Reeling in the Berkshires

REMARKABLE MOVIES ARE MADE IN THIS REGION

May 1, 2021 // By Anastasia Stanmeyer

THE BERKSHIRES has attracted and inspired an impressive array of literary luminaries whose works span the decades, and the same can be said of filmmakers who have been inspired to create some one-of-a-kind movies. Genres cross over the eras, the themes, the actors, the directors, the movie lengths, the technical advancements, and the critical acclaim (or condemnation). What is it that makes the Berkshires appealing and inspiring for writers and filmmakers alike?

Karen Allen directs Jackson Smith in Carson McCuller’s A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.

“You can be quiet and completely isolated and dive into something, or you can be social if you want,” answers director Diego Ongaro, whose Bob and the Trees debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015. “It’s also the mix of people who live in the Berkshires—farmers, loggers, construction workers, second homeowners, younger transplants, people from very different social backgrounds and classes. It’s great to see these people interact with each other. It’s something I touch on with my films, like the interaction between a farmer and a New York City rapper. It wouldn’t happen in the middle of Arkansas.”

BOB AND THE BERKSHIRES Bob and the Trees (2015) directed and written by Diego Ongaro and filmed in Sandisfield, is about 50-year-old Bob Tarasuk, played by himself, struggling to make ends meet in a changed economy.

Ongaro moved from Paris to Brooklyn to Sandisfield, where he befriended farmer and logger Bob Tarasuk. He saw the conditions that those guys lived in and how charismatic a character Bob was and felt like he had a story, which became Ongaro’s first film. He returned to Sandisfield to shoot his second feature, Down With the King, in October and November 2020. Now in post-production, the independent film stars Freddie Gibbs, who wrote and performed the original music. It is about a famous rapper named Mercury Maxwell who unexpectedly retires from the music industry to become a farmer. The farmer that he connects with is Bob, from Ongaro’s previous film.

Bob and the Trees can be streamed on iTunes, Google Play, and Vudu. Other Berkshire-created films also can be watched on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Vimeo, and IndiePix Films. We explore many of those here—guided by Ongaro as well as filmmaker Kent Jones (former head of the New York Film Festival); Berkshire Film and Media Collaborative executive director Diane Pearlman; Berkshire International Film Festival (BIFF) founder and artistic director Kelley Vickery; director/actor Karen Allen; and director/writer/producer Sam Handel. With the celebrated and much-anticipated 15th Annual BIFF moved from the end of May to September 9-13, this is a good time to get familiar with Berkshire filmography. When the BIFF comes around, this region will be well-represented on the big screen, says Vickery. “Filmmaking is alive and well in the Berkshires.”

The short film was shot in Sandisfield at the old Silverbrook Cafe.

Screenwriting is also alive and well, with the likes of Stephen Glantz, who is often seen hard at work at Lenox Coffee. (The photo on his IMDb.com page is him standing in front of the coffeeshop’s sign.) Glantz’s credits include Wunderkinder (2011), Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991) and The Fall Guy (1981).

Production in the Berkshires is going strong, too. Prolific Academy Award®-winning documentary filmmaker Cynthia Wade, who developed and edited many of her films from her Egremont home studio, moved to Los Angeles a year ago but has already returned to the Berkshires to direct her first fiction work, Sproutland. This featurette, penned by Berkshire screenwriter Nannina Gilder, just had its world premiere at the Florida Film Festival in April. Sproutland is a fiction piece inspired by the life of local health food guru “Sproutman” Steve Meyerowitz, who was killed in a car accident in 2015. His widow, Beth Robbins, plays the lead. The film will screen at the BIFF, with Wade in attendance.

Cynthia Wade’s new featurette Sproutland is a fiction piece inspired by the life of “Sproutman” Steve Meyerowitz. His widow, Beth Robbins, plays the lead.

In 2014, Wade directed the short film Selfie, which followed teenage girls from Monument Mountain Regional High School and their mothers who took selfies as a way to challenge how they perceive beauty. Selfie screened at the Sundance Film Festival, garnered eight million online views, and captured a Clio for Dove Real Beauty. (Wade has directed Grit, Generation Startup, Mondays at Racine, Freeheld, and other films.) She is now writing a feature-length screenplay about the Shakers, with extensive research done at Hancock Shaker Village.

