'Big Screen Boston: From Mystery Street to The Departed and Beyond' by Paul Sherman -- Web special: $16 including shipping!

'Girltalk' tonight!

As part of the celebration of Big Screen Boston's release, tonight there will be a screening of Kate Davis' phenomenal 1987 documentary Girltalk, a very intimate, dramatic look at three Boston teen runaways  (at left is one of them, Mars). The movie hasn't been shown locally in years and is not as yet on DVD. The screening starts at 8 pm at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square, and I'm very happy that Martha, one of the movie's subjects, will be on hand to talk about the movie, too.

Psst... Wanna buy a "bestseller"?

BIG SCREEN BOSTON HAS been ensconced in the Top 10 New England books on Amazon for most of the day today. Does that make it a bestseller? You can buy it there or here now, and it will be in bookstores on Thursday, if not sooner.
    The first three screenings of outstanding but rarely seen Boston movies I've set up around town are this week: Kate Davis' Girltalk at the Brattle Theater Wednesday at 8 pm; Jan Egleson's Billy in the Lowlands at the Brattle Thursday at 8; and Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies at the Museum of Fine Arts Saturday at Noon. It's the first area screening in at least five years for each of them. I'll be selling and signing books at all three, and I expect people involved with the making of the first two to be in attendance, as well. If you can't make Girltalk on Wednesday, catch me on Backstage with Barry Nolan on Wednesday night at 8 pm on CN8 (The Comcast Network). I'm supposed to be taping a segment earlier in the day.

Globe daily double

The book and screenings are covered in a couple of different places in today's Sunday Globe:

In the Movies section...

...and in the Books section.

Check 'em out.

Book excerpt: The Blinking Madonna and Other Miracles

Here is the book's section on one of the really special Boston movies, Beth Harrington's one-of-a-kind mix of documentary and staged scenes--funny, evocative, thought-provoking, endearing, personal, convincing. Like the best Boston movies, it has a great sense of place. It's never come out on commercial home video, but last time I checked the North End branch of the Boston Public Library had a VHS copy Check it out.

1995. Written and directed by Beth Harrington. With The People of the North End, Beth Harrington, Roberta Beyer, Trisha Zembruski, Lorenzo Perez, Melinda Lopez, Jeff Miller and Michael Harrington. Cinematography by Kyle Kibbe.

