Oscar Night: Hollywood meets Saratoga Springs

SARATOGA SPRINGS - With all eyes focused on Hollywood, and the movie world gathered to
salute the best of the year, actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, director Bennett Miller and writer Dan Futterman closely watched the ceremonies to see it all play out.

The trio collaborated on the multi-nominated film 'Capote.' The fuse that sparked the trio's collaboration was lit in a Saratoga Springs theater group more than 20 years ago.

The three - each nominated for awards in their respective fields as well as for an Oscar as Best Picture - met as teenagers with theatrical aspirations at a summer drama camp in 1984. They shared classroom space and dorms at Skidmore College during the four-week camp for promising youths hosted by the NYS Summer School of the Arts Program.

(The 16-year-old Hoffman is pictured above, wearing a blue shirt at rear, with his fellow students at the summer drama camp in the summer of 1984 in Saratoga Springs. Photo courtesy of NYSSSA).

The collaboration from the Spa City classrooms to the film world's grandest stage has been more than 20 years in the making. It is an unusual footnote in the city's movie-making history, which is more accustomed to providing a backdrop for filmmakers for the past 70 years.

In 2005, residents saw their city's streets become a set for a pair of films being filmed in the region. Anthony Michael Hall, Tony Danza and the late Christopher Penn were among the cast shooting in town in November for the movie 'Aftermath,' which is tentatively slated for release later this year.

Writer-director Tennyson Bardwell and wife and co-producer Mary-Beth Taylor brought their own cast and crew to the city for their second film, 'The Skeptic.'

'We had Ed Hermann, who is the voice of The History Channel, Tom Arnold, who is like the kid in the back of the room in an eighth-grade class, and Tim Daly, who is a combination of both, all together on the set,' laughed Taylor, reminiscing from the Broadway offices of Saratoga Studios, where post-production work will be ongoing through the summer.

During filming, the large space was swarming with costume fitters, department heads and production designers coming in from all over the country for the shoot. Comparatively, the post-production work is a lonely business, where Bardwell sits facing a pair of computer monitors lit with Tom Arnold's face, a scribbled-in notebook, ragged pieces of hand-written notes and a bottle of water. Bardwell said the role of writer and director for 'The Skeptic' was a challenging experience.

'Some of these guys, they've worked with Martin Scorsese, with James Cameron and Steven Spielberg. There is a certain amount of ego which is magnified with their name,' Bardwell said. 'Sometimes, the actors don't mesh with each other. As the director, it's up to you to fix that and, at times, it's like being kind of a den mother,' he said. 'But I'm a believer that what doesn't destroy you makes you stronger. It was pretty close -- but I think I'm stronger now,' he said.

From Bardwell's second-floor window above Broadway, he can glance out at architectural charm so alluring to movie makers.

For many, what brings them here is a past-world charm. Parts of 'Billy Bathgate' and 'Ghost Story' were filmed in Saratoga Springs and the greater Capital Region has similarly been the backdrop for the sets of 'Scent of a Woman,' 'The Age of Innocence' and 'Time Machine.'

Robert Redford his crew here for the filming of 'The Horse Whisperer' in 1997, matching the scenes with natural country landscape. It was Redford's second visit to the region, filming 'The Way We Were' in Ballston Spa and Schenectady a quarter century earlier.

In 2002, Tobey Maguire headlined the list of more than 200 cast and crew attracted by the real-life setting of historic Saratoga Race Course for the filming of 'Seabiscuit.' More than 65 years earlier, the racecourse was the also the setting for Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, filming scenes for 'Saratoga.'

Before the movie's completion, Harlow became ill and died in Hollywood.

'Death Calls 'Cut' in Actress' Life' screamed the cover of The Saratogian, June 8, 1937, which included a statement from Louis B. Mayer of MGM, that the film 'Saratoga' was to be discarded. After a public outcry that Harlow's final film would never be seen, a stand-in was used to complete the movie with its memorable line: 'We women can do things to a man we love that men wouldn't do to a rattlesnake,' was issued in 1937. George S. Bolster, one of the area photographers assisting the film crew with local scenes, was given one of the movie's clips from outside the United States Hotel, as a gesture of gratitude for his help.

Hollywood returned to the city eight years later to shoot Spa City locales for the film 'Saratoga Trunk.'

Bringing a major film company into the region can be a major coup for the Saratoga County Film Commission, whose Clinton Street offices are filled with descriptions and photographs of potential area locales. Luring a major motion picture cast and crew to the county, with potentially hundreds of people staying at hotels, eating at restaurants and buying local goods can have a lucrative impact on area shops and businesses.

'I get calls daily from filmmakers, both local and outside the region, looking for locations,' said Jennifer Joseph Perry, commissioner of the Saratoga County Film Commission. 'It's important if it's made in Saratoga. It puts heads in beds, people in restaurants and provides hiring for local crews and services,' she said. 'It provides dollars for the community.'

Some advantages for having the film industry here are home grown. Every year, a number of independent filmmakers can be found shooting scenes on the city's streets. For some, like Albany-based writer William Kennedy's book and screenplay for 'Ironweed,' shooting local is the logical way to go, and only the future will tell what role the works being produced on a regular basis at the Yaddo Arts Colony will play on the city's filmmaking future.

Truman Capote came here in the 1940s as an aspiring young writer and ended up authoring his first book. Forty years later an even younger trio of aspiring theater students came here and met for the first time. Tonight on the Hollywood stage the three will be battling for Academy Awards for their movie 'Capote.' Coincidences like that are usually the stuff of fiction. This one just might have a real-life Hollywood ending.

by Thomas Dimopoulos
The Saratogian, 2006