“The Berkshires offers a vast array of visual locations—small towns, urban centers, meadows and forests, hills and plains,” says Wade. “It’s also the friendliest and most collaborative place I’ve ever shot in. My husband, producer Matthew Syrett, recently finished writing a TV pilot as part of Sundance Collab, and his series is based in the Berkshires. We’d love to come back and shoot more projects—and soon!”

We continue our moviemaking journey with a short dip in The River (2013), a poetic, charming short starring Lauren Ambrose and Adam Driver and directed by (Lauren’s husband) Sam Handel. The 13-minute film is about a pregnant woman, Maria, who spends her days listening to “love and kindness” meditation tapes. The only thing she wants is a cooling swim in the river to combat the sweltering south county heat. Another entertaining, longer short by Handel that also stars Ambrose and Driver was released a few years earlier, I’m Coming Over, about a day in the life of Matt Downing, who specializes in holistic happiness.

“It’s almost impossible to avoid having deeper relationships here with almost everyone I interact with,” says Handel, who lives in the Berkshires. “It’s not like city living where you are constantly in transactional relationships with people who you might never see again. I love the fact that you can’t dismiss or avoid people, and if you have a problem you better work it out because you are about to be thrown together again soon; that is obviously an absolutely ripe reality for comedy.

“This place is teeming with insanely talented people who brought so much energy, creativity, and collaborative spirit to those shorts.”

Berkshire notable Ben Hillman also has created quirky shorts in the Berkshires, such as Little Red Jiving Hood (2009). And the short film Worlds We Created (2013), directed by Nicholas Santos, offers some stunning storytelling and vivid cinematography depicting the fantasies and stark truths of childhood from the perspective of a 12-year-old boy and his two friends in 1969.

That same year—1969—stands out in the annals of Berkshire filmmaking, when Alice’s Restaurant was released. Legendary filmmaker Arthur Penn reinvented it as a bittersweet tale of the ’60s counter-culture based on Arlo Guthrie’s rambling comic song. A longtime Stockbridge resident, Penn immortalized his adopted town and its surroundings with this movie.

“I vividly remember seeing the film being shot on multiple locations,” says Kent Jones, a Pittsfield native. “I understand that Arlo himself has issues with the film and its divergence from actual fact, and that’s understandable. But I looked at it again a couple of years ago, and I think Alice’s Restaurant is remarkable, a movie that gets the beauty and the poignancy and the deep sadness of that moment in time. Arthur Penn was a formidable artist, and it’s one of his best films. It’s worth noting that after the success of Bonnie and Clyde, he probably could have made anything he wanted. He chose to make Alice’s Restaurant. For anyone who grew up in the Berkshires in the late ’60s, Penn’s film is like a time machine. I recognize so many faces I knew, as wedding extras or in the snowy funeral scene where Tigger Outlaw sings Joni Mitchell’s Songs to Aging Children Come—Amy Loveless’s brother Keith is the guy crouching at the gravesite, wearing a cowboy hat. And even more than that, I remember the shared sense of life as it was.”

Alice’s Restaurant was released in 1969 and was based on Arlo Guthrie’s rambling comic song.

This shared sense of life includes the setting—the landscape that has inspired so many who have come to the Berkshires to create. Herman Melville published the iconic novel Moby-Dick 170 years ago and wrote it at Arrowhead, his home in Pittsfield. The 1851 novel was not exactly embraced in its time, and it was only in the 1920s, some 70 years after it was published, that it came to be known as a great, complex work. It is a challenge to film, says Jones, because “too much of it is given to enterprises apart from storytelling, such as the contemplation of the white whale’s whiteness or a breakdown of the whale’s skeletal structure.” But John Huston’s adaptation of Moby-Dick (1956) “got a piece of it” and is “far and away the best.” Written by Ray Bradbury with Richard Basehart as Ishmael and Gregory Peck as Ahab (and Orson Welles as Father Mapple), Huston shot the film in Ireland, doubling for New Bedford and Nantucket, and he and his cameraman Oswald Morris desaturated a lot of the color to create images that look like scrimshaw, notes Jones.