A 1991 VIDEOTAPE OF a North End feast shot by Beth Harrington inspired her wondrous hour-long movie. The Jamaica Plain native’s tape became a Boston media sensation when it apparently showed a Madonna statue blinking. But in letting us share in Harrington’s religious and personal reaction to the event and the subsequent hoopla, The Blinking Madonna covers much more ground than that mere “miracle.”
    Harrington establishes the context for her reaction to the incident through hilarious staged flashbacks that she narrates. In them, we see seven-year-old Beth (Roberta Beyer) in her early-1960s parochial school—complete with Bing Crosby-casual priest (Michael Harrington; no relation to Beth)—consuming herself in her religion during the heyday of Boston Catholicism (cue the clips of dashing JFK and gravel- voiced Cardinal Cushing). The kid’s-eye-view interplay between wide-eyed Beth and the ominous yet very theatrical nun (Trisha Zembruski) who teaches her is a hoot to watch. (The Archdiocese of Boston changed its mind about letting Harrington shoot inside Braintree’s St. Francis of Assisi School, causing her to film classroom interiors in Jamaica Plain’s aptly named John F. Kennedy School.)
    Staged flashbacks and newsreel footage of the changing world beyond Catholic school next combine to show how religion becomes less important in Harrington’s life. Later, though, she moves to the North End to try to return to a more traditional life, culturally if not religiously. The move is also a way for Harrington to connect with her Italian-American mother’s heritage. But, of course, even a half-Italian woman trying to fit in is still “an outsider” to North End natives, and The Blinking Madonna details her uneasy path to neighborhood acceptance with a characteristically light touch. Her social entrée was to start videotaping the cultural traditions around her in short films such as Ave Maria. (The cool, unmentioned fact that Harrington was also a backup singer for Natick’s finest son, Jonathan Richman, during several of her 18 years in the North End should also be noted.)
    The breakup of a long relationship, a move from one North End apartment to another and a lack of work lead to the vulnerable emotional state Harrington is in at the time of the blinking Madonna incident. Although she knows the “miracle” is a result of a glitch in her camcorder’s auto-focus, the event turns out to be an emotional watershed for Harrington. It doesn’t awaken any dormant religious faith, but instead makes her appreciate life’s happy little accidents and blesses her with a new go-with-the-flow attitude.
    The seed for this new attitude comes not only from the accident on the feast video, but also from the carefree new neighbors in her North Margin Street building that Harrington dubs the “airline angels” (flight personnel played by Lorenzo Perez, Melinda Lopez and Jeff Miller). As with the Catholic school sequences, the scripted scenes in which the neighbors loosen up Harrington are down to earth and funny, as are the recreations of the hubbub surrounding the video (featuring many non-professional North Enders, who do just fine before the camera).
    Beneath the intentional surface comedy of The Blinking Madonna, there’s a quiet wisdom that makes the ending very moving and the movie especially rich. Like so much of the best non-fiction moviemaking that’s come out of Greater Boston, it’s an affecting combination of soul-baring and storytelling.
    The new go-with-the-flow attitude Harrington picked up in The Blinking Madonna stuck. Eventually, she left the North End for the Pacific Northwest to be with her future husband. She also showed that she could make an outstanding movie that looked beyond her own experiences when she traveled the lost highway of American music history to spotlight the fire-breathing, foot-stomping, fringe-shaking, rule-breaking, trailblazing women of country-tinged 1950s rock ’n’ roll in 2002’s Welcome to the Club: The Women of Rockabilly.
►Locations: North End, Jamaica Plain, Boston; Braintree.
►Accents: In spades. And they’re real.
►Local color: If North End feasts, neighborhood tribalism, Cardinal Cushing clips and Catholic schools aren’t Boston local color, nothing is. You can practically taste the fried dough during the feast footage.

Book excerpt: "The Brink's Job"

I've put up a few excerpts about homegrown movies, but how about some Hollywood stuff? Here is the section on 1978's The Brink's Job, perhaps the most infamous movie production to ever have to struggle through a Boston shoot. The movie's experiences here gave Boston a downright syphilitic reputation in Hollywood. The ironic thing is that, though flawed, the movie is entertaining. Sheldon Leonard!!

1978. Directed by William Friedkin. Written by Walon Green. Based on Noel Behn’s Big Stick-Up at Brink’s. With Peter Falk, Peter Boyle, Allen Goorwitz, Warren Oates, Gena Rowlands and Paul Sorvino. Cinematography by Norman Leigh.

