Movies Made Here
Movies Made Here
House of Dark Shadows, BUtterfield 8 and many more made in Tarrytown-Sleepy Hollow!
The best time I had writing for Patch.com (AOL was the original owner of this local journalism enterprise across America, remember them?!), was when I got to spin out on any idea I liked as a casual contributor. Since so many movies are filmed here in Sleepy Hollow Country, or at least many scenes, I decided to review as many as I could get my hands on.
Below are blurbs of them all with links to the original reviews, which if you’ll forgive them, Patch sometimes lost fragments of words here and there when they migrated to a new platform, so it can be less than perfect in moments — much like the movies themselves. Not my fault! AOL!
Here we go, from the original article on Patch here. Links lead to full reviews.
Movies Made Here: Recapping the Reviews of 10591
The movies we watched with scenes filmed in Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, plus one “almost” made here Honorable Mention.
All we are missing is a representative from that gloriously tacky decade known as the ‘80s. We’ll find something as we continue to feature films every other week next year...until we are out of films, and they shoot some more.
In the meantime, here’s the round-up of the hits, misses and just endearingly weird flicks we reviewed in 2011:
1. BUtterfield 8 (1960) - Look for just a few minutes of our dear old Tappan Zee when it was shiny and new, yet still leads to a horrible car crash.
2. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962) - Made entirely in Tarrytown, “the film took all of two weeks to film, on a skimpy stripper-outfit budget of $125K. Beyond the façade of some mansion, a car speeding through country roads, and a walk down a TTown-esque looking lane of houses, the rest comes from some ‘sound stage in a hotel basement.’"
3. House of Dark Shadows (1970) - The review that generated the most excitement, as this cult classic has the most rabid fans. Lyndhurst was the main setting of this feature length made from the gothic soap opera, along with some time in a crypt in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and, possibly, the now ruined Spratt House.
4. Savages (1972) - The weirdest one by far, this wild romp is all filmed in, and around, the former Beechwood Estate in Scarborough. Ivory said, “sophomoric nonsense” and “it just rubbed people the wrong way.” Merchant said, “I think if the film were to play now there’d be a cult following.” What do you think? Cult or flop?
5. Child’s Play (1972) - “Marymount gets to experience gender reversal as a Catholic school for boys. Creepy boys. Lots of odd looking creepy boys who don’t speak much and seem to swarm innocents like buzzards” in this mystery gone amuck.
6. The Impostors (1998) - This farce is adrift! But before it launches off entirely into chaos on a cruiseliner, it enjoys some time here at the Tarrytown Music Hall.
7. The Family Man (2000) - This remake of It’s a Wonderful Life turned the building that used to occupy the site where Open Door is slated to be into a tire store with the world’s most obtrusive sign (which would never fly with our zoning board.) Sadly they called this New Jersey.
8. Game 6 (2005) - “Several short scenes were filmed in the Music Hall (starting at around 30 minutes in, then the one-hour mark), standing in for a NYC theater whose shiny midtown exterior belies the shabby grandeur of the red-seated theater we know and love. The main character of the play-within-the-movie, Peter Redmond played by Harris Yulin, has a parasite in his brain and keeps getting jammed in rehearsals on the simplest line of all, ‘This could be it.’” If you watch one movie filmed here that might really be good, this could be it.
9. The Good Shepherd (2006) - So Matt Damon doesn’t feel the love for movie wife Angelina Jolie, okay. This film takes us again to the Music Hall, and the Set Back Inn, where Damon revisits his one true love before his life went all Cold War.
10. Henry’s Crime (2010) - Another numb hero who visits Tarrytown’s hot spots of the Music Hall, the Set Back, Sol Mar, and Citi Bank, all here standing in for really cold Buffalo.
Reviews of 2012:
1. Reversal of Fortune (1990) - If you need a mansion for your movie, you go to Newport, RI and…Tarrytown! Lyndhurst is the setting for Glenn Close in a coma, Jeremy Irons sounding like a vampire, in the dramatization of the Sunny von Bulow case.
2. Secret Lives of Dentists (2002) - While we all know marriage is hard, the movie posits that divorce would probably be harder. There’s the inevitable analogy to teeth: teeth live forever; it’s life that’s hard on them with its apples and candy. And one hard truth: everyone hates a dentist. But maybe not this one.
3. Mona Lisa Smile (2003) - Julia Roberts and many other bignamers grace this 1950s era drama. Wellesley College is a girls’ school 100% fixated on men with Julia as their boho teacher trying to dispel their myths. Teacher learns that she can only go so far convincing them their path is skewed. Maybe they do want to be housewives and that’s okay (save for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character who is appropriately bad-ass)
4. The Preacher’s Wife (1996) - this movie transformed Main Street to Christmas for filming in April. Whitney Houston, who may not be remembered foremost for her acting career, here gets to shine as an actor who happens to do a lot of what Houston will be remembered for: lip-quiveringly belting out song as the preacher’s wife. Denzel Washington is not the preacher, but an angel, of course.
*Honorable Mention
Sleepy Hollow (1999) - Tim Burton wanted to film it here in Sleepy Hollow and he was in talks with Philipsburg Manor but it wasn’t dark and strange enough for his taste so he built his own darn village, in England. Oh well, we tried.
And leave it to the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery to catch some I missed. Here’s more Movies Made Here.