish Memorial Hospital. Charlestown, Everett and Chelsea also appear, the last during the car crash scene.
►Locations: Dorchester, South Boston, Charlestown, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, Boston; Waltham; Everett; Sharon/Easton; Somerville/Medford.
►Accents: None of the lead actors is local, but Brendan Gleeson, Michael Angarano, Tom Guiry and Emily VanCamp do a good job with their pretend accents, while Melissa Leo does a dandy faux Irish accent. It’s ironic to have Irish Gleeson doing an American accent and American Leo doing an Irish brogue, yet the two do such a good job it’s inconsequential.
►Local color: Perhaps because of budget limitations, there isn’t a lot of public action here (since that involves things like blocking off streets and hiring more extras). Most of the neighborhood scenes could have been filmed in any Northeastern blue-collar neighborhood. But the smattering of Southie businesses and parks on display bolsters the story’s credibility.

Two August screenings at Video Underground in J.P.

I'll write about these more at a later date, but Jamaica Plain's Video Underground has scheduled two screenings of Boston movies with yours truly introducing, as well as selling and signing copies of Big Screen Boston. Scroll down to see info about these and several other backyard screenings at this truly indie store.

'Steve Sweeney Show" this morning!

I'll be doing local comedy icon Steve Sweeney's show on WWZN (1510 AM) this morning, talking about Boston movies from 9 to 10 a.m. Of course, Steve is mentioned in the book several times. Give us a call if you can.

'Walk East on Beacon!' reactions

So... now that the little-seen (and not on VHS/DVD) Walk East on Beacon! has had its TCM airing, I'm  interesting in hearing people's reaction to Boston's unwitting contribution to the early 1950s' Red Scare. Let's get some comments going here.

Also--sales pitch time--click on the PayPal rectangular box on the right sidebar to take advantage of the $16 Summer website special on the book.

'Walk East on Beacon!' on TCM, July 24

I've been surprised that several people have come up to me at my signings/screenings and wanted to talk about 1952's Walk East on Beacon! Never released on video, it's pretty obscure. It's one of the first Hollywood features made in Boston, and the Red Scare drama is certainly the most hysterical. But its documentary style and its taste for "realism" (the quotes included because the movie is pure propaganda) mean that it's usually shot in bright daylight with little creative lighting, which makes it very handy for taking a gander at the city, post-war and pre-urban renewal (it's the only commercial movie with a glimpse of Scollay Square, albeit a brief but tasty one). It's on rare display this coming Thursday on Turner Classic Movies, as part of the cable channel's series coinciding with the FBI's centennial. So "enjoy" it while you can.

Book signing and screening July 12 @ Cornerstone Books, Salem, MA

I'll be signing books, talking up Boston movies, answering questions and showing one of my favorites--Beth Harrington's one-of-a-kind featurette The Blinking Madonna and Other Miracles (not available on commercial home video)--at Cornerstone Books in Salem, Mass. this Saturday [July 12] at 7 pm. Join me in the Witch City for a cheap but fun Saturday night out...

Check out Ty Burr's review!

Boston Globe movie critic Ty Burr's review of Big Screen Boston went up on boston.com today. He says, among other things, "An essential purchase for Bay State cinemaniacs, this does what all good movie books do: Makes you want to run out and see the movies." Pre-BSB, Ty wrote one of the more extensive looks at movies made in Boston, in the Globe magazine a few years back.

Book excerpts--and plenty of them

There are a whole lot of excerpts from Big Screen Boston up here, though most of them are in past months' archives. Here are links to some of those excerpts:

• Introduction: The 'Beanstreet movies, Part 1, a look at the gritty local dramas of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
• Mystery Street, the 1950 film noir--the first fictional feature to take advantage of predominantly Greater Boston locations.
• Introduction: The 'Beanstreets' movies, Part 2, a look at the impact of those movies.
• Girltalk, Kate Davis' unforgettable 1987 documentary.
• Billy in the Lowlands, Jan Egleson's ground-breaking 1979 drama.
• The Brink's Job, 1978's amusing comic take on the 1950s robbery and--perhaps more importantly--the fiasco-like production that soured Hollywood on Boston for years to come. 
• The Blinking Madonna and Other Miracles. Beth Harrington's one-of-a-kind personal documentary.
• Titicut Follies, Frederick Wiseman's still-disturbing 1967 documentary about Bridgewater State Hospital.
• The Thomas Crown Affair, the impossibly urbane Steve McQueen picture.
• Walk East on Beacon!, the hysterical (but scenic) Red-baiting 1952 "thriller."
• The Dark End of the Street, Egleson's equally engrossing follow-up to Billy in the Lowlands.
• The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the best movie ever made in Boston, Period. And still not on home video!

Book excerpt: 'The Departed'

Here's the book's take on the other movie in the subtitle. It's one of the book's more famous movies, but it's no ordinary Boston movie: it's a remake of a Hong Kong movie directed by a moviemaker strongly associated with another city, not Boston. Of course, with screenwriter William Monahan, Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg involved, it's not as if there aren't any locals involved.

2006. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by William Monahan. Based on Infernal Affairs by Alan Mak and Felix Chong. With Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga and Alec Baldwin. Cinematography by Michael Ballhaus.

MARTIN SCORSESE’S AWARD-WINNING crime drama is one of the best Boston movies. But, like many others, it’s a mix of real Boston and fake Boston. After all, Mean Streets, Raging Bull and GoodFellas director Scorsese is the foremost New York director of his time. And more of The Departed was shot in his hometown than in the city where it takes place.
    But Bostonian William Monahan wrote it, putting a Boston overlay on Infernal Affairs, the cleverly plotted 2002 Hong Kong movie about a crook pretending to be a cop and a cop pretending to be a crook. And homegrown Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg are in its cast. Take The Departed out of Boston and you wouldn’t just lose the repressed atmosphere in which everyone, especially the two moles, is stingy about personal details. You’d have to lose one of its essential scenes, and its best Boston moment. That’s when State Police sergeant Dignam (Wahlberg) tries to goad just-graduated State Police cadet Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) into going undercover in the South Boston mob by targeting Costigan’s embarrassment over coming from a family of underachievers, and his identity crisis from having split his youth between his “lace curtain” remarried mom on the North Shore and his downscale father in Southie. “You had different accents,” Dignam prods. “You did, didn’t you, you little fuckin’ snake?” Dignam  has found a weak spot to squeeze and he won’t let go.
    The scene doesn’t just mark Costigan as a character who could only be from within the confining loop of Route 128. It also taps into Bostonians’ tendencies to skip the pleasantries and rub each other raw. This isn’t the playful “You talking to me?” or “Whadya mean, I’m funny?” Scorsese cursing by Robert De Niro or Joe Pesci. It’s a hailstorm of dropped-R, in-your-face, smart-ass expletives worthy of the verbal sparring in George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Yes, I’m talking to you. These Staties are like hockey dads, with guns. They’re just looking for an excuse to go after somebody.
    The writing in the scene and the specific Boston qualities of Costigan are among the best instances of The Departed embellishing Infernal Affairs. Almost all of the plot comes from the Hong Kong film, from such big elements as a mob boss having a young protege become a cop so he’ll have a friend inside the department (this time, the characters are Jack Nicholson’s Frank Costello and Damon’s Colin Sullivan), to little things such as Costello smashing Costigan’s arm cast (lest it contain a recording device) and two henchmen joking about how you can tell who’s an undercover cop.
    In its bulk-up from Hong Kong action drama to big-budget Hollywood blockbuster, The Departed certainly has problems here and there, though. It distressed this longtime Scorsese fan to see his Mean Streets innovation of using a rock-song score devolve into nothingness—wall-to-wall use of songs in which few of them actually have dramatic meaning—while the expanded character of a female psychologist (Vera Farmiga) comes off like a Hollywood convenience who’s around just to have affairs with the two conflicting male leads.
    One of the local aspects of The Departed that’s been overly doted upon is that Costello is based on one-time South Boston mob boss and longtime fugitive James “Whitey” Bulger. Monahan’s script adds a Whitey-like touch to Costello now and then, including the strong suggestion that he’s an FBI informant. But 95% of the character is from Infernal Affairs and Nicholson, whose trademark leering sometimes detracts from the drama.
    Like the Whitey connection, the locations used in The Departed supply an extra dimension for those aware of them. Scorsese and crew shot here for six weeks, using Staniford Street’s butt-ugly Hurley Building for State Police headquarters, Charlestown’s Flagship Wharf condos for Costello’s luxurious digs and the Quincy Shipyard for the microchip-sale stakeout and the climactic showdown between Costello’s crew and the police. You can also spot Boston Common in the opening rugby scene, Quincy Bay as the remote spot where Costigan has a rendezvous with his police contacts, the exterior of the Moakley Courthouse (from where Costigan makes a phone call), the Lewis Wharf area (where Dignam and his boss confront Costello) and the Park Street and South Station Red Line stations. The rooftop scenes take place in the Fort Point Channel area, off of Farnsworth Street, Costigan pursues Sullivan down Tyler Street and into the Chinatown parking lots bordered by Edinboro, Ping On and Oxford Streets, and such other spots as Charles Street (where the exterior of Charles Street Cleaners was made over as a bistro) and the ever-familiar Zakim Bridge are also visible. Sullivan’s condo with a sweet view of the State House is a fake, though. Those scenes weren’t done locally, and were presumably done on a New York soundstage with a photomural for its powerful “view.”
    With a sequel for The Departed now in the works (featuring Wahlberg’s Dignam) and tax breaks now in place that make it more desirable for Hollywood productions to shoot in Massachusetts, chances are any Departed follow-ups will shoot in Boston more than the original did.
►Locations: South Boston, Charlestown, Chinatown, Seaport District, Beacon Hill, Dorchester, East Boston, Boston; Quincy; Cambridge.
►Accents: Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg amp up their lingering accents and give The Departed a sense of authenticity. Others in the cast are hit and miss. Costigan’s accent is supposed to be weak, thanks to his childhood split between his upwardly mobile mother and his Southie dad, and DiCaprio does fine with the light accent. Nicholson and Alec Baldwin are inconsistent, Vera Farmiga is passable, Martin Sheen just cranks up the Kennedy accent he used playing both John and Bobby in different TV movies and Ray Winstone’s accent is an unpredictable mix of Boston, generic American and his own English accent (big deal—he’s always been a ferocious actor, and he’s a force here). All in all, above average, as nobody is awkward enough to spoil his or her performance.
►Local color: As in Mystic River, there’s much use of the Staties nickname for the State Police. But William Monahan’s script gets even littler details right. It’s just perfect that the Staties’ secretary we see is named Darlene. Who didn’t go to high school in Greater Boston during the 1970s or 1980s with a Darlene, a Darlene that might go on to have a job just like that? Throw in The Dropkick Murphys’ anthemic “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” a clip from the old Channel 56 news and a Brigham’s reference, and the local flavor gets stronger. And you just have to grin at any line of dialogue describing someone once holding down the job of “carpet layer for Jordan Marsh.”

R.I.P. George Carlin

If you're of the right age--and I was--George Carlin's comedy albums were an important part of your adolescence. Class Clown was huuuge in the early 1970s, the sort of album you and your friends listened to when the adults were out of the house. Sure, the "7 Words You Can't Say on TV" was our taboo pleasure, but the rest of the album was hilarious, too, and the comic's distaste for hypocrisy actual made his comedy unusually ethical [Carlin would've laughed that his AP obit said he was from "Morningside Heights" on Manhattan, since he joked on that album that "Morningside Heights" was just the acceptable euphemism for what the neighborhood really was, Spanish Harlem]. You also looked forward to Carlin's many Flip Wilson Show guest shots. Later, of course, you realized that Carlin was part of a larger comic tradition of outspokenness, and that he and Richard Pryor carried the baton that Lenny Bruce almost singlehandedly fought to get to them through routines like this [available on the amazing Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware boxed set]:

By the end of the 1970s, Carlin had already become self-parody in a sense (I remember Rick Moranis nailing the Carlin cliches during an SCTV sketch). But even as he became more accepted and did all those HBO specials, he still kept much of his outspokenness, particularly in his rants against organized religion.