THE “CRIME OF THE century” becomes a caper comedy, with bumbling, two-bit thieves lucking into a big haul in director William Friedkin’s rendering of the legendary January 17, 1950 Brink’s robbery. Based on Noel Behn’s fact-based Big Stick-Up at Brink’s and scripted by Wild Bunch writer Walon Green, The Brink’s Job uses the ultimate heist comedy, Italy’s Big Deal on Madonna Street, as its model.
    Not surprisingly, the 1978 comedy never reaches its predecessor’s level of lunacy in character and deed. But it unearths a few hidden corners of the city (like the “ghost sign” on the back of the Gaiety Theater in its opening sequence), lets production designer Dean Tavoularis (The Godfather) loose in recreating bygone Boston and emerges as an agreeable enough diversion from the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist.
    There are no bad guys in The Brink’s Job, a perspective accentuated by the casting of charismatic Peter Falk as its hero. His Tony Pino is a crook destined never to taste the big time as the movie starts. He gets pinched in a botched slaughterhouse robbery and, when he gets out and gets back to work, his break-in of a candy factory, complete with pratfalls in piles of gumballs, is almost as comical as it is unproductive. Tony might be unlucky, but brother- in-law Vinnie (the always amusing Allen Goorwitz) is just plain stupid. The way they stumble upon a Brink’s depot, in which stacks of money are being casually toted from armored cars, is dumb luck—but Tony’s determination to penetrate the company’s counting rooms and vault, which “smarter” guys might have assumed are well-secured, is actually admirable.
    This is a motley-crew movie, and in addition to Tony and Vinnie, there are also bookie Jazz (Paul Sorvino), demolitions expert Specs (Warren Oates), fence McGinnis (Peter Boyle) and lifetime crooks Sandy (Gerard Murphy) and Gus (Kevin O’Connor) in on the job. There’s a definite Runyonesque flavor to their antics, and the comedy hits a groove when the bunch plans the heist (it’s a riot how Specs originally wants to fire a bazooka into the vault from across the street, and can’t imagine how that might be a little conspicuous). When the guys actually carry out the heist, it’s staged as a relatively straight suspense sequence. Mirroring the lunacy of the crew is that of obsessive J. Edgar Hoover (Sheldon Leonard), who theorizes the robbery is the “missing link” between Communism and organized crime (in reality, Hoover’s FBI spent $29 million and only ever recovered $52,000 of the $1.2 million in cash and $1.5 million in checks and securities).
    The Brink’s Job stumbles in its late action, giving a poor sense of elapsed time and omitting much bizarre, real-life intrigue (is this perhaps a consequence of the movie somehow going from 118 minutes in its original release to 104 on video?). The clumsy resolution mutes the movie’s charms. While the locations don’t always scream Boston, they are very effective: the North Terminal Garage Building at Prince and Commercial streets (the same structure where the real robbery happened), the old Dudley elevated Orange Line stop, the Custom House Tower steps for the last big crowd scene, Tony taking his wife (Gena Rowlands) to Rino’s restaurant in East Boston and Stoneham doubling for a Pennsylvania town’s Main Street.
    Not yet released on DVD as of this writing and out of print on VHS, The Brink’s Job has been all but forgotten by most. But its effect on the relationship between Boston and Hollywood lingered for decades (see below). Of course, that had nothing to do with its content.
►Locations: North End, Financial District, East Boston, Charlestown, Roxbury, Boston; Stoneham.
►Accents: This is a movie you trot out whenever people talk about mangled Boston accents. With Peter Falk, Peter Boyle, Warren Oates, Paul Sorvino and Allen Goorwitz (a/k/a Allen Garfield), among others, The Brink’s Job has as colorful a 1970s ensemble cast as you could hope for. Boyle’s character is an Irishman, so he’s exempt, but Falk’s and Goorwitz’s New York accents dominate, as does Oates’ Appalachian drawl. Falk’s Tony Pino is even given a good favorite Boston exclamation (“Mothah ah Gawd”), but the actor’s attempts to do the accent are middling at best, as are Oates’. Sorvino, who’d played a Boston cabbie in 1972’s Dealing, does better, but is still not that convincing. The amazing thing is that the strongest Boston accent comes from the judge who sends up Specs and Gus, and he’s supposed to be in Pennsylvania.
►Local color: It’s great to see some of the locations here in a movie, like the North Washington Street Bridge. But, in a way, most of the locations are so tucked away that they could be anywhere (since the movie takes place in 1938, 1944 and the 1950s, they had to use tucked-away places that hadn’t been modernized). So local color is lower than expected. There are old Hood and Moxie signs on display and a mention of Narragansett (the race track, not the beer), but not very much “public” action.
►Off the set: The shenanigans surrounding The Brink’s Job forever overshadow the actual movie. First off, the North End’s narrow streets are not friendly to the convoys of trucks and trailers that accompany a major motion picture production. Just try turning an 18-wheeler down Sheafe Street. And stories— some no doubt true, some legend—abound of neighborhood residents finding creative ways of getting courtesy payments to take down TV aerials, air conditioners and other visual impediments to the movie’s authenticity.
    But these are not the most extreme shenanigans. Two episodes stand out. One is when gunmen barged into the movie’s Stuart Street production office and stole several cans of film from the editing room. In a case of life imitating art, the misinformed robbers then tried to ransom the film, which was practically worthless, since the negative was still in the production’s possession.
    The worst was yet to come. As detailed in Nat Segaloff’s book Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and Films of William Friedkin, an investigation into the extortion of five film productions, including The Brink’s Job, by The Federal Organized Crime Task Force led to charges being filed against five Boston area Teamsters. Although Friedkin denied knowledge of any such payments during a 1978 press conference, having been working solely on the creative end of the production, executive producer Dino De Laurentiis told NBC the movie spent over a million dollars hiring more Teamsters than necessary. From this point on, “Brink’s job” must have become a two-word Hollywood code for “Why would you ever want to shoot a movie in Boston and put up with that, you schmuck?”