ADAPTING THE WHALE Herman Melville’s epic Moby Dick, which was written in Pittsfield, has been adapted to screen through the decades. John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956) is considered one of the best adaptations, starring Gregory Peck. The Sea Beast was an earlier attempt that hit the Big Screen in 1926 and starred John Barrymore. It was released in a sound version in 1930. In 2015, the historical adventure-drama film Heart of the Sea was released, directed, and produced by Ron Howard.

It wasn’t the first attempt to film Moby-Dick. The Sea Beast is an American silent drama film directed by Millard Webb, starring John Barrymore, Dolores Costello and George O’Hara. The film was one of the biggest pictures of 1926. Barrymore also was in a sound version in 1930 named Moby-Dick. And there is a TV miniseries released in 1998 with Patrick Stewart as Ahab and co-starring Henry Thomas as Ishmael, Ted Levine as Starbuck, and Peck as Father Mapple.

In recent years, that giant white sperm whale is captured in the movie In the Heart of the Sea, a 2015 historical adventure-drama film directed and produced by Ron Howard and written by Charles Leavitt. It is based on Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2000 nonfiction book of the same name, about the sinking of the American whaling ship The Essex in 1820, an event that inspired the epic literary tale.

Many filmmakers also have attempted to adapt books by Edith Wharton to the big screen, some with more success than others. Jones says that The Age of Innocence, Martin Scorsese’s 1993 adaptation of Wharton’s 1920 novel about old New York, is “one of the great works of American cinema.”

ON FILM Edith Wharton books are timeless in many ways, and they have been adapted to screen through the years. The Age of Innocence, Martin Scorsese’s 1993 adaptation of Wharton’s 1920 novel about old New York, above, stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder, and Miriam Margolyes. House of Mirth (2000), directed by Terence Davies, stars Gillian Anderson and Dan Aykroyd.

“I started working for Marty in the early ’90s when he was preparing to shoot the film, one of the last of the carefully (and lovingly) crafted pre-CGI [computer-generated imagery] recreations of the past, and I saw multiple cuts before it was completed. It seems to deepen every time I go back to it,” says Jones. “It was not set in the Berkshires, but it was a remarkable adaptation of one of the finest novels of a writer who spent a good portion of her life in the Berkshire hills.”

(It is also worth noting that Scorsese’s wife, Helen Morris, spent summers at her cousin’s home in Alford during her youth, and they have visited and stayed in the Berkshires a number of times. Scorsese was honored in 2019 at the BIFF for his achievements in film.)

Wharton’s The House of Mirth was made into a striking film by Terence Davies, filmed in Scotland in 2000 with a magnificent lead performance by Gillian Anderson. Despite being a period piece, The House of Mirth’s depiction of social cruelty still feels chilling and relevant for today.

Ethan Frome did not receive such critical acclaim. The 1993 romantic historical drama film was directed by John Madden and stars Liam Neeson, Patricia Arquette, Joan Allen, and Tate Donovan. Filmed in Peacham, Vermont, it is a story about a farmer with an invalid wife who falls in love with her cousin (Arquette). The book was written while Wharton was living at The Mount, and she likely based the story on an accident that she had heard about in 1904 in Lenox in which four girls and a boy crashed into a lamppost while sledding down Courthouse Hill. It is among the few works by Wharton with a rural setting, and the connection between the land and the people is a recurring theme of the novel.

Down With the King, filmed last year, is now post-production. It was shot in Sandisfield, directed by Diego Ongaro, and stars Freddie Gibbs.

Another literary masterpiece of a different era was John Irving’s The Cider House Rules. Although the movie is set in Maine, Miramax made arrangements in 1998 to use the exterior of the Ventfort Hall mansion in Lenox as the St. Cloud’s Orphanage for the Oscar-winning film adaptation of the novel. It starred Tobey Maguire, Michael Caine, and Charlize Theron. Much lesser-known and released 20 years later is the adventure drama The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot (2018), also filmed at Ventfort Hall.

Around that time, Diane, directed by Jones, was filmed over the border in New York State. (Jones’s mother, Marcia Jones, who taught for many years at Berkshire Country Day School and ran the visitor’s center at Tanglewood for quite a few summers, grew up in Pittsfield; his father, Dana Jones, the first announcer WBEC hired when they went on the air in 1947, was known as “the voice of the Berkshires.”)