Here's a typically brilliant Carlin Tonight Show appearance from May 1972, during his most influential period. Enjoy:

A way to watch 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle'

Many of us are puzzled why The Friends of Eddie Coyle, still the best movie ever made in Boston, has never come out on VHS or DVD. Surely, there must be some rights tangle that's prevented it from ever being released, correct? Maybe not. Throwing a monkey wrench into that theory is the fact that the Robert Mitchum noir is available through Amazon's Unbox Video feature. You can watch it and have access to the George V. Higgins adaptation for 24 hours, or buy it, with the apparent ability to save it onto a disc. Hmmm. Here are links below to get this Mass.classic.

'Harvard Man' co-star now NBA champ--all is forgiven!

Hitting seven three-pointers in a title-clinching game does a lot for your pop-culture karma. That's why I, on behalf of moviegoers everywhere, am officially forgiving Ray Allen for his co-starring role in James Toback's bat-shit insane 2001 movie, Harvard Man, one of the worst movies shot in Greater Boston, but also one of the most bizarrely bad (actually, more of it was shot in Toronto than Boston). Harvard Man is the inner-logic-lacking movie that takes place during college basketball season, yet is somehow also unfurling in the middle of summer, as the men are often wearing shorts and the women are wearing sun dresses and open-toe shoes. Hey, you don't expect total coherence from a movie featuring an LSD overdose, but c'mon (and that's just part of its logical deficiencies). As star Adrian Grenier's Harvard teammate, Allen doesn't have a lot to do in the movie, but this is one of those projects in which everyone involved emerges tainted by it. Congrats, Ray!

HubArts.com reviews 'Big Screen Boston'

Check out Joel Brown's review of Big Screen Boston over at HubArts.com. I don't want to spoil anything, but the word "essential" is in there somewhere. Thanks, Joel, for taking the time between blown Red Sox leads and Swingtown episodes to get in your two cents!

Where to get 'Big Screen Boston'

• Here. Click on the PayPal "box" on the right sidebar. Media Mail shipping is free, and I'll happily sign any books if requested.
• Local independent bookstores: Brookline Booksmith, Wellesley Booksmith, Harvard Bookstore and New England Mobile Book Fair--among others. [Surprisingly, local indie bookstores have been very slow in carrying the book, so if your local store doesn't have it, request that they get it.]
• Cool local retailers: Video Underground in Jamaica Plain, Magpie in Somerville, Monroe Salt Works at Copley Place and in Arlington and some Newbury Comics locations.
• Chain bookstores: Most Borders and Barnes & Noble locations in eastern and central Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire.
• Amazon.com and other websites, including buy.com and deepdiscount.com.

Bostonist podcast

The Bostonist's Rick Sawyer's interview with yours truly re Boston movies and Big Screen Boston is now up on that site as a podcast.Please check it out. Rick knows his Eddie Coyle and has long championed the movie!

'The Friends of Eddie Coyle,' tonight, Coolidge Corner Theater, 7 pm

THE BEST MOVIE EVER made in Boston is not on video, but you can see it tonight at the Coolidge Corner Theater at 7 pm (ending early enough to get home to catch the last three quarters of the Celtics-Lakers' Game 1). You can read more about The Friends of Eddie Coyle in the book excerpt in a post below, but it's still the grittiest crime thriller made in the city and it is the godfather to a number of more recent Boston crime movies, from Monument Ave. to Gone Baby Gone. Remarkably, it's the only movie ever made from a George V. Higgins novel--perhaps because it was a commercial flop. If anyone today wrote movie-ready dialogue as well as Higgins, he'd have every novel optioned by Hollywood and would be getting paid hundreds of thousands as a script-doctor. Higgins' influence wasn't only cinematic. Elmore Leonard was a big fan, too, and he paid tribute to Higgins by recycling the Coyle character name Jackie Brown in his Rum Punch.

Mark Griffin has a little plug for the screening in today's Globe, while this is the blurb from The Phoenix. Here, The Bostonist chips in.

Watch the trailer:

R.I.P., Bo Diddley

Saw him open for The Clash at the (pre-renovation) Harvard Square Theater in February 1979. He was wearing a bell-bottom jumpsuit, yet somehow still looked cool. Here's a classic clip of Bo, The Duchess and the rest from 1966's The Big T.N.T. Show:

R.I.P., 'Six Bridges to Cross' director Joseph Pevney

Joseph Pevney, who passed away several days ago, was a journeyman director who became very prolific in TV during the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. Most of his obits labeled him a Star Trek director, as he did several episodes of that series. But he also directed one of the earliest movies to use Boston locations, 1955's Six Bridges to Cross. Loosely based on the real Brink's robbery, Six Bridges is an odd movie that tries to take that real event and turn it into a very light drama, banking highly on the presence of Tony Curtis to keep the career criminal at its center likable (in his film debut, Sal Mineo plays Curtis' character as a boy so, amusingly, they both have the same wrong Bronx accent for the Bostonian). But the movie never really finds a convincing tone, so it doesn't quite work (it's certainly inferior to 1978's The Brink's Job, which took an overtly comic approach to the events and had a Runyonesque flair to it). Six Bridges has a few interesting sights to see of the city, pre-urban renewal, but otherwise it's not all that memorable. It has never come out on video.

Book excerpt: 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle'

Don't miss the chance to see an archival print of the best damn movie ever made in Boston, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. at the Coolidge Corner Theater on June 5 at 7 pm. I'll be there introducing the movie, and selling and signing books, too. Father to the more recent Boston "neighborhood pictures," from Monument Ave. to Gone Baby Gone, it has never come out on home video.

1973. Directed by Peter Yates. Written by Paul Monash. Based on George V. Higgins’ novel. With Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats, Alex Rocco and Joe Santos. Cinematography by Victor J. Kemper.

ALL HAIL EDDIE. THE gritty film adaptation of attorney turned writer George V. Higgins’ terse debut novel is the best movie ever made in Boston, a touchstone with a legendary status enhanced by the fact that it’s never been released on any form of home video.
    Director Peter (Bullitt) Yates’ movie is one of the few post-1960 color thrillers to capture the desperation and doom of 1940s and 1950s film noir. Of course, it helps to have Robert Mitchum, who headlined such vintage noirs as Out of the Past and Pursued, playing the title character. Mitchum and his hangdog persona perfectly embody the weariness of Coyle, an aging, working-class crook awaiting sentencing for transporting stolen goods who reluctantly becomes a police informer in hopes that his tips to “uncle” will win him leniency.
    Like Higgins’ novel—which is almost experimental in its preferred use of two-character dialogues instead of conventional narrative—The Friends of Eddie Coyle atmospherically presents the workaday tug of war between crooks and cops. Seen through the movie’s gutter’seye view of the world, everyone’s looking for a leg up on the other guy, a favor or some sort of insulation from jail (for the crooks) or bad work assignments (for the cops). Eddie Coyle is the common thread running among gun seller Jackie Brown (Steven Keats), bartender/hit man Dillon (Peter Boyle), federal agent Foley (Richard Jordan) and a group of robbers that’s striking suburban banks.
    As Coyle secures handguns from Jackie for the bankrobbers, Dillon keeps tabs on Eddie’s travels and Foley fields tidbits of info from both men. These tips are cast out like fishing lines, hoping to return a nibble from Foley that might bring a desired favor. One such nibble comes after Eddie sees machine guns in Jackie’s car trunk and hears him say he has to get to the train station at Sharon. He gets there, but so do Foley and a half-dozen other agents.
    Still, Eddie’s aid in Boston is not enough to get Coyle a break with a New Hampshire prosecutor, and you can feel the vice tighten around him. He’s faced with a no-win situation: do jail time or fink on guys who, unlike younger Jackie, are his contemporaries and cohorts. In its own low-key, Eddie-ish way, The Friends of Eddie Coyle works to a tragic ending that, hard to believe, makes a change in the story that actually improves upon Higgins’ plot.
    Eddie Coyle is the first Boston movie with the guts to never be scenic (just look at the Quincy street Coyle lives on, with its row of drab, look-alike houses). It’s a grey, grey movie, because Eddie is stuck in a grey, grey world, lacking the resources to go to sunny Florida (as he laments) or the traction to climb out of his place on the crime ladder. Yates shot the movie in late 1972, with winter approaching, and you can feel the chill in the air. You often see the breath exhaled by characters during the conversations on the Boston Common or outside a Quincy Red Line station. The other locations are grungy spots Thomas Crown would certainly never be caught at, including Dillon’s bar (shot at the Kentucky Tavern at Mass. Ave. and Newbury Street), the cafeteria where Coyle and Jackie first meet (which appears to be on Boylston Street near Tremont), Boston Bowl and Dedham Plaza. A Weymouth bank, Memorial Drive, the old Boston Garden and even grim City Hall Plaza also serve the story very well. And rather than packing up back to Los Angeles for interiors, the production did everything here, even building sets, including the trailer belonging to robber Jimmy Scalise (hometown boy Alex Rocco), in Pier Five on the waterfront.
    Apparently, Higgins did an uncredited polish on Paul Monash’s script. When I checked with the Higgins archives at the University of South Carolina to see if the late novelist’s papers contained any info on the movie’s locations, the staff’s perusal of his archival materials from that period turned up at least one reference in his letters to restoring dialogue from the novel to the screenplay. Thirty-five years after it was released to audience indifference, it’s hard to watch The Friends of Eddie Coyle now and not think that it—the most essential movie Hollywood has made in Boston—deserves the awards, acclaim and popularity bestowed upon Mystic River, a lesser movie in the same vein. Oh, well. That’s showbiz.
►Locations: Back Bay, North End, Beacon Hill, Boston; Quincy; Sharon; Milton; Weymouth; Dedham; Cambridge.
►Accents: Surprisingly good. Mitchum, originally eyed for Peter Boyle’s role, manages to use a convincing Boston accent without losing his own distinctive voice. So Eddie comes off as an emotionally spent Mitchum character, and a neighborhood guy, too. Boyle and Richard Jordan use a light touch with their accents, too. Considering the strong sense of place the locations give the movie, thick accents might have been overkill. These guys sound right at home next to Alex Rocco.
►Local color: “Numbah faw, Bobby Aw!” Eddie bellows from the Boston Garden balcony during a Bruins game featuring helmetless players and no ads on the ice or boards. Of course, Eddie and his “friends” would be into the big, bad Bruins (just as they’d be into the Pats today). The hockey sequence appears to have been shot during a real game, and that’s the kind of authenticity you get here. It’s not as if other movie productions were lining up to shoot at the Kentucky Tavern or fluorescent-lit cafeterias. The locations are so real I expected to see Eddie pop into a Zayre at some point, but no such luck.
►Aftermath: Higgins fan Elmore Leonard borrowed the androgynous name Jackie Brown for the heroine of his novel, Rum Punch. When Quentin Tarantino made a film of Leonard’s book, he renamed the story Jackie Brown, as did the movie tie-in re-release of the book.