Screening #3: "Titicut Follies," Museum of Fine Arts, May 3

LOOKING FOR AN UNUSUAL way to start your weekend? How about a Saturday at noon screening of Titicut Follies, Frederick Wiseman's controversial 1967 documentary shot at Bridgewater State Hospital? That's what the MFA will be offering on May 3 in their contribution to the celebration of the release of Big Screen Boston (as with all the screenings, I'll be there to introduce the movie and sign some books). It won't exactly have you leaving the theater with a skip in your step, but the disturbing film (banned for 25 years by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!) will give you the opportunity to see one of the best documentaries to come out of the vibrant Boston-Cambridge documentary scene and the movie that started Wiseman's formidable body of work. Documentaries presented me with some interesting choices when constructing the book. Often, local documentarians' films aren't necessarily "Boston movies" by the usual standards (setting, local color, etc.). But their work is so important to local film culture that they certainly deserve a place in the book. So I've included a cross-section of significant documentaries. In the case of veteran filmmakers such as Wiseman, Errol Morris and Ross McElwee, I've emphasized one movie, and mentioned some of their other films in the coverage of that movie. With Wiseman, the "one movie" had to be Titicut Follies. Oddly enough, it does have a lot of local color, whether it's the accents, the 1960s chain-smoking [like in the photo above, courtesy of Zipporah Films] and Masshole-style bureaucratic indifference. It's not conventional "fun," but it sure is rewarding.

Book excerpt: "Billy in the Lowlands"

Inspired by Italian neo-realism, British kitchen-sink dramas, the French New Wave and the kids he taught at Cambridge's The Group School, actor Jan Egleson turned writer-director in Billy, a technically crude but emotionally energetic film that blazed the trail for independent filmmaking in Greater Boston. It will be shown at the Brattle Theater on May 1, its first local showing since 2001.

1979. Written and directed by Jan Egleson. With Henry Tomaszewski, Paul Benedict, Genevieve Reale and David Clennon. Cinematography by D’Arcy Marsh.