Jones has said that the acclaimed Diane, set in Pittsfield, was inspired by his own aunts, uncles, and cousins, and that the principal character (the part was written for actress Mary Kay Place) was largely inspired by his mother. The film was the first narrative feature from Jones, with Scorsese serving as executive producer. The two have been close friends and collaborators for decades. Jones co-wrote Scorsese’s epic documentary My Voyage to Italy (1999), and they co-directed the Peabody Award-winning A Letter to Elia (2010). Scorsese also appears in Jones’s documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015).

The Current War (2019) is also fueled by the Berkshires. The AC demonstration system built in Great Barrington in 1886 by William Stanley and financed by George Westinghouse was a great achievement in AC power. They showed that alternating current with the use of transformers could create distribution systems of longer distances than direct current promulgated by Thomas Edison. The Current War was directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, and Scorsese was the executive producer. (It has one scene in Great Barrington, although it wasn’t shot there.)

In another town in the Berkshires, in Lenox in the mid 1990s, resided one of the film industry’s biggest full-service visual effects companies, Mass.Illusion. The visual effects for films including Judge Dredd (1995), What Dreams May Come (1998), The Matrix (1999), and Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) were done there and provided some of the most groundbreaking work in the history of the visual effects industry. The company was created by Diane Pearlman and Joel Hynek.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) was filmed (partly) in Northampton. It stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

“There’s something about the Berkshires that inspires people to be creative, with the ability to have the space to try your ideas,” says Pearlman, who ran the Lenox visual effects studio of 200 people. While they were testing for The Matrix, she had things constantly disappearing in her office. “People were trying stuff. In the middle of New York City, you’re not about to blow up something to see how it looks. But here, everything is possible. There’s a magic to creating here and being in nature that spills out onto film.”

When there was a technical problem, the tech teams would go for a hike and brainstorm to create groundbreaking technologies, Pearlman says. Some of those special effects are still being used today.

The first film studio in the area, Berkshire Motion Pictures, opened in Housatonic to create the “Back to the Future: The Ride” for the Universal Studios theme park in Los Angeles. The studio was established by director and visual effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull and business owner Nick Kelly. Trumbull’s visual effects credits include 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Blade Runner (1982). He directed Brainstorm (1983) and Silent Running (1972).

“Doug Trumbull is the genius of geniuses, and he’s here. He is an inspiration,” says the BIFF”s Kelley Vickery. “He has impacted dozens of filmmakers that we’ve brought to the BIFF. He is a microcosm of the creative spirit of film in the Berkshires.”

Another filmmaker/actor who is a familiar face and sits on BIFF’s board of trustees is Karen Allen, who directed A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud. The short film was adapted from the Carson McCullers short story. Allen says she has been a fan of McCullers since her early 20s and carried her stories with her throughout her life. She really wanted to start her directing career with a film and a story that was meaningful to her.

Allen had been in films all of her adult life (National Lampoon’s Animal House, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Starman, to name a handful) and knew how involving it is. So she decided to make a short film. She imagined the setting for A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud. would be similar to Silverbrook Cafe in Sandisfield, a place she knew from driving by countless times to Bradley International Airport. It was of the right era, built in the ’30s, and right on the road. She pictured this as a place where soldiers would be drinking beer at the same time as millworkers having breakfast.

“I told myself, ‘If I walk in there and it looks like what I pictured in the story, I’m going to do it.’ So I pulled in, walked in, and everything inside looked like what I imagined it to be—the bar, the booths along the window. So I thought, that’s it. The weather was great, the road was able to be closed down without much traffic.”

After receiving 350 resumes for the lead part, Allen ended up casting young Jackson Smith from Housatonic. Among the other actors were Jeffrey DeMunn as the old man and James McMenamin as Leo. (Jones’s wife, Carisa Kelly, was the costume designer on Allen’s film, as well as Diane.) A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud., which was produced by Pearlman, was released in 2017 and will be available to view on Amazon Prime Video in June.

“The Berkshires has a lot of diversity, with different kinds of environments,” says Allen. “The mountains, the farm country, the little towns haven’t changed much. It’s a wonderful location to be in and to create.”