Screening #5: 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle,' Coolidge Corner Theater, June 5 @ 7pm

The next Big Screen Boston book-signing/movie-screening is a biggie: the best movie ever made in Boston, 1973's The Friends of Eddie Coyle. I'll be posting an excerpt from the book about the movie soon, but here's a little of what Eddie has to offer: a doom-filled film noir mood that's rare for a post-1960 color movie, a totally convincing Robert Mitchum performance as a low-level hood being squeezed by the law and the wonderful use of grimy Greater Boston locations, from brutalist City Hall Plaza to the Boston Garden. Without this movie and the novels of George V. Higgins (on whose first book this is based), it's hard to conceive of such subsequent stories as Monument Ave., Mystic River, The Departed and Gone Baby Gone. Dennis Lehane may be its purveyor now, but it was George V. Higgins who started Boston noir. So don't miss this rare chance to see Eddie Coyle on the big screen (it's still never come out on VHS or DVD). The Coolidge has just informed me that they're getting an archival print from Paramount, so the city will be on display in all its gritty glory.

Leonard Maltin chimes in

The ever-credible Leonard Maltin has included Big Screen Boston in his summer movie book round-up. Here's what he has to say:

BIG SCREEN BOSTON: From "Mystery Street" to "The Departed" and Beyond by Paul Sherman (Black Bars Publishing) — Film buff and critic Sherman has researched scores of films that were set and/or filmed at least in part in the Boston area and compiled this informative survey book, crammed with background information, assessments of the films, and detailed information on the use of locations. Obvious choices like The Boston Strangler, Charly, The Thomas Crown Affair, Love Story, The Brink’s Job, The Departed, Mystic River, Fever Pitch, The Perfect Storm and A Civil Action are cited alongside smaller, independent features. A separate section deals in brief with scores of films that had at least some Boston-area content, from The Cardinal to Stuck on You. I can’t imagine anyone producing a more definitive document on the subject.

Check out Maltin's Movie Crazy site for the entire book round-up and more. Glad to see that, after all these years, Leonard is as enthusiastic about movies as he was when he was a teenager putting out Film Fan Monthly. I still have my copy of Leonard's Movie Comedy Teams that I got as a pre-teen in the early 1970s. And I still check it when I want to decide if a particular Olsen & Johnson movie (i.e., any other one than the great Hellzapoppin') showing at 4 am on TCM is worth recording or not.

'Backstage' interview clip, April 30, 2008

"Little" movies we like

Big Screen Boston is mainly comprised of two sections: one with the 80 movies getting "full entries," and another ("Brief Visits, Day Trips & the Rest") in which each movie gets a capsule review. There were a lot of borderline movies that might have landed in either section, and the determining factor wasn't always the quality of the movie. For instance, James Toback's Harvard Man is a horrible movie, but it's so outrageously horrible (Toback had tried to get it made for 25 years, it's set during college basketball season yet everyone is wearing summer clothes, it has no internal logic at all) that it merited the bigger space so its bizarreness could be fully covered. Another reason some good "little" movies didn't get the full treatment was that there were only so many instances when I could write "here's a little overachiever" in the full entries without the thought losing all credibility, since movies such as Ruby, Urban Relics and The Blinking Madonna and Other Miracles already were being billed as such. Below are the capsule reviews of some enjoyable homegrown movies that didn't make it into the front section. They're an important part of the book.

All Kindsa Girls (2003)
Cheryl Eagan-Donovan’s evocative documentary about Boston garage-rockers The Real Kids, named for one of their quintessential 1970s Boston rock songs, isn’t just a portrait of John Felice’s on-again, off-again band. It also delves into what might be called “Boston band syndrome” (great band that should’ve become big, but doesn’t) and, to give the music context, dips into Boston rock history and the city’s preference for guitar-driven garage rock, with both Barry Tashian of The Remains and Jonathan Richman (who started the Modern Lovers with Natick neighbor Felice when the latter was 15) appearing. Of course, there’s onstage footage of The Real Kids, too, filmed at the Middle East, the Abbey and Avalon.







Dirt Boy (2001)
A New Yorker with a dark past (Jacob Lee Hedman) comes to fictional Atwater Commons to take a forensic criminology course, and discovers there’s more truth to a local author’s grisly bestselling novel than the townies want to admit. Jay Franco’s nifty no-budget thriller, set and filmed on Cape Cod, weaves a little spell and, thanks to its stripped-down production—no Anthony Hopkins or Christopher Plummer chewing scenery as the imposing author—avoids many a cliché along the way.




A Pound of Flesh (1994)
Catherine Burns, later producer of such homegrown indies as All the Rage and Starving Artists, directed this flimsy but funny comedy in which a black market human liver is the center of everyone’s attention. Its best parts are definitely those with Sandi Carroll and Ian Lithgow (son of John) as an irreverent couple looking for unconventional good times. This movie not only led to Starving Artists (its director, Allan Piper, is the assistant director here), but also to Brad Anderson’s The Darien Gap (he’s sound recordist and assistant camera); charismatic Carroll co-stars in both subsequent movies.


The Same Side of Rejection Street (2000)
Clunky moments aside, S.G. Collins’ hi-def feature has one of the more ambitious scripts of any homegrown indie film. Set over one action-packed day, it’s about the uneasy friendship that develops between a philosophical homeless man (Micheal Henderson) and an unemployed woman (Karen Ball). As the two walk from Downtown Crossing and the Financial District to South Boston and Dorchester, the movie mixes in heartache, laughs, the obstacle of racism and even gospel music. It’s an all-encompassing mix that usually works.


Starving Artists (1997)
The absurdity in Allan Piper’s Harvard Square comedy is hit or miss. Its funniest action involves his playwright character’s uncomfortable courtship of neighbor Mildred (Bess Wohl), whom he almost always manages to unwittingly insult. The production came up with a fun way to raise part of its $50,000 budget: everyone who donated at least $1 got his or her name in the movie, whether it was as graffiti, in a newspaper headline or on a note on someone’s wall.

"The Dark End of the Street"--tonight!

I'll be selling and signing books and showing one of the best Boston indie films, 1981's The Dark End of the Street, tonight at 6:45 at West Newton Cinema. This is the second in writer-director Jan Egleson's so-called Boston trilogy, and this Cambridge projects drama features dynamite performances from Laura Harrington, Henry Tomaszewski (in photo), Pamela Payton-Wright, Michele Greene and, before his great run as a Hollywood character actor, Lance Henriksen. Tonight will be its first local showing in nearly a decade, the movie is not available on home video and Jan Egleson will be joining me to talk about it. The Celts are off tonight, so come on down.

Book excerpt: "The Dark End of the Street" -- showing 5/21 @ West Newton Cinema, 6:45 pm

The Dark End of the Street is one of the best homegrown movies to come out of Greater Boston. As he did in its predecessor, 1979's Billy in the Lowlands, writer-director Jan Egleson mixes engaging drama with genuine authenticity in this tale of Cambridge project kids, specifically Donna (Laura Harrington), who's seeking a better life than the one she sees around her. As an added bonus of sorts, among the fine performances are before-they-were-famous roles for Ben Affleck (then 8 years old) and Lance Henriksen (the latter did a lot of theater acting in the area during the 1970s). Here is the section of the book about it. The movie gets its first local screening in seven years at West Newton Cinema this coming Wednesday (May 21) at 6:45pm. I'll be signing books, and Egleson will be appearing to talk about the movie. [That's Harrington, right, and co-star Michele Greene sharing a fun off-camera moment in the photo below.]

1981. Written and directed by Jan Egleson. With Laura Harrington, Henry Tomaszewski, Michele Greene, Lance Henriksen, Pamela Payton-Wright, Albert Eaton and Terence Grey. Cinematography by D’Arcy Marsh.

TWO YEARS AFTER BRINGING grass-roots fiction filmmaking to Greater Boston with Billy in the Lowlands, Theater Company of Boston vet Jan Egleson returned to the streets of Cambridge for another life-sized drama. Billy Shaughnessy (Henry Tomaszewski), whom we left trying to right his life after legal troubles in Billy, is back in The Dark End of the Street (like its predecessor, named for a song). In the followup, vulnerable Billy’s need to steer clear of the law is again a big factor, but he’s not the main focus. Girlfriend Donna (Laura Harrington) is.
    The intrigue begins after some post-softball partying on a roof in the Cambridge projects where they live. Billy and Donna hang around so they can be alone, but they’re joined by Ethan (Terence Grey), a drunk friend who teases them, horses around a bit and then falls from the roof. The couple doesn’t tell the police for two reasons. One is Billy’s probation; he’s sure any hint of wrongdoing will land him back in juvenile prison (it’s an inside joke when he says, “I’ll be in Billerica until I’m 90,” a line he first utters in Billy in the Lowlands). The other is the fact that Ethan is black, and Donna and Billy are not. The chance of a race-related crime will surely make the police aggressively investigate the incident.
    Not being able to tell anyone what happened hits Donna hard—in totally convincing, everyday ways. Her best friend is African-American Marlene (Michele Greene), whose brother Brian (Albert Eaton) becomes the subject of the police investigation, since he and Ethan had quarreled earlier. When she hears that Donna might have seen what happened, the two fight in a disco and end up in jail overnight. Donna’s attempts to get Billy to go to the cops with her also threaten that relationship. She’s soon missing shifts at the greasy spoon where she works, and taxing her already overburdened mother (Pamela Payton-Wright) who, like Billy’s mom in the earlier movie, is raising her kids alone. Ethan’s death after several days in the hospital eliminates the one other person who could explain the incident. (That’s Boston power couple Flash and Bennie Wiley playing Ethan’s parents.)
    As with Billy in the Lowlands, the filmmaking in The Dark End of the Street is basic, and the dialogue sometimes flat, particularly in the big speeches by the detective (Gustave Johnson) investigating Ethan’s death. But the pleasure of the movie is in the intimate world it etches out, not just the plot. In a less intimate movie, the race question would swell into big crowd scenes with angry project residents and police barricades, and Donna and Marlene’s friendship might get lost in the shuffle. Similarly, the scenes with Donna’s weary mom, who’s so well-played by Payton-Wright, wouldn’t make the cut, since they don’t often advance the central plot. Straddling the plot and the more observational scenes is Jimmy, the exotic truck driver and the mom’s boyfriend, played with flippant charisma by Lance Henriksen, who’d worked in Boston theater and later scored in such cool movies as Near Dark and Stone Cold (he's in the photo below, with Payton-Wright).
    The Dark End of the Street doesn’t deliver a knockout the way bigger movies sometimes can, but it portrays the delicate balance of everyday life in ways most movies overlook. The world doesn’t change much over the course of its action. Life is just as much of a struggle for its characters as it was before, and the earthy characters (many played by non-professionals) remain in the same station in life. Since Hollywood was turning away from its uncharacteristic 1970s adventurousness, this and Egleson’s other Boston movies were a welcome departure from the crush of sequels, remakes and save-the-world escapism.
    Unlike the on-the-run plot of much of Billy in the Lowlands, The Dark End of the Street sticks closer to home: the most prominent Cambridge locations are where the characters live and work, including the Roosevelt Tower projects and Sexton Can (formerly in East Cambridge). The donut shop where Donna works is Linda’s, over the line in Belmont. We also see Flapper’s, a one-time club where Alewife Station now stands, as well as the old Howard Johnson’s off the expressway in South Bay and the Quincy quarries.
►Locations: Cambridge; Belmont; Dorchester, Boston; Quincy.
►Accents: Unlike most of the young cast, Laura Harrington is not from the projects. But the former B.U. student does a great job of blending in with her fellow actors. As with Billy in the Lowlands, the genuine accents are part of the deep credibility of the movie.
►Local color: With its plot in which characters try to get through their daily lives, the color is more class-based than geographical. Just about everything we see is related to work, home or play—where Billy and Donna work, where she lives, where they hang out. This is working-class life shown with no desire to glorify it or gloss up its bleakness. And considering that much of it is in East Cambridge before it changed from an industrial area to a high-tech area, this is working-class life from a specific time.
►Don’t blink!: Yup, that’s little Ben Affleck making his movie debut in the silent role of Donna’s brother Tommy.