TO PARAPHRASE AN OLD line of dialogue, there’s not a lot to Billy in the Lowlands, but what’s there is choice. In many ways, Jan Egleson’s homegrown movie began indie feature filmmaking in Greater Boston. The drama struggles to get going, but it ultimately kicks in and its offbeat coming-of-age tale definitely stays with you.
    It takes a while to tune into Billy in the Lowlands’ particular rhythms. Egleson was a theater actor who’d occasionally been in movies—he’s the young soldier nervously selling guns in The Friends of Eddie Coyle and the guy whose bike is almost stolen here—and the style of his first movie is fairly primitive. Since there was no fiction filmmaking community in Boston at the time (the movie is actually a production of the famed Theater Company of Boston), Egleson’s small crew was just as inexperienced as he was. He cast the movie with a combination of professionals (Paul Benedict, David Clennon) and nonprofessionals, including teens from Cambridge’s The Group School for troubled youth, where Egleson volunteered as a drama instructor.
    These kids’ anecdotes provided the inspiration for Egleson’s tale of Billy (Henry Tomaszewski), a trouble magnet who rests all his hopes on a reunion with his wayward father (Benedict). Billy’s bad luck and poor judgment are evident right away when he punches out at his foundry job in Quincy, and a joy-riding friend pulls up and asks him if he wants a ride home—in a stolen car. Billy, who we soon learn is on probation, gets in, the cops catch them and Billy ends up in juvenile prison in Billerica.
    When Billy gets a call about his grandfather’s death and his father flying in for the funeral, he sneaks away from jail to find him, thinking his father will take him far away. Once he gets back to Cambridge and finds his friends from his housing project, who try to help him get to Lynn, where his father is supposed to be, the story takes on a real urgency and hits its stride. After the set-up, the last two-thirds of the movie take place over a 24-hour period.
    Tomaszewski’s nervous energy suits the urgency that grips the title character (of course, the fact that Billy has handcuffs he wants to shed adds to the kid’s frenzy). The scenes with his friend Liz have a special spark, because Genevieve Reale, who plays her, has an unusually expressive face. Liz is sad-eyed, as if she knows more about what’s ahead than Billy does. We know Billy is deceiving himself about his dad because, at various times, he tells others his father is an artichoke farmer, a trucker and an oil-well driller. Sure enough, once Billy finds his father, he’s a drunk who doesn’t live in Billy’s land of dreams, California, but in Cleveland. There’s a humorous, skin-crawling awkwardness to most of their scenes together, but the movie ends with hope, not despair, as the encounter awakens Billy to the fact that no one is going to shape him up but him.
    Of course, Billy’s lack of style is its style. It’s a back-to-basics, grass-roots movie all the way. I assume Egleson had permits to shoot some scenes in Harvard Square, or else the Cambridge police would have quickly shooed him away, but some of the little moments—like Billy panhandling for change—feel as if the director just pushed Tomaszewski into a real crowd and filmed what happened. There’s also a gritty beauty to shots like the one in which Billy, Liz and another friend ride towards the Paragon Park rollercoaster at dawn, while the sequence in Cardell’s, the atmospheric Harvard Square greasy spoon that used to be across from the Brattle Theater, is pure Edward Hopper. The prison scenes are also in Cambridge (at the then-new Middlesex courthouse), while the Lynn scenes were done mostly in Hull (after plans to shoot in Revere were thwarted by the demolition of the rollercoaster there). [That's Benedict and Tomaszewski in Hull in the photo above.]
    One of my favorite touches, which I’m sure no one thought twice about at the time, is that Billy has a Sears basketball near the end of the movie. Now that Sears no longer makes things like basketballs, it just seems so right. Billy and his friends are more likely to have things or frequent places that are old than they are to be enjoying the latest things. They don’t live in a land of dreams.
►Locations: Cambridge; Quincy; Hull; Medford.
►Accents: All real, all the time. They ought to make Hollywood dialect coaches watch it.
►Local color: This one will definitely take you back, if you’re old enough to remember, to a less slick time: Paragon Park! Zayre! Cardell’s, Brigham’s and the antiquated wooden-slats escalator in “old” Harvard Square! And there’s a great view of the roster of stores at Fresh Pond Shopping Center, circa 1977.

Screening #2: "Billy in the Lowlands," Brattle Theater, May 1

It's not the first Boston independent feature. It's not the best Boston independent feature. But Cambridge-based writer-director Jan Egleson's Billy in the Lowlands (1979) is probably the most important Boston independent feature. No similar movie inspired as many subsequent movies as this unpretentious movie inspired by the French New Wave, the story of its trouble-prone title character (Henry Tomaszewski)--The Dozens, Squeeze and, to a small extent, Good Will Hunting being some of its "offspring." That's why Billy is one of the movies that will be revived to help celebrate the release of Big Screen Boston. It will be at the Brattle on the night of May 1. The no-budget movie has a real energy, and some great locations, mainly in Cambridge and Hull (like the evocative photo here, with Paul Benedict and Tomaszewski walking through Nantasket at dawn). As with the screening of Girltalk the night before, some of the people involved with the movie will be coming out for it. Jan Egleson will be there to discuss the first of his "Boston trilogy," while the word has also gone out to several cast members. I'll post an excerpt from the book about Billy soon; in the meantime, if you haven't read the excerpts about the "Beanstreets" movies (of which it's the first), those offer a lot of background into the movie's importance.

