News and Events

Ben Affleck is one of the biggest names in Hollywood. And he’s a pretty big name back in his hometown of Boston as well. Russ Mitchell pays him a visit for this CBS Sunday Morning Profile.

Sometimes it takes 10 years to become an overnight sensation. Just ask Stephanie Lemelin. The actress (inset) has done 11 TV pilots in nine years, but she’s only getting traction in Tinseltown now. Lemelin, whose dad is former Bruins goalie Reggie Lemelin, has a recurring role on “The Whole Truth’’ — Jerry Bruckheimer’s new legal drama on ABC costarring Rob Morrow — and also shows up in the new issue of Esquire, dubbed one of the “Sexiest New Faces of Fall TV.’’ (Daniella Alonso of “My Generation’’ and “Lone Star’’ lovely Eloise Mumford are a couple of the others.)

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Four Massachusetts-made films (THE TOWN, THE SOCIAL NETWORK, COMPANY MEN, and THE FIGHTER) lead a parade of new films opening nationally in the last quarter of 2010.

A first for the Boston Film Festival this year is that all screenings will take place at the much-heralded, invitingly intimate Stuart Street Playhouse, a 425-seat, stadium-style, state-of-the-art independent cinema at 200 Stuart St., in Boston’s Theater District.

The critics have spoken, and early reviews out of Venice for Ben Affleck’s made-in-Boston thriller “The Town” are mostly positive. The set-in-Charlestown bank-robbery drama debuted at the Venice Film Festival earlier this week, and most of the critics say the flick is a worthy successor to Hub classics such as “The Departed,” ‘Mystic River’ and Ben’s earlier work in “Gone Baby Gone.”

“Everyone in this business was an extra,” said Angela Peri, owner of Boston Casting. “I was an extra.” According to a 2010 University of Massachusetts study, the Bay State is among the fastest growing states in the country for film production. And while employment is down, film production jobs have increased, the study said. Case in point: Ben Affleck’s “The Town” was shot here and opens Sept. 17.

The stars of director Ben Affleck’s new shot-in-Boston heist drama will attend the Sept. 14 screening at Fenway Park. Warner Bros. yesterday announced that “The Town’’ will premiere at the ballpark, and the all-star cast, including Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively, Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, and Chris Cooper, will join Affleck for the special event in the outfield.

The production company Moderncine has spent the past four weeks in mostly remote parts of Greenfield and Montague shooting the movie “The Woman,” and some of the scenes are not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. 



Behind the scenes of David O. Russell’s film “The Fighter”, starring Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, and Melissa Leo. The Fighter, is a drama about boxer “Irish” Micky Ward’s …

Massachusetts native Taylor Schilling is taking Hollywood by storm. Best known for her role as tough Iraq vet nurse Veronica Callahan on NBC’s “Mercy,” Taylor will hit the silver screen as Zac Efron’s leading lady in the film adaptation of the Nicholas Sparks’ novel “The Lucky One.”

Despite the extraordinary passion of Mark Wahlberg, who started training almost four years ago for the lead role as the real-life boxer Micky Ward, “THE FIGHTER” still had to survive a grueling behind-the-scenes struggle before landing on the schedule at Paramount Pictures, which plans to release it on Dec. 10, as the awards season hits full stride.

Just a day after Dorchester’s own Mark Wahlberg premiered his comedy “The Other Guys’’ in New York with costars Will Ferrell and Eva Mendes, he took the film to Hingham — more specifically to Alma Nove, his brother Paul Wahlberg’s new restaurant in the Hingham Shipyard.

Filmmaking in the county has operated at a steady pace since “Pretty Poison” became the first major motion picture made in Berkshire County. It was shot in 1968 in North Adams and Great Barrington and was followed a year later by “Alice’s Restaurant.” This past spring, two out-of-town filmmakers came here to shoot low-budget short feature films.

The New York Times reported this week that “The Woman” could begin shooting Aug. 2. Massachusetts offers filmmakers a 25 percent tax credit on money spent in the state. In recent years, that has been enough to draw movies like “Shutter Island” and “Gone Baby Gone” to the Bay State. In 2008, parts of the Mel Gibson movie “Edge of Darkness” were filmed in Northampton and Deerfield.

The credits have been like Miracle-Gro for our industry. Over the past five years, there has been a national race — a fierce competition to attract the high-spending film and TV industries, with states across the country vying to create incentives to lure movies and TV companies and their lucrative spending to their states. The surprise winner: Massachusetts.

THE COMPANY MEN, shot in Massachusetts in 2009, opens nationally on October 22, 2010.

An odd wrinkle in the globalization of popular culture has given Massachusetts a certain currency as a place where traditional forms of masculine virtue still thrive. Movies have played a key role. The state’s efforts to attract film production, especially the film tax credit, have enabled a string of movies — “Mystic River,’’ “The Departed,’’ “Gone Baby Gone,’’ “Edge of Darkness,’’ and, next up, “The Fighter’’ and Ben Affleck’s “The Town’’ — that glorify white-ethnic (usually Irish) styles of toughness associated with working-class neighborhoods in places like Boston and Lowell. Native storytellers like Affleck, Wahlberg, and Dennis Lehane are responsible for this lionizing of Boston-area regular guys, but so are internationally prominent mythmakers from elsewhere like Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, and Mel Gibson. With the help of local casting consultants and dialogue coaches, they come here, of all places, to get some of that potent homegrown stuff.

THE TOWN, directed by Ben Affleck and shot in Massachusetts in 2009, opens nationally on September 17, 2010.

Productions of all types and sizes are hitting the road and bringing into
play what this country has to offer beyond the glitz and glamour of Tinsel Town. With tax incentive programs, a deep crew base and bountiful infrastructure, filmmakers will find themselves hard pressed to find a reason not to film in this great state.