'The Frugal Yankee' interview

Garen Daly is not only the fellow responsible for Boston's annual Presidents' Day sci-fi marathon. He was also once manager of Cambridge's late, great Orson Welles Cinema, ran the Somerville Theater during the 1980s (he was one of the people responsible for making Davis Square's turnaround possible--i.e., no moviehouse, no Redbones, no Disc Diggers, then no "Paris of the '90s")  and he co-hosts the Frugal Yankee radio program. Last week, Garen and co-host Louise Reilly Sacco interviewed me about the book, and you can listen to it here .

Dude, read the book already!

I heard that Ty Burr had some nice things to say when Big Screen Boston came up on an online chat on boston.com, saying yours truly "knows his stuff." But he confessed that the book was still sitting on his desk and he hasn't had a chance to read it yet. Let's hope he gets around to it and is able to review the book in the Globe. Ty grew up locally and has always been a shrewd assessor of movies shot here, so I'm interested in hearing what he thinks of the book.

Book excerpt: "Walk East on Beacon!"

If 1950's Mystery Street is a good example of the post-WWII location thriller coming to Boston, 1952's Walk East on Beacon! is its not-so-good counterpart. While the first brings a foreboding film noir tone to the city, the second just uses it for some hysterical anti-Communist fear-mongering (I guess the exclamation point in the title is a dead giveaway). Ironically, though, Walk East offers a better peek at the city because it has more daylight action (and it lacks the skill to create a mood through use of darkness)--for instance, it's the only Hollywood movie that shot in Scollay Square. It's also never come out on home video, so it's certainly worth checking out if you ever get the chance.

1952. Directed by Alfred Werker. Written by Leo Rosten and Emmett Murphy. Based on Crime of the Century by J. Edgar Hoover. With George Murphy, Finlay Currie, Virginia Gilmore and Karel Stepanek. Cinematography by Joseph C. Brun.

CHELSEA NATIVE LOUIS de Rochemont was one of the producers behind the post-World War II wave of docudrama thrillers that includes Mystery Street and this 1952 Boston movie. Some of these movies take creative inspiration from Italian neorealism, Jules Dassin’s The Naked City or Anthony Mann’s T-Men. But de Rochemont’s inspiration wasn’t fictional entertainment, it was his own career producing the March of Time newsreels. At the tail end of WWII, he wed the heavy narration and real locations of newsreels with a ripped-from-the-headlines plot in the Manhattan-set The House on 92nd Street, in which an FBI agent infiltrates a Nazi spy ring.
    Seven years later, he came home for Walk East on Beacon! There’s no infiltration in this overheated Cold War drama, but there is a spy ring and the FBI to crack it, led by the agent played by future politician George Murphy. The movie adapts an article written by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (or by whoever ghostwrote it for him), and it starts and ends with much flag-waving on behalf of the Bureau and the fine, upstanding men who keep America safe from its “hidden enemies.”
    Although Walk East is painless enough to sit through, a more expressive story might have better paid tribute to law enforcement than the anti-Communist message movie we get. Whatever legitimate threat there was from Soviet espionage after WWII was clearly exploited by Hoover into a menace that allowed him to position himself as America’s watch dog, and the movie eagerly plays Hoover’s enabler. After all, what can you say when a character who lost two children in a concentration camp tells an FBI agent, “I survived Buchenwald, Inspector. I know many Communists and how they work.” That, of all people, this survivor should know better than to shift Nazi blame? That the screenwriters ought to be ashamed of themselves?
    But that’s the kind of hysteria Walk East seeks to inspire. The story itself is a rather routine investigative thriller lacking much emotion and mood. If it has any style, it’s an anti-style. But since this was made at a time when shadowy, visually expressive film noir was in full swing, such anti-style seems flat by comparison. When there actually is a scene of human emotion—when the Commie-aiding cab driver (Jack Manning) confesses to his wife about being trapped into helping them—you momentarily see what the movie is missing. But that’s the only taste you get of such human drama.
    The value of the movie’s real Boston footage in the early 1950s is much greater than that of its FBI cheerleading, stock characters (like pipe-smoking intellectuals) and forensic gadgetry (Mystery Street integrated the last into a thriller much better). Action takes place in the Public Garden, Louisburg Square, South Station, Longfellow Bridge, Storrow Drive and the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial across from the State House, among other places, while there are incidental shots of Harvard Square, Memorial Drive, the Mystic River (Tobin) Bridge, the old Ritz (now the Taj), pre-makeover Faneuil Hall and the corner of Park and Tremont streets, with a nice shot of a Dorothy Muriel’s bakery. And that’s legendary Scollay Square where we see the amazing sign for Jack’s Lighthouse, as well as a tattoo parlor and The Tasty (any relation to the one in Harvard Square seen in Love Story and Good Will Hunting?).
►Locations: Charlestown, Back Bay, South Station, East Boston, Scollay Square, Beacon Hill, West End, Boston.
►Accents: Full of FBI agents from all over the country, spies who’ve come to Boston to hide their real identities and immigrants, the story doesn’t have much call for local accents. But it seems that many of the bit parts—lower-lever agents, dispatchers, etc.—were cast with local non-professionals (probably guys who did those real jobs everyday). So every so often you’ll get a real Bostonian talking.
►Local color: Although some of the movie was shot in New Hampshire and beyond—the huuuge mainframe computer seen was the Selective Service Electronic Calculator at IBM in New York—this is the one category where Walk East outdoes Mystery Street. The latter is a much better movie, because its dark mood summons the danger Walk East does not, but that darkness obscures the shooting locations. Walk East isn’t a quarter as creative, but its preponderance of broad daylight shots in public places is just great for playing “Where’s that?” and seeing how certain spots have changed in 50-plus years.

Screening #4: "The Dark End of the Street," West Newton Cinema, May 21, 6:45 pm

After making one of the best Boston independent dramas, 1979's Billy in the Lowlands, Cambridge writer-director Jan Egleson was able to secure much of the funding for the follow-up from WGBH, which had aired Billy after its local theatrical run (and had been able to get some of the glory when the movie won a New England Emmy award). Like its predecessor, 1981's The Dark End of the Street is set in the world of the Cambridge working-class youths Egleson had met at The Group School. Although DEOTS has a more complex story, it sacrifices none of the decidedly un-Hollywood rawness of Billy. This time Henry Tomaszewski's Billy Shaughnessy is still around, but his girlfriend Donna (Laura Harrington) is the center of attention. Once again, it's a story of a "project kid" trying to find a better way in life, and there is no "Hollywood ending." I'm thrilled to be able to present the movie at West Newton Cinema, at 6:45pm on May 21. This very entertaining and significant Boston movie has never come out on home video and has not shown locally since 2001, and Jan Egleson will be joining me at the screening. Oh, and did I mention a little blond 8-year-old named Ben Affleck plays the heroine's little brother? That's him in the photo, with Harrington (left) and Janice Brown (sporting a nifty Group School t-shirt). Ben, we'll save you a seat...

Book excerpt: 'The Thomas Crown Affair' [at the Brattle, May 10]

Coincidental to the screenings of Boston movies I set up, the Brattle Theater is showing the original 1968 version of The Thomas Crown Affair as part of its great United Artists retrospective. That seemed like the perfect excuse to offer this excerpt about the movie, a film so blatantly "fabulous" that you have to cut it slack for having little relation to reality.

1968. Directed by Norman Jewison. Written by Alan Trustman. With Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke and Jack Weston. Cinematography by Haskell Wexler.

I HAVE VERY VAGUE recollection of the media coverage of the glittery Boston premiere that greeted Norman Jewison’s movie. Such events were (and still are) a very rare occurrence down around here, but for some reason Hollywood really, really liked Boston in 1968. Along with Charly and The Boston Strangler, the original version of The Thomas Crown Affair gave the city a Hollywood hat trick that year. For better or worse, none of them is as “Hollywood” as this glossy romantic drama.
    It’s a state-of-the-art confection set in an impossibly urbane Boston concocted by Alan Trustman, a local lawyer who went on to pen more movies. Director Jewison and composer Michel Legrand then buffed it to a spiffy sheen. Steve McQueen plays the title character, a blue-blooded investment wiz who, between buying low and selling high at his Post Office Square headquarters, masterminds crimes and seeks thrills wherever he can find them, whether it’s from golf-course betting or piloting gliders. He’s a sort of American James Bond in a three-piece suit, but he serves only his own interests.
    As with The Boston Strangler, this exercise in style shows the influence of the split-screen films screened at Expo ’67—Christopher Chapman’s A Place to Stand in this case. Jewison uses multiple imagery often in the story’s first third, when a Crown-hired crew descends on a bank and robs it of $2.6 million (in scenes shot at the old Shawmut Bank on Congress Street). The build-up and execution of the heist are thrilling and offer glimpses of a wide variety of sights, from Washington Street and Stuart Street to the corner of Cambridge and Linden Streets, with the Allston train yard behind it.
    The little celebratory dance and chuckle in which Crown privately indulges once the job is done, and he can kick back in his Mt. Vernon Street townhouse, tells you all you need to know about why he takes risks that jeopardize his cushy life. He gets a life-affirming kick out of it. Posh insurance investigator Vicky Anderson (Dunaway) recognizes Crown’s need to push himself because she has the same sort of driven personality. When she’s called in to crack the case, The Thomas Crown Affair ignites its romantic sparks and turns into the tale of two alpha dogs in heat. Canine personalities aside, their affair is pure cat-and-mouse stuff, with Vicky telling him why she’s in town and why she’s keeping an eye on him, and Crown similarly finding her to be both a kindred spirit and an enemy.
    But sometimes the movie overdoes it. It’s one thing for the romance to be a metaphorical chess game, it’s another for it to have Crown and Vicky sit down and play chess, especially with the overripe chess-as-sex images that accompany the game. It’s enough to make you think the moviemakers aren’t in on the fact that the movie is a fluffy, silly diversion, nothing more. Then again, any movie containing the hats Dunaway wears would have to be partially silly.
    Jewison estimates on the movie’s DVD that he shot “70%” of The Thomas Crown Affair on location. Hamilton’s Myopia Hunt Club (the polo sequence) and Crane Beach’s dunes provide outside-the-city scenery, Cambridge Cemetery figures heavily in the plot and the Haymarket and Copp’s Hill Burying Ground add urban atmosphere. Of course, the 1999 remake decided Boston just wasn’t upscale enough
and moved the story to New York.
►Locations: Beacon Hill, Financial District, Allston, North End, Back Bay, Boston; Cambridge; Ipswich; Hamilton; Beverly; Belmont.
►Accents: McQueen attempted a Boston accent in rehearsals, but it was decided against. Hopefully, someone told him a character like Crown most likely wouldn’t even have a Boston accent. Locals in supporting roles provide the accents here, including Worcester-born Nina Marlowe as cop Paul Burke’s secretary and the two real Boston Police patrolmen who rouse the detective that Crown KO’s, douses in
booze and then puts in a car.
►Local color: While there are plenty of familiar and not-so-familiar sights on display, the movie takes place in a rarefied, upper-class Boston. For those of us who don’t drive a Rolls, stable a polo mount at the Myopia and bed down in a Beacon Hill townhouse (complete with butler), this is a Bizarro Boston we don’t generally experience. But it is true to Crown’s world. The color is more class-specific than location-specific, since Crown has more in common with other rich people, regardless of where they’re from, than he does with other Bostonians. It’s not as if he’s hanging out with bookies from Jamaica Plain or cheering on Ken Harrelson from the bleachers at Fenway.