Book excerpt: "Girltalk"

Here's the book's entry for Kate Davis' Girltalk, the first of the movies that will be revived to coincide with the May 1 release of Big Screen Boston. It will show at the Brattle Theater on April 30. Only the middle of the photos (all courtesy of Kate Davis) appears in the book, though here it's in glorious color.

1987. Directed by Kate Davis. Cinematography by Alyson Denny.

THIS IS THE BOSTON movie guaranteed to break your heart. Former Harvard students Kate Davis and Alyson Denny, who both worked as editors on Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March, take their documentary camera and sound recorder to places movies rarely dare to travel, focusing on three Boston teen runaways. Rather than damning its troubled teens to hopelessness or glazing them in simple solutions, Girltalk humanizes all those statistics about runaways, teen pregnancies and abused children. The result is an engrossing combination of heartbreaking tragedy and life-affirming resilience.
    Each girl is in a different stage of her teen years and a different stage of her troubles. Pinky is a 14-year-old Roxbury truant who’s run away in the past. After living in two foster homes briefly, she’s now back with her mother in a no-questions-asked situation. Mars left home at 13, after being raped by her stepbrother. Years later, she’s still numbed by the experience, and works as a stripper in the Combat Zone. And Somerville’s Martha—19, single and pregnant—is using motherhood as a reason to put a past of sexual abuse and self-destructive behavior behind her.
    Combining interviews and footage that follow each in day-to-day activities, Girltalk deftly avoids pigeonholing or exploiting the girls. These girls are here because of their troubles, yet they’re not simply victims in a “case study” movie. Mars and Martha both talk about the sexual abuse they suffered, yet Davis resists sensationalism. The movie never acts with moral superiority or pity, and it never looks down on its “girls.”
    It also never weighs itself down with self-importance. Pinky, Mars and Martha appear to be so comfortable on camera that the movie is unusually intimate and they speak very freely. Director Davis, who’d previously co-written Vacant Lot, a documentary-style short about Somerville project kids, obviously made them at ease. Girltalk’s greatest achievement is blending a variety of emotions into a thoroughly captivating, bittersweet mood. Such a mood accommodates a funny-sad line like Pinky’s half-optimistic, half-pessimistic “The first time I get married I’m gonna wear white, the second time I’m gonna wear pink,” and makes you feel for Martha at the same time you want to chew her out for smoking while pregnant.
    The tone also informs the sequences filmed at the bar where Mars strips in a schoolgirl’s uniform, the Combat Zone’s Pussycat Lounge (which had already closed by the time the movie opened at the Brattle Theater in May 1988). She usually performs her act in a schoolgirl outfit, the energetic music to which she disrobes mixing with the sad irony of what grown-up-too-soon Mars is doing.
    Such a mood makes Girltalk unusually dramatic. Mars’ final dance, in which she’s bathed in red light and wears a diaphanous cape, is set to Janis Ian’s “Bright Light and Promises” and has the sad beauty of the Rolling Stones’ “Love in Vain” sequence in Albert and David Maysles’ Gimme Shelter. There’s a split-second when the camera catches the expression of weary despair on Mars’ face as she finishes, and there’s more emotional tension in it than most fiction films ever muster.
    Though all three girls complain of inattentive parenting, Girltalk doesn’t merely point fingers. It looks more towards the future. With Mars and Martha, the movie seems to say, we’re watching survivors (though Martha’s baby has a worried face that makes you think he knows the struggle he’s in for). In Pinky’s case, there’s the foreboding of someone who seems headed for more trouble. Girltalk is not conventionally entertaining, but it is incredibly engaging. Like the best documentaries that have taken a similar path—from Streetwise and Hoop Dreams to Love and Diane—you’ll never forget it.

