RELEASE: BOSTON FILM BLOG TO LAUNCH TOMORROW

Tomorrow (May 17th), Filming up to Boston will officially launch at noon eastern time. The blog is focused on movies and TV shows that are set in Boston and whether or not they are accurate depictions of the city.

A big piece of the blog involves getting a taste of the Boston culture from the people that live there. Interviews such as the ones done with a "Townie", a former writer for the Boston Globe, and random people off the streets of Boston help to get an idea of how the people of Boston feel about how they are being represented by Hollywood.

Now that Filming up to Boston has made a focus on getting feedback from the people of Boston, the aim is to start reviewing movies and TV shows and analyze how accurately they depict Boston. Currently, there are only two reviews on the blog. One focuses on the actual Cheers bar that the show was based off of while the other review takes a look at the Dropkick Murphys (who have been on the soundtrack for many Boston movies) and their live album entitled Live on Lansdowne.

Another key aspect of Filming up to Boston involved editorials on Boston movies that should be made. Aside from a lot of focus on the upcoming Whitey Bulger movies, the blog also looked into how movies should be made to tell Boston's history through events that have shaped the culture and way of life in Boston. Such events that have been discussed include busing during the Civil Rights movement and the recent bombing of the Boston Marathon.

As of noon tomorrow, Filming up to Boston will be the source for everything that is Boston film. Anyone with a passion for Boston and/or Boston movies and shows is both invited and encouraged to explore this blog.

Coming Together on Common Ground

Since my sit down with Jeff Kelly, I have really been stuck on this one idea that, despite all the various kinds of people and different cultural backgrounds that make up Boston, movies have really focused mainly on the Irish in Charlestown. It's baffling. There's so much history and culture that has yet to be captured on film and to me, that's a problem. As a result, I challenged myself to look for ways to make movies based off of the different regions of Boston: The North End, Chinatown, Jamaica Plains, etc.My best attempts to find a good plot worth making a movie out of ended up being a lot tougher than I imagined. It was right as I was about to give up (call it a cliche I don't care) that I found a book under my bed that answered everything. I had to read it last semester for one of my English classes and, even though it does get into the history of Charlestown, it focuses on a very big piece of Boston history surrounding the Civil Rights movement: J. Anthony Lukas' Common Ground.

Common Ground was published in 1985 and looks at race, civil rights, and segregation in Boston through the introduction of desegregated busing in Boston the 60's and the 70's. The entire book follows the lives of three different families with three different views on busing: the Irish McGoff family in Charlestown, the African-American Twymons, and the Yankee Divers.

Yes, the story still does involve the Irish and Charlestown, but there is a critical focus on how Charlestown had come to be. Most stories about Charlestown focus on current life in "The Town". A Common Ground movie would be more focused on the why. Also, it brings in other cultures and their history in Boston with the middle to upper class Irish (the Divers) and the lower class African Americans (Twymons). With so much of a focus on segregation and the Civil Rights movement, this movie is guaranteed to not be leaning heavily in favor of Charlestown.

As I mentioned before when I discussed the making of a Boston Strong movie, there should not be any kind of big name cast in a movie like this. To bring recognizable and well-known actors into a project like this makes for a huge risk because then the viewer has the ability to leach onto one actor and then focus on one of the three families over the other. Much like the brothers who could not over shadow the firefighters and police officers for Boston Strong: The Movie, no one family can over shadow the others for the sake of depicting three equal perspectives on busing in Boston.

There's one final thing that I think gives Common Ground the potential to be a great movie: the fact that it is both true and, historically speaking, recent. Many of the people that Lukas wrote about are still alive. To me, that is a big opportunity to provide credibility and a sense of reality to the movie. However, it has the risk of losing the viewer if they watch first-hand interviews or anything of that sort. I think the actual movie should have some real flash back clips of Boston during this time, but I think it would be neat to incorporate the people that are still alive much in the same way that Schindler's List had done. The actor/actress was paired up with the actual Holocaust survivor that they were portraying in the movie. I think some sort of recognition and visual of the actual person and what they are currently doing (much in the same way that Lukas concludes the book with) would be a great way to end the movie.

So, there's my idea. I can now officially say that if anyone tries to go for it, I can take some credit. It's a shame that Lukas has passed away and will therefore make this a much more difficult book to convert into a movie. It would definitely be worth it though. Why? Because I am absolutely positive that it can make a big impact on people looking for both Civil Rights history as well as the background on more than just the Irish part of Boston.

Off the Press: A Talk with Jeff Kelly

 

When you write for a newspaper, you got to be able to know about your town. As someone who writes about the area, it’s kind of a good idea. Jeff Kelly knows all about this: he was once a writer for the Boston Globe. He wasn’t your run-of-the-mill writer doing the news or some sort of politics, which he was very adamant about as we talked in a rather crowded library.

“I really hate politics,” Jeff told me “And newspapers were just starting to get more and more political.”

Jeff, now an adjunct professor of creative writing at Endicott College, wrote non-fiction stories for the Globe while he lived in Cambridge. He had also done some work with the Boston Magazine. His favorite piece of work for them revolved around women police officers in Boston. He went out with two female detectives that who had been doing some undercover work. Jeff’s fondest moment was sitting in a little diner with them at the end of the night and asking how they learned to use their guns. The more athletically built one gave a generic answer by saying the academy. As for the other officer, she was ironically smaller than the other detective and said “Jeff, I’m from Mississippi. If you’re a girl born in Mississippi, you know how to shoot a gun.”

As a published children’s author, Jeff takes pride in the fact that all his non-fiction stories are based off of real events. It has been his specialty for many years and it is something that he encourages in each one of his classes. He still admires when his students are able to write fiction, but to Jeff, there is something deep and meaningful in writing about what has happened.

“I’ve always had a problem writing from other points of views,” he told me, which, as an English major, I was very quick to relate with him on “I always write best when I write about things that actually happened.”

Jeff then proceeded to pull a laminated story out of his bag. It was a story that he had written for the Globe about this one time that he was sitting on the T next to woman with pet rats. He made sure to point out the art that they had done to go along with his story. It was of a very muscular rat that was much larger than the rest of the people. He was sitting next to the woman and looked to be intimidating the rest of the people on the train. He found it so amusing how abstract and false the picture was. This was my way of transitioning as flawlessly as possible to Boston movies. More specifically, which ones were better: the realistic, more accurate movies or the movies that had some creative license to them?

“You know, I don’t know. It varies from movie to movie and it depends on what you’re setting out for when you make those movies. I really love the realistic movies like The Departed, though. I always liked that one scene where the cop is at the door trying to ask a woman some questions and then when she sees the mafia drive by, she slams the door. You know that she knows something. It’s a great movie and I think it does a great job depicting the Boston mafia.”

Our conversation became more and more interesting as we talked about just how segmented Boston was. There’s Chinatown, the Italian North End, a heavily Irish-filled Charlestown, and much more. Jeff pointed this out to me as he referred to Boston as “the most segmented city in America”. I knew he was right, but it made me curious then as to why so many of the movies ended up being about the Irish? Jeff wasn’t truly able to give a specific answer. As I thanked him and hurried along to my next class, we seemed to be that that was specifically a matter of whose been able to get their hands on a camera.