NewEnglandFilm.com interview

Just noticed that an interview I recently did with filmmaker/writer Jared M. Gordon is now up on NewEnglandFilm.com. Fairly coherent, despite my rambling!

Book excerpt: 'Titicut Follies'--screening 5/3, Noon, MFA

Appreciative audiences have enjoyed Girltalk and Billy in the Lowlands the last two nights. The third screening to help celebrate the release of Big Screen Boston is of Frederick Wiseman's squirm-inducing 1967 documentary, Titicut Follies, which I'll be introducing at the Museum of Fine Arts, on Saturday [May 3] at Noon. Here is the book's section on this disturbing and unforgettable movie.

1967. Directed by Frederick Wiseman. Cinematography by John Marshall.

FREDERICK WISEMAN’S FIRST DOCUMENTARY is still shocking today. Just imagine what Titicut Follies was like in 1967, when it was first shown. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts banned his peek behind the walls at Bridgewater State Hospital, claiming the movie invaded the privacy of patients there, who are often shown nude and in various states of helplessness. Of course, the ban—finally lifted in 1991—couldn’t have had anything to do with the cruelty with which the institution often treats those patients, right?
    Although Wiseman (High School, Domestic Violence) has long been a pillar of the documentary, he came to filmmaking in a roundabout way in the 1960s. He was already a lawyer when he made Titicut Follies, having lectured in law at Boston University from 1958 to 1961 and taken his students to Bridgewater State Hospital during that time. After working on Shirley Clarke’s minor independent classic Cool World, he decided to make a movie about the hospital. He asked for permission in 1964, and ultimately was allowed to film there in 1966.
    From the moment the movie begins, we enter a sort of absurd hellhole. The absurdity comes through mainly in the talent show that gives the movie its name (and bookends it). First, we see a group of uncomfortable men sing “Strike Up the Band”; then an eager emcee tells a corny joke about two beetles and a priest. But, wait, in the next sequence, in which guards search the belongings of stripped patients, we see that this emcee is not a patient, but a guard. One thing is sure: there is no scorecard to tell us who’s sane and who’s insane, who’s dangerous and who’s not dangerous.
    What follows—as is so often the case in Wiseman’s films about various institutions—is an impressionistic portrait of the hospital. Sometimes Wiseman focuses on specific threads, like a psychiatrist’s therapy session with a man sent to Bridgewater for molesting an underage girl, while other times there’s a more random series of sights and sounds, as when we follow the goings-on in the courtyard outlined by the hospital’s buildings. The treatment is never sensational.
    These glimpses of daily life can be amusing. One incessant ranter (in photo above; courtesy Zipporah Films) lets loose a stream-of- consciousness barrage of gibberish, real words and famous names that’s a cross between a jazz solo, a sermon and a stand-up routine. A later shot of the guy spewing verbiage in the courtyard while, behind him, another fellow stands on his head and sings a hymn may be the emblematic image of the collision of individual realities in the movie.
    But, mostly, Titicut Follies is grim and disturbing. Clearly Bridgewater, an exile for the maladjusted, presents a tough situation for staff there to handle. It is practically a no-win situation. But the casual cruelty dished out by the same staff can be striking, particularly in two instances. The first comes when one guard repeatedly questions a patient named Jim about his cell’s cleanliness. “How’s that room gonna be?” he asks over and over. And after nearly every reply from Jim, he says “What’d you say?” Treat the most normal person like this, and he or she will get agitated; try it on someone who’s locked up and vulnerable, and the effect is tragic. Later, a force-feeding of a patient who won’t eat—the movie’s most squirm-inducing sequence— is performed so casually that the psychiatrist doesn’t even put down his cigarette as he shoves inch after inch of tubing up the patient’s nose and funnels soup into the guy’s stomach. To make the action even more unsettling, Wiseman inserts shots of the patient’s corpse— presumably, taken not long after—into the sequence.
    Rejecting the cinema vérité label and the objectivity it implies, Wiseman has regularly examined the relationship between individuals and society’s institutions in his movies (including Near Death, filmed at Beth Israel Hospital). Titicut Follies remains one of his most potent looks at this difficult relationship.

'Billy in the Lowlands' tonight!

LAST NIGHT, A SMALL but appreciative audience at the Brattle Theater got to see the first local screening of Kate Davis' Girltalk in many years. Up tonight at the Brattle is Jan Egleson's groundbreaking Billy in the Lowlands, the most influential indie film ever made in Boston. Full of locations that just aren't there anymore (pre-Red Line extension Harvard Square, Paragon Park, Fresh Pond Shopping Center with its late-1970s roster of stores [Zayre, anyone?]), it inspired movies just after it (such as The Dozens, which won a Grand Prize at Sundance before it was called Sundance) and 15 years later (Rob Patton-Spruill's Squeeze and, to a certain extent, Good Will Hunting). Writer-director Jan Egleson will be joining me to talk about how he was the first Bostonian to make an attempt at sustained, grass-roots dramatic filmmaking.
    The book should be in stores today. If you go to a store and they don't have it, please ask them to carry it!

'Girltalk' tonight!

As part of the celebration of Big Screen Boston's release, tonight there will be a screening of Kate Davis' phenomenal 1987 documentary Girltalk, a very intimate, dramatic look at three Boston teen runaways  (at left is one of them, Mars). The movie hasn't been shown locally in years and is not as yet on DVD. The screening starts at 8 pm at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square, and I'm very happy that Martha, one of the movie's subjects, will be on hand to talk about the movie, too.

Psst... Wanna buy a "bestseller"?

BIG SCREEN BOSTON HAS been ensconced in the Top 10 New England books on Amazon for most of the day today. Does that make it a bestseller? You can buy it there or here now, and it will be in bookstores on Thursday, if not sooner.
    The first three screenings of outstanding but rarely seen Boston movies I've set up around town are this week: Kate Davis' Girltalk at the Brattle Theater Wednesday at 8 pm; Jan Egleson's Billy in the Lowlands at the Brattle Thursday at 8; and Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies at the Museum of Fine Arts Saturday at Noon. It's the first area screening in at least five years for each of them. I'll be selling and signing books at all three, and I expect people involved with the making of the first two to be in attendance, as well. If you can't make Girltalk on Wednesday, catch me on Backstage with Barry Nolan on Wednesday night at 8 pm on CN8 (The Comcast Network). I'm supposed to be taping a segment earlier in the day.

Globe daily double

The book and screenings are covered in a couple of different places in today's Sunday Globe:

In the Movies section...

...and in the Books section.

Check 'em out.

Book excerpt: The Blinking Madonna and Other Miracles

Here is the book's section on one of the really special Boston movies, Beth Harrington's one-of-a-kind mix of documentary and staged scenes--funny, evocative, thought-provoking, endearing, personal, convincing. Like the best Boston movies, it has a great sense of place. It's never come out on commercial home video, but last time I checked the North End branch of the Boston Public Library had a VHS copy Check it out.

1995. Written and directed by Beth Harrington. With The People of the North End, Beth Harrington, Roberta Beyer, Trisha Zembruski, Lorenzo Perez, Melinda Lopez, Jeff Miller and Michael Harrington. Cinematography by Kyle Kibbe.

A 1991 VIDEOTAPE OF a North End feast shot by Beth Harrington inspired her wondrous hour-long movie. The Jamaica Plain native’s tape became a Boston media sensation when it apparently showed a Madonna statue blinking. But in letting us share in Harrington’s religious and personal reaction to the event and the subsequent hoopla, The Blinking Madonna covers much more ground than that mere “miracle.”
    Harrington establishes the context for her reaction to the incident through hilarious staged flashbacks that she narrates. In them, we see seven-year-old Beth (Roberta Beyer) in her early-1960s parochial school—complete with Bing Crosby-casual priest (Michael Harrington; no relation to Beth)—consuming herself in her religion during the heyday of Boston Catholicism (cue the clips of dashing JFK and gravel- voiced Cardinal Cushing). The kid’s-eye-view interplay between wide-eyed Beth and the ominous yet very theatrical nun (Trisha Zembruski) who teaches her is a hoot to watch. (The Archdiocese of Boston changed its mind about letting Harrington shoot inside Braintree’s St. Francis of Assisi School, causing her to film classroom interiors in Jamaica Plain’s aptly named John F. Kennedy School.)
    Staged flashbacks and newsreel footage of the changing world beyond Catholic school next combine to show how religion becomes less important in Harrington’s life. Later, though, she moves to the North End to try to return to a more traditional life, culturally if not religiously. The move is also a way for Harrington to connect with her Italian-American mother’s heritage. But, of course, even a half-Italian woman trying to fit in is still “an outsider” to North End natives, and The Blinking Madonna details her uneasy path to neighborhood acceptance with a characteristically light touch. Her social entrée was to start videotaping the cultural traditions around her in short films such as Ave Maria. (The cool, unmentioned fact that Harrington was also a backup singer for Natick’s finest son, Jonathan Richman, during several of her 18 years in the North End should also be noted.)
    The breakup of a long relationship, a move from one North End apartment to another and a lack of work lead to the vulnerable emotional state Harrington is in at the time of the blinking Madonna incident. Although she knows the “miracle” is a result of a glitch in her camcorder’s auto-focus, the event turns out to be an emotional watershed for Harrington. It doesn’t awaken any dormant religious faith, but instead makes her appreciate life’s happy little accidents and blesses her with a new go-with-the-flow attitude.
    The seed for this new attitude comes not only from the accident on the feast video, but also from the carefree new neighbors in her North Margin Street building that Harrington dubs the “airline angels” (flight personnel played by Lorenzo Perez, Melinda Lopez and Jeff Miller). As with the Catholic school sequences, the scripted scenes in which the neighbors loosen up Harrington are down to earth and funny, as are the recreations of the hubbub surrounding the video (featuring many non-professional North Enders, who do just fine before the camera).
    Beneath the intentional surface comedy of The Blinking Madonna, there’s a quiet wisdom that makes the ending very moving and the movie especially rich. Like so much of the best non-fiction moviemaking that’s come out of Greater Boston, it’s an affecting combination of soul-baring and storytelling.
    The new go-with-the-flow attitude Harrington picked up in The Blinking Madonna stuck. Eventually, she left the North End for the Pacific Northwest to be with her future husband. She also showed that she could make an outstanding movie that looked beyond her own experiences when she traveled the lost highway of American music history to spotlight the fire-breathing, foot-stomping, fringe-shaking, rule-breaking, trailblazing women of country-tinged 1950s rock ’n’ roll in 2002’s Welcome to the Club: The Women of Rockabilly.
►Locations: North End, Jamaica Plain, Boston; Braintree.
►Accents: In spades. And they’re real.
►Local color: If North End feasts, neighborhood tribalism, Cardinal Cushing clips and Catholic schools aren’t Boston local color, nothing is. You can practically taste the fried dough during the feast footage.

Book excerpt: "The Brink's Job"

I've put up a few excerpts about homegrown movies, but how about some Hollywood stuff? Here is the section on 1978's The Brink's Job, perhaps the most infamous movie production to ever have to struggle through a Boston shoot. The movie's experiences here gave Boston a downright syphilitic reputation in Hollywood. The ironic thing is that, though flawed, the movie is entertaining. Sheldon Leonard!!

1978. Directed by William Friedkin. Written by Walon Green. Based on Noel Behn’s Big Stick-Up at Brink’s. With Peter Falk, Peter Boyle, Allen Goorwitz, Warren Oates, Gena Rowlands and Paul Sorvino. Cinematography by Norman Leigh.