Book excerpt: The "Beanstreets" movies, Part 2

Here is another section from the introduction concerning the "Beanstreets" movies--the first sustained wave of Boston independent features. Take a look at the earlier excerpt to see how these movies came about, and read about the gritty stories they told.

SO THE IDEALISTIC "BEANSTREETS" movies came and went with barely a blip. Or did they? A more accurate description might be that they quietly planted a seed, and the crop is still being reaped today.
    Put bluntly, the chances that Hollywood ever would have made Boston “neighborhood movies” like Mystic River or The Departed were it not for Billy in the Lowlands—a movie few people are even aware of today—are doubtful. But the dots are pretty easy to connect. Billy begat Dark End of the Street, in which a little tyke named Ben Affleck made his acting debut [in photo, Laura Harrington and Lance Henriksen in The Dark End of the Street]. Affleck’s and Matt Damon’s families were friendly with Egleson’s before Matt and Ben were even born—Affleck’s dad acted some with the Theater Company of Boston and the three families were all Cambridge neighbors. The influence of Egleson’s homegrown movies rubbed off on Good Will Hunting, and not just on Damon and Affleck’s stubborn insistence that at least a good chunk of the movie be shot locally. As Affleck told me shortly before filming began on Good Will Hunting: “Part of what the movie’s about on a subtext level is class and the way people deal with each other. In Cambridge, we were acutely aware of the stark contrast between university life and the lives of the people who live there.” Working on Egleson’s second movie surely wasn’t the only way Affleck learned about class struggle, but it helped to shape the specific understanding of society that Good Will Hunting exudes.
    Good Will Hunting isn’t the only sprout that’s the result of the “Beanstreets” movies. Robert Patton-Spruill, the Roxbury-based director and producer, is the son of another Theater Company of Boston alumnus, B.U. drama professor James Spruill. In the 1990s, when Patton-Spruill was working at Collinge-Pickman, the casting agency co-founded by Egleson’s wife, Patty Collinge, Egleson took Patton-Spruill under his wing. The two collaborated on an unproduced script for The Boy Without a Flag, the Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. story Egleson had optioned. That project never came to fruition, but Patton- Spruill’s first movie, 1997’s Squeeze, grew out of his experiences with kids at the Dorchester Youth Collaborative, just as Egleson’s early movies had been inspired by his Group School students. Like Egleson, Patton-Spruill cast untrained kids as his Squeeze leads.
    Good Will Hunting and Squeeze are big parts of the impressive late-1990s cluster of Boston independent movies that also included Brad Anderson’s Next Stop Wonderland and Ted Demme’s Denis Leary-produced Monument Ave. These films, as much as Blown Away, Housesitter or The Crucible—Hollywood visits that pumped much more money into local coffers—kept Boston an interesting movie city and indirectly inspired Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese to fight their studios for a local shooting schedule—the entire movie for Mystic River, about half for The Departed. The momentum generated by such acclaimed movies also made it possible for Affleck to later direct his own Boston neighborhood movie, Gone Baby Gone—like Mystic River, an adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel.

Screening #1: "Girltalk," April 30, Brattle Theater

Several screenings of movies covered in Big Screen Boston will be happening to celebrate the book's May 1 release. The first will be Kate Davis' unforgettable documentary Girltalk at the Brattle Theater, April 30 at 8 pm. This will be the movie's first local screening in 20 years, back at the theater where it first opening in 1988. Although it had a small theatrical release and it came out on VHS during the late 1980s, Girltalk has never been released on DVD and has been all but forgotten. But it's one of the best movies to spring from the Boston-Cambridge documentary scene, and one of those largely unheralded movies on which I hope the book will shine deserved light. One of the three young women profiled in it, Martha (in photo with her then-young son), will be appearing at the screening with me. I'll be posting an excerpt from the book about Girltalk (along with additional photos) before the screening.