THE “CRIME OF THE century” becomes a caper comedy, with bumbling, two-bit thieves lucking into a big haul in director William Friedkin’s rendering of the legendary January 17, 1950 Brink’s robbery. Based on Noel Behn’s fact-based Big Stick-Up at Brink’s and scripted by Wild Bunch writer Walon Green, The Brink’s Job uses the ultimate heist comedy, Italy’s Big Deal on Madonna Street, as its model.
    Not surprisingly, the 1978 comedy never reaches its predecessor’s level of lunacy in character and deed. But it unearths a few hidden corners of the city (like the “ghost sign” on the back of the Gaiety Theater in its opening sequence), lets production designer Dean Tavoularis (The Godfather) loose in recreating bygone Boston and emerges as an agreeable enough diversion from the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist.
    There are no bad guys in The Brink’s Job, a perspective accentuated by the casting of charismatic Peter Falk as its hero. His Tony Pino is a crook destined never to taste the big time as the movie starts. He gets pinched in a botched slaughterhouse robbery and, when he gets out and gets back to work, his break-in of a candy factory, complete with pratfalls in piles of gumballs, is almost as comical as it is unproductive. Tony might be unlucky, but brother- in-law Vinnie (the always amusing Allen Goorwitz) is just plain stupid. The way they stumble upon a Brink’s depot, in which stacks of money are being casually toted from armored cars, is dumb luck—but Tony’s determination to penetrate the company’s counting rooms and vault, which “smarter” guys might have assumed are well-secured, is actually admirable.
    This is a motley-crew movie, and in addition to Tony and Vinnie, there are also bookie Jazz (Paul Sorvino), demolitions expert Specs (Warren Oates), fence McGinnis (Peter Boyle) and lifetime crooks Sandy (Gerard Murphy) and Gus (Kevin O’Connor) in on the job. There’s a definite Runyonesque flavor to their antics, and the comedy hits a groove when the bunch plans the heist (it’s a riot how Specs originally wants to fire a bazooka into the vault from across the street, and can’t imagine how that might be a little conspicuous). When the guys actually carry out the heist, it’s staged as a relatively straight suspense sequence. Mirroring the lunacy of the crew is that of obsessive J. Edgar Hoover (Sheldon Leonard), who theorizes the robbery is the “missing link” between Communism and organized crime (in reality, Hoover’s FBI spent $29 million and only ever recovered $52,000 of the $1.2 million in cash and $1.5 million in checks and securities).
    The Brink’s Job stumbles in its late action, giving a poor sense of elapsed time and omitting much bizarre, real-life intrigue (is this perhaps a consequence of the movie somehow going from 118 minutes in its original release to 104 on video?). The clumsy resolution mutes the movie’s charms. While the locations don’t always scream Boston, they are very effective: the North Terminal Garage Building at Prince and Commercial streets (the same structure where the real robbery happened), the old Dudley elevated Orange Line stop, the Custom House Tower steps for the last big crowd scene, Tony taking his wife (Gena Rowlands) to Rino’s restaurant in East Boston and Stoneham doubling for a Pennsylvania town’s Main Street.
    Not yet released on DVD as of this writing and out of print on VHS, The Brink’s Job has been all but forgotten by most. But its effect on the relationship between Boston and Hollywood lingered for decades (see below). Of course, that had nothing to do with its content.
►Locations: North End, Financial District, East Boston, Charlestown, Roxbury, Boston; Stoneham.
►Accents: This is a movie you trot out whenever people talk about mangled Boston accents. With Peter Falk, Peter Boyle, Warren Oates, Paul Sorvino and Allen Goorwitz (a/k/a Allen Garfield), among others, The Brink’s Job has as colorful a 1970s ensemble cast as you could hope for. Boyle’s character is an Irishman, so he’s exempt, but Falk’s and Goorwitz’s New York accents dominate, as does Oates’ Appalachian drawl. Falk’s Tony Pino is even given a good favorite Boston exclamation (“Mothah ah Gawd”), but the actor’s attempts to do the accent are middling at best, as are Oates’. Sorvino, who’d played a Boston cabbie in 1972’s Dealing, does better, but is still not that convincing. The amazing thing is that the strongest Boston accent comes from the judge who sends up Specs and Gus, and he’s supposed to be in Pennsylvania.
►Local color: It’s great to see some of the locations here in a movie, like the North Washington Street Bridge. But, in a way, most of the locations are so tucked away that they could be anywhere (since the movie takes place in 1938, 1944 and the 1950s, they had to use tucked-away places that hadn’t been modernized). So local color is lower than expected. There are old Hood and Moxie signs on display and a mention of Narragansett (the race track, not the beer), but not very much “public” action.
►Off the set: The shenanigans surrounding The Brink’s Job forever overshadow the actual movie. First off, the North End’s narrow streets are not friendly to the convoys of trucks and trailers that accompany a major motion picture production. Just try turning an 18-wheeler down Sheafe Street. And stories— some no doubt true, some legend—abound of neighborhood residents finding creative ways of getting courtesy payments to take down TV aerials, air conditioners and other visual impediments to the movie’s authenticity.
    But these are not the most extreme shenanigans. Two episodes stand out. One is when gunmen barged into the movie’s Stuart Street production office and stole several cans of film from the editing room. In a case of life imitating art, the misinformed robbers then tried to ransom the film, which was practically worthless, since the negative was still in the production’s possession.
    The worst was yet to come. As detailed in Nat Segaloff’s book Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and Films of William Friedkin, an investigation into the extortion of five film productions, including The Brink’s Job, by The Federal Organized Crime Task Force led to charges being filed against five Boston area Teamsters. Although Friedkin denied knowledge of any such payments during a 1978 press conference, having been working solely on the creative end of the production, executive producer Dino De Laurentiis told NBC the movie spent over a million dollars hiring more Teamsters than necessary. From this point on, “Brink’s job” must have become a two-word Hollywood code for “Why would you ever want to shoot a movie in Boston and put up with that, you schmuck?”

Screening #3: "Titicut Follies," Museum of Fine Arts, May 3

LOOKING FOR AN UNUSUAL way to start your weekend? How about a Saturday at noon screening of Titicut Follies, Frederick Wiseman's controversial 1967 documentary shot at Bridgewater State Hospital? That's what the MFA will be offering on May 3 in their contribution to the celebration of the release of Big Screen Boston (as with all the screenings, I'll be there to introduce the movie and sign some books). It won't exactly have you leaving the theater with a skip in your step, but the disturbing film (banned for 25 years by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!) will give you the opportunity to see one of the best documentaries to come out of the vibrant Boston-Cambridge documentary scene and the movie that started Wiseman's formidable body of work. Documentaries presented me with some interesting choices when constructing the book. Often, local documentarians' films aren't necessarily "Boston movies" by the usual standards (setting, local color, etc.). But their work is so important to local film culture that they certainly deserve a place in the book. So I've included a cross-section of significant documentaries. In the case of veteran filmmakers such as Wiseman, Errol Morris and Ross McElwee, I've emphasized one movie, and mentioned some of their other films in the coverage of that movie. With Wiseman, the "one movie" had to be Titicut Follies. Oddly enough, it does have a lot of local color, whether it's the accents, the 1960s chain-smoking [like in the photo above, courtesy of Zipporah Films] and Masshole-style bureaucratic indifference. It's not conventional "fun," but it sure is rewarding.

Book excerpt: "Billy in the Lowlands"

Inspired by Italian neo-realism, British kitchen-sink dramas, the French New Wave and the kids he taught at Cambridge's The Group School, actor Jan Egleson turned writer-director in Billy, a technically crude but emotionally energetic film that blazed the trail for independent filmmaking in Greater Boston. It will be shown at the Brattle Theater on May 1, its first local showing since 2001.

1979. Written and directed by Jan Egleson. With Henry Tomaszewski, Paul Benedict, Genevieve Reale and David Clennon. Cinematography by D’Arcy Marsh.

TO PARAPHRASE AN OLD line of dialogue, there’s not a lot to Billy in the Lowlands, but what’s there is choice. In many ways, Jan Egleson’s homegrown movie began indie feature filmmaking in Greater Boston. The drama struggles to get going, but it ultimately kicks in and its offbeat coming-of-age tale definitely stays with you.
    It takes a while to tune into Billy in the Lowlands’ particular rhythms. Egleson was a theater actor who’d occasionally been in movies—he’s the young soldier nervously selling guns in The Friends of Eddie Coyle and the guy whose bike is almost stolen here—and the style of his first movie is fairly primitive. Since there was no fiction filmmaking community in Boston at the time (the movie is actually a production of the famed Theater Company of Boston), Egleson’s small crew was just as inexperienced as he was. He cast the movie with a combination of professionals (Paul Benedict, David Clennon) and nonprofessionals, including teens from Cambridge’s The Group School for troubled youth, where Egleson volunteered as a drama instructor.
    These kids’ anecdotes provided the inspiration for Egleson’s tale of Billy (Henry Tomaszewski), a trouble magnet who rests all his hopes on a reunion with his wayward father (Benedict). Billy’s bad luck and poor judgment are evident right away when he punches out at his foundry job in Quincy, and a joy-riding friend pulls up and asks him if he wants a ride home—in a stolen car. Billy, who we soon learn is on probation, gets in, the cops catch them and Billy ends up in juvenile prison in Billerica.
    When Billy gets a call about his grandfather’s death and his father flying in for the funeral, he sneaks away from jail to find him, thinking his father will take him far away. Once he gets back to Cambridge and finds his friends from his housing project, who try to help him get to Lynn, where his father is supposed to be, the story takes on a real urgency and hits its stride. After the set-up, the last two-thirds of the movie take place over a 24-hour period.
    Tomaszewski’s nervous energy suits the urgency that grips the title character (of course, the fact that Billy has handcuffs he wants to shed adds to the kid’s frenzy). The scenes with his friend Liz have a special spark, because Genevieve Reale, who plays her, has an unusually expressive face. Liz is sad-eyed, as if she knows more about what’s ahead than Billy does. We know Billy is deceiving himself about his dad because, at various times, he tells others his father is an artichoke farmer, a trucker and an oil-well driller. Sure enough, once Billy finds his father, he’s a drunk who doesn’t live in Billy’s land of dreams, California, but in Cleveland. There’s a humorous, skin-crawling awkwardness to most of their scenes together, but the movie ends with hope, not despair, as the encounter awakens Billy to the fact that no one is going to shape him up but him.
    Of course, Billy’s lack of style is its style. It’s a back-to-basics, grass-roots movie all the way. I assume Egleson had permits to shoot some scenes in Harvard Square, or else the Cambridge police would have quickly shooed him away, but some of the little moments—like Billy panhandling for change—feel as if the director just pushed Tomaszewski into a real crowd and filmed what happened. There’s also a gritty beauty to shots like the one in which Billy, Liz and another friend ride towards the Paragon Park rollercoaster at dawn, while the sequence in Cardell’s, the atmospheric Harvard Square greasy spoon that used to be across from the Brattle Theater, is pure Edward Hopper. The prison scenes are also in Cambridge (at the then-new Middlesex courthouse), while the Lynn scenes were done mostly in Hull (after plans to shoot in Revere were thwarted by the demolition of the rollercoaster there). [That's Benedict and Tomaszewski in Hull in the photo above.]
    One of my favorite touches, which I’m sure no one thought twice about at the time, is that Billy has a Sears basketball near the end of the movie. Now that Sears no longer makes things like basketballs, it just seems so right. Billy and his friends are more likely to have things or frequent places that are old than they are to be enjoying the latest things. They don’t live in a land of dreams.
►Locations: Cambridge; Quincy; Hull; Medford.
►Accents: All real, all the time. They ought to make Hollywood dialect coaches watch it.
►Local color: This one will definitely take you back, if you’re old enough to remember, to a less slick time: Paragon Park! Zayre! Cardell’s, Brigham’s and the antiquated wooden-slats escalator in “old” Harvard Square! And there’s a great view of the roster of stores at Fresh Pond Shopping Center, circa 1977.

Screening #2: "Billy in the Lowlands," Brattle Theater, May 1

It's not the first Boston independent feature. It's not the best Boston independent feature. But Cambridge-based writer-director Jan Egleson's Billy in the Lowlands (1979) is probably the most important Boston independent feature. No similar movie inspired as many subsequent movies as this unpretentious movie inspired by the French New Wave, the story of its trouble-prone title character (Henry Tomaszewski)--The Dozens, Squeeze and, to a small extent, Good Will Hunting being some of its "offspring." That's why Billy is one of the movies that will be revived to help celebrate the release of Big Screen Boston. It will be at the Brattle on the night of May 1. The no-budget movie has a real energy, and some great locations, mainly in Cambridge and Hull (like the evocative photo here, with Paul Benedict and Tomaszewski walking through Nantasket at dawn). As with the screening of Girltalk the night before, some of the people involved with the movie will be coming out for it. Jan Egleson will be there to discuss the first of his "Boston trilogy," while the word has also gone out to several cast members. I'll post an excerpt from the book about Billy soon; in the meantime, if you haven't read the excerpts about the "Beanstreets" movies (of which it's the first), those offer a lot of background into the movie's importance.

Book excerpt: "Girltalk"

Here's the book's entry for Kate Davis' Girltalk, the first of the movies that will be revived to coincide with the May 1 release of Big Screen Boston. It will show at the Brattle Theater on April 30. Only the middle of the photos (all courtesy of Kate Davis) appears in the book, though here it's in glorious color.

1987. Directed by Kate Davis. Cinematography by Alyson Denny.

THIS IS THE BOSTON movie guaranteed to break your heart. Former Harvard students Kate Davis and Alyson Denny, who both worked as editors on Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March, take their documentary camera and sound recorder to places movies rarely dare to travel, focusing on three Boston teen runaways. Rather than damning its troubled teens to hopelessness or glazing them in simple solutions, Girltalk humanizes all those statistics about runaways, teen pregnancies and abused children. The result is an engrossing combination of heartbreaking tragedy and life-affirming resilience.
    Each girl is in a different stage of her teen years and a different stage of her troubles. Pinky is a 14-year-old Roxbury truant who’s run away in the past. After living in two foster homes briefly, she’s now back with her mother in a no-questions-asked situation. Mars left home at 13, after being raped by her stepbrother. Years later, she’s still numbed by the experience, and works as a stripper in the Combat Zone. And Somerville’s Martha—19, single and pregnant—is using motherhood as a reason to put a past of sexual abuse and self-destructive behavior behind her.
    Combining interviews and footage that follow each in day-to-day activities, Girltalk deftly avoids pigeonholing or exploiting the girls. These girls are here because of their troubles, yet they’re not simply victims in a “case study” movie. Mars and Martha both talk about the sexual abuse they suffered, yet Davis resists sensationalism. The movie never acts with moral superiority or pity, and it never looks down on its “girls.”
    It also never weighs itself down with self-importance. Pinky, Mars and Martha appear to be so comfortable on camera that the movie is unusually intimate and they speak very freely. Director Davis, who’d previously co-written Vacant Lot, a documentary-style short about Somerville project kids, obviously made them at ease. Girltalk’s greatest achievement is blending a variety of emotions into a thoroughly captivating, bittersweet mood. Such a mood accommodates a funny-sad line like Pinky’s half-optimistic, half-pessimistic “The first time I get married I’m gonna wear white, the second time I’m gonna wear pink,” and makes you feel for Martha at the same time you want to chew her out for smoking while pregnant.
    The tone also informs the sequences filmed at the bar where Mars strips in a schoolgirl’s uniform, the Combat Zone’s Pussycat Lounge (which had already closed by the time the movie opened at the Brattle Theater in May 1988). She usually performs her act in a schoolgirl outfit, the energetic music to which she disrobes mixing with the sad irony of what grown-up-too-soon Mars is doing.
    Such a mood makes Girltalk unusually dramatic. Mars’ final dance, in which she’s bathed in red light and wears a diaphanous cape, is set to Janis Ian’s “Bright Light and Promises” and has the sad beauty of the Rolling Stones’ “Love in Vain” sequence in Albert and David Maysles’ Gimme Shelter. There’s a split-second when the camera catches the expression of weary despair on Mars’ face as she finishes, and there’s more emotional tension in it than most fiction films ever muster.
    Though all three girls complain of inattentive parenting, Girltalk doesn’t merely point fingers. It looks more towards the future. With Mars and Martha, the movie seems to say, we’re watching survivors (though Martha’s baby has a worried face that makes you think he knows the struggle he’s in for). In Pinky’s case, there’s the foreboding of someone who seems headed for more trouble. Girltalk is not conventionally entertaining, but it is incredibly engaging. Like the best documentaries that have taken a similar path—from Streetwise and Hoop Dreams to Love and Diane—you’ll never forget it.

Book excerpt: The "Beanstreets" movies, Part 2

Here is another section from the introduction concerning the "Beanstreets" movies--the first sustained wave of Boston independent features. Take a look at the earlier excerpt to see how these movies came about, and read about the gritty stories they told.

SO THE IDEALISTIC "BEANSTREETS" movies came and went with barely a blip. Or did they? A more accurate description might be that they quietly planted a seed, and the crop is still being reaped today.
    Put bluntly, the chances that Hollywood ever would have made Boston “neighborhood movies” like Mystic River or The Departed were it not for Billy in the Lowlands—a movie few people are even aware of today—are doubtful. But the dots are pretty easy to connect. Billy begat Dark End of the Street, in which a little tyke named Ben Affleck made his acting debut [in photo, Laura Harrington and Lance Henriksen in The Dark End of the Street]. Affleck’s and Matt Damon’s families were friendly with Egleson’s before Matt and Ben were even born—Affleck’s dad acted some with the Theater Company of Boston and the three families were all Cambridge neighbors. The influence of Egleson’s homegrown movies rubbed off on Good Will Hunting, and not just on Damon and Affleck’s stubborn insistence that at least a good chunk of the movie be shot locally. As Affleck told me shortly before filming began on Good Will Hunting: “Part of what the movie’s about on a subtext level is class and the way people deal with each other. In Cambridge, we were acutely aware of the stark contrast between university life and the lives of the people who live there.” Working on Egleson’s second movie surely wasn’t the only way Affleck learned about class struggle, but it helped to shape the specific understanding of society that Good Will Hunting exudes.
    Good Will Hunting isn’t the only sprout that’s the result of the “Beanstreets” movies. Robert Patton-Spruill, the Roxbury-based director and producer, is the son of another Theater Company of Boston alumnus, B.U. drama professor James Spruill. In the 1990s, when Patton-Spruill was working at Collinge-Pickman, the casting agency co-founded by Egleson’s wife, Patty Collinge, Egleson took Patton-Spruill under his wing. The two collaborated on an unproduced script for The Boy Without a Flag, the Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. story Egleson had optioned. That project never came to fruition, but Patton- Spruill’s first movie, 1997’s Squeeze, grew out of his experiences with kids at the Dorchester Youth Collaborative, just as Egleson’s early movies had been inspired by his Group School students. Like Egleson, Patton-Spruill cast untrained kids as his Squeeze leads.
    Good Will Hunting and Squeeze are big parts of the impressive late-1990s cluster of Boston independent movies that also included Brad Anderson’s Next Stop Wonderland and Ted Demme’s Denis Leary-produced Monument Ave. These films, as much as Blown Away, Housesitter or The Crucible—Hollywood visits that pumped much more money into local coffers—kept Boston an interesting movie city and indirectly inspired Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese to fight their studios for a local shooting schedule—the entire movie for Mystic River, about half for The Departed. The momentum generated by such acclaimed movies also made it possible for Affleck to later direct his own Boston neighborhood movie, Gone Baby Gone—like Mystic River, an adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel.

Screening #1: "Girltalk," April 30, Brattle Theater

Several screenings of movies covered in Big Screen Boston will be happening to celebrate the book's May 1 release. The first will be Kate Davis' unforgettable documentary Girltalk at the Brattle Theater, April 30 at 8 pm. This will be the movie's first local screening in 20 years, back at the theater where it first opening in 1988. Although it had a small theatrical release and it came out on VHS during the late 1980s, Girltalk has never been released on DVD and has been all but forgotten. But it's one of the best movies to spring from the Boston-Cambridge documentary scene, and one of those largely unheralded movies on which I hope the book will shine deserved light. One of the three young women profiled in it, Martha (in photo with her then-young son), will be appearing at the screening with me. I'll be posting an excerpt from the book about Girltalk (along with additional photos) before the screening.

Book excerpt: 'Mystery Street'

We all know The Departed. But fewer of us know the other movie mentioned in Big Screen Boston's subtitle, Mystery Street. So here is an excerpt of the book's entry on this 1950 film noir, the first movie to predominantly feature location shooting in the Hub.

1950. Directed by John Sturges. Written by Sydney Boehm and Richard Brooks. Based on Leonard Spigelgass’ story. With Ricardo Montalban, Sally Forrest, Bruce Bennett, Elsa Lanchester, Marshall Thompson, Edmon Ryan, Betsy Blair and Jan Sterling. Cinematography by John Alton.

HOLLYWOOD FINALLY CAME TO Boston for this 1950 thriller, the first commercial feature to be predominantly shot in the area. Like the later (and lesser) Walk East on Beacon!, Mystery Street (also known as Murder at Harvard) rides the post-war wave of realistic crime dramas, pioneered by low-budget films like Anthony Mann’s T-Men, many of which were shot on location. Director John Sturges’ movie doesn’t quite use the semi-documentary approach that Walk East and other similar movies did. In this case, that’s all for the better. T-Men director of photography John Alton, one of the essential film noir cinematographers, is behind the camera here, bringing a sense of shadowy dread to the Boston locations in this pre-CSI police procedural in which a human skeleton is the only evidence with which an investigation starts.
    Alton’s work is most evident in the set-up for the detective work that will follow. The movie opens in a Beacon Hill rooming house where darkness dominates, except for the light that shines on desperate Vivian Helding (Jan Sterling, right in photo above; click on it for larger view), the house phone she’s using and the ajar door of eavesdropping landlady Mrs. Smerrling (Elsa Lanchester). It turns out Vivian, a B-girl at a Scollay Square dive called The Grass Skirt, is pregnant, and the married Hyannis man who fathered the child is giving her the brush-off.
    At The Grass Skirt, where Vivian’s boyfriend has stood her up, she gloms onto drunk Henry (Marshall Thompson), “helps” him move his car and keeps driving it to the Cape, where she eventually ditches Henry and meets with the boyfriend, whose face isn’t shown. He shoots her, dumps her body in the ocean and pushes the stolen car into a lake.
    It’s only months later, when a birdwatcher finds Vivian’s skeleton sticking out of a sandy beach, that the investigation begins. Barnstable County investigator Pete Moralas (Ricardo Montalban) is on the case, which eventually leads him to Beacon Hill, Cambridge and Harvard Medical School’s Department of Legal Medicine in Roxbury. That’s where Dr. McAdoo (Bruce Bennett) helps Moralas identify the body and build a case against unwitting Henry, who initially denies he met Vivian because he’s married and wasn’t  supposed to be in The Grass Skirt (he was supposed to be at the Boston Lying-In Hospital with his pregnant wife). But that changes when McAdoo discovers the cause of death was a gunshot, putting Moralas on a collision course with the well-to-do Hyannis boyfriend (Edmon Ryan). He is finally shown to the audience halfway through the movie, when snooping Mrs. Smerrling tries to blackmail him.
    As crime thrillers circa 1950 are wont to do, Mystery Street climaxes in a public place, Trinity Station. This long-gone train station adjacent to Back Bay Station is a suitably bustling, urban backdrop for the end chase (its train yard is apparently now part of the Mass. Pike). Although the rooming house is on fictional “Bunker Street,” the building used appears to be on Pinckney Street near Anderson Street (you can see the old New England College of Pharmacy there at one point). Suspect Henry lives in Charlestown (in a forward-looking movie connection, just a half-block from Monument Avenue), while The Grass Skirt exterior is on a studio backlot. Aside from the dunes footage (presumably) it’s unclear if any of the Cape Cod action was done there; the gas station with the greasy spoon attached looks to be in California (its signs for Caloco Oil sure sound West Coast). There’s also a Harvard Yard sequence that turns out to be rather inconsequential (since the cop finds out he has to go over to the Med School), but it adds to the movie’s local color. Amusingly, co-star Thompson (later of TV’s Daktari) appears on the movie’s trailer to offer special thanks to Harvard for its cooperation, something the school generally doesn’t offer anymore.
    Like Alton’s artful Hollywood cinematography, non-local flavor comes from the cast, with Lanchester, the bride of Frankenstein herself, practically stealing the show with her proper yet hypocritically opportunistic landlady. Years before he became kitsch, Montalban is a sturdy presence in this brisk B-thriller.
►Locations: Beacon Hill, Roxbury, Back Bay, Charlestown, Boston; Cambridge; Cape Cod.
►Accents: Back in a time when there probably were a greater percentage of area residents with Boston accents than there are now, Mystery Street generally refrains from including them. But there are generic New England accents from Cape Cod characters talking about the found skeleton. And we do get what might be Hollywood’s first overdone Boston accent from Wally Maher, who plays the Boston detective Moralas teams with in the city. Maher, who also voiced the title character in Tex Avery’s Screwy Squirrel cartoons, couldn’t quite get the Boston accent.
►Local color: Over 50 years later, many of the shooting locations will have you wondering their exact whereabouts, especially Trinity Station. But the movie’s issues also hit close to home at times, specifically the hypocrisy of the landlady, a self-righteous moral guardian who no doubt supported many a Boston book banning, and the elitism of Vivian’s blue-blooded killer, who not only victimizes her, but also feels superior to first-generation American Moralas, and lets him know it.

Here's a link to the movie's trailer.

Book excerpt: The "Beanstreets" movies, Part 1

This is a section of the book's introduction, this particular part dealing with the emergence of independent filmmaking in Boston in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I've also included some rare photos which are not in the book (photos courtesy of Jan Egleson). Enjoy this preview. The book is available May 1...

BOSTON MIGHT HAVE BEEN a periodic pit stop for Hollywood by the 1970s, but feature filmmaking that really reflected the city didn’t emerge until two local traditions, documentary filmmaking and theater companies, intersected.
    Boston had long been a hot spot for both. Many of the country’s most innovative non-fiction filmmakers had ties to the area. Albert and David Maysles (Salesman, Gimme Shelter) grew up in Brookline and Dorchester; lawyer turned filmmaker Frederick Wiseman (Titicut Follies) was based here; and such directors as Richard Leacock, Ed Pincus, Alfred Guzzetti and Richard Rogers were teaching locally. Boston was one of the homes of “direct cinema” non-fiction filmmaking, a style that frowned upon narration and other overt forms of audience manipulation. These filmmakers went out into the world and shot “fly on the wall” style, and for this they needed stripped-down, portable equipment, much of which they developed themselves. Boston’s documentary films were also often politically motivated, with an eye toward focusing on the disenfranchised and issues of the day. There was a Boston chapter of the activist film collective Newsreel, Henry Hampton formed his production company Blackside in 1968 (it would eventually make the definitive civil-rights chronicle Eyes on the Prize in the late 1980s) and WGBH supplied a substantial amount of documentary programming to PBS.
    So, in the 1970s, Boston did not have many people who knew how to shoot and edit a polished, “professional” feature film. But it did have many who knew how to make documentaries.
    Meanwhile, David Wheeler’s Theater Company of Boston was ambitiously staging plays in the area, with such actors as Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Blythe Danner, John Cazale, Stockard Channing and Lance Henriksen appearing in its productions. So, too, did Jan Egleson, a young actor who’d begun directing for the company. Egleson had had a small part in The Friends of Eddie Coyle as a soldier selling stolen guns; technical problems necessitated the reshooting of his scene, and he took the extra time on the set to observe the logistics of moviemaking.
    “The transition was just a natural step from doing theater to doing film,” he says, years later. It wasn’t until a few years after Eddie Coyle that he’d have the inspiration. During the run of one Theater Company of Boston production, The Medal of Honor Rag, he had pondered filming a performance for posterity. But that never happened. Then Egleson and his wife, actress (and future casting agent) Patty Collinge, volunteered to teach drama at The Group School, an alternative Cambridge school for working-class kids.
    “A lot of the kids were great actors, they were naturals,” Egleson recalls. “Their stories were fascinating, and their experiences were different from what you could see in mainstream films. So we took the stories that the kids told and wove them into a script and worked with them as actors. And we used the technique of documentary guys who were here: we used their lightweight equipment, we shot on the street with available light.”
    The result was Billy in the Lowlands, among the first homegrown feature films and the most ambitious yet (James A. Pike’s 1966 teen picture Feelin’ Good and Dick Bartlett’s daffy 1971 comedy Ruby predate it). With Henry Tomaszewski  (in photo below) as the feisty anti-hero, Billy is no-frills filmmaking that challenges audiences to invest themselves in characters who are just scraping by in life, if that, and to find drama in the everyday world around them. Billy is certainly not for all audiences—not escapist enough for some nor exotic enough for others (Egleson used to joke that his movie would have gotten more attention in America if he’d made it in Polish and subtitled it). It had a spotty release in theaters, but earned a New England Emmy after later airing on WGBH, prompting the station to help finance Egleson’s follow-up, the Cambridge projects drama The Dark End of the Street.
    The apparatus to get low-budget, American non-horror independent movies to audiences barely existed at the time. But Egleson’s film reflected a growing rebellion against Hollywood hegemony. Like him, other moviemakers were taking to their streets, including Victor Nuñez (Gal Young ’Un) in Florida and the team of Rob Nilsson and John Hanson (Northern Lights) in Minnesota. Regional filmmaking was posing no threat to Hollywood, but it was bubbling under the surface. And Billy in the Lowlands had a ripple effect in Boston.
    Among those who saw Egleson’s movie were Robert Jones and the husband-and-wife duo of Randall Conrad and Christine Dall. All three had been making documentaries, but recognized that Egleson had shown how they could take their talents in a new direction. After seeing Billy, and as Egleson filmed The Dark End of the Street, these other moviemakers made their own fiction films—The Dozens (1981) by Conrad and Dall, Mission Hill (1982) by Jones.
    “I think there was a craving to make films,” Conrad recalls of the time. “Making films was a very ’60s thing. People used to joke that, in Cambridge, if you tripped over an architect you fell over a filmmaker—they were so common. It was sacrosanct to make documentaries, for various reasons. (But) in some of our fantasies, we all wanted to make a feature film—a dramatic movie. I remember going over to see Jan and asking him a little bit of how he worked. Because I had zero experience making fiction films, a fact which was to be sorely tested during the shoot.
    “Jan was very encouraging,” Conrad adds. “He was very lonely out there by himself.”
    For Dall, making The Dozens—which she and Conrad shot in 1978 and 1979, shortly before they were married—wasn’t chasing a dream, it was a practical solution. Although they’d originally imagined doing a movie about a just-released female convict as a documentary, she saw the logistical problems in that.
    “One of the big problems we faced if we were going to do it as a documentary was being allowed into  the real life of this person,” Dall says. “Obviously, they’re not going to want what they’re doing and who they’re associating with out there in the public.”
    So The Dozens became well-researched fiction, with a script the couple wrote with Marian Taylor, an ex-con who also acts in the movie. Debra Margolies brings fiery spunk to the role of Sally, a young woman with one foot in prison and the other in a drab, blue-collar world of limited opportunities, especially for a woman. Inspired by the English movies of everyday drudgery made by Ken Loach and Roland Joffé, it’s grim yet somehow lyrical.
    Robert Jones, then teaching film at Boston University, felt the influence of Billy in the Lowlands, too. “Jan was definitely the primary influence—I really liked his films and his style,” says the Mission Hill director. Like Egleson’s films and The Dozens, Mission Hill, set in the neighborhood where Jones grew up (though filmed in other parts of Boston and its surroundings), is a blue-collar drama. But it spreads its focus over an entire family—a dissipated single mother (Barbara Orson) and the kids (Brian Burke, Alice Barrett and John Mahoney) who are still rattling their cages to escape their triple-decker flat. Social realism isn’t the only thing linking the movies. “The tech talent pool was very thin, so we all used the same camera people, editors, make-up people, etc., which augmented the feeling of community,” recall  Jones.
    Movies such as Billy in the Lowlands, The Dozens, The Dark End of the Street and Mission Hill received plenty of local attention and jump-started Boston independent moviemaking. There was even a 1983 Museum of Fine Arts panel discussion with all four directors which, putting a local twist on Scorsese’s Mean Streets, branded their movies as “Beanstreets” movies. But the idea of self-sustaining regional cinema was not economically viable. In order for a movie to be attractive to the sort of independent film distributors that sprang up in the 1980s, it had to appeal to audiences nationwide, conforming to the accepted style and look of a “commercial movie” and, in the process, requiring an enhanced budget and losing some local flavor.
    After The Dark End of the Street, Egleson was unable to secure financing for the follow-up he’d intended. Instead, he eventually found partial funding from PBS’ new American Playhouse series for The Little Sister, a project that had a similar grass-roots genesis to his previous movies but, for better or worse, also had a much more professional rendering. His career since has been a mixture of PBS, Hollywood and Boston films, including the withering black comedy A Shock to the System, locally shot TV movies such as Big Time and Original Sins and a triumphant return to local moviemaking with 2001’s The Blue Diner, the last in collaboration with the late Natatcha Estébanez. Since Egleson was not able to continue making movies only in Boston, Billy in the Lowlands, The Dark End of the Street and The Little Sister retroactively became known as his “Boston trilogy.”
    Egleson says he “always” has at least one Boston project he’s trying to get made at any given time. “I live here and I love the city, I love the way it looks and everything else about it,” he explains. “But I also like the idea that you do work that’s rooted in where you are. It’s just much less abstract. When you’re making a film about your neighborhood or your city, it has a very different feel than when you go somewhere and make it all up. It’s very different.”
    Despite winning a Grand Prize at the U.S. Film & Video Festival (later renamed the Sundance Film Festival), The Dozens did not open doors for Randall Conrad and Christine Dall. “There was no thought of sitting down with the studios,” Conrad says, contrasting the situation with that awaiting today’s Sundance award winners. And the pair wanted no part of the fund-raising struggle necessary to make another movie like their first.
    “For me, it was the reality of (features) not really being about filmmaking and being able to make social justice movies,” says Dall, explaining why there was no follow-up to The Dozens. “This was a business. It takes money, a lot of money, to do it. If you don’t have access to it, it’s a killer. You have no money, you can’t support yourself. I wanted to have a family.”
    So it was back to documentaries for the couple. He made a short documentary about Shay’s Rebellion (A Little Rebellion Now and Then), she made the 1989 music documentary Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues. They taught, worked on other people’s movies and stayed sane.
    Similarly, Jones eventually returned to documentaries and teaching. He’s been at the University of Central Florida for over a decade, with the makers of The Blair Witch Project counted among his students. More recently, he’s been making low-budget comedies, his latest being Fetus Fetish.

More about the "Beanstreets" movies in future excerpts...