TL the movie star (in which Jess freaks out about Paul Giamatti)

I mean, seriously. Paul Giamatti!

And also, Paul Giamatti!

Did you SEE him in "Sideways"? And the "John Adams" mini-series? The man is personally responsible for rousing my interest in American history through that series.

(You guys know I have a strong arts background, right? I was a theatre major in college. Well, creative arts — theatre and music, but I focused most of my energies on theatre.)

I couldn't believe so many people didn't even know his name yesterday. I learned it after his awesome performance back in the '90s in "Man on the Moon," and I've been a big fan ever since.

But OK. Deep breaths. The cool thing here (beyond Paul Giamatti!) (And the Paul Rudd connection!! Don't even get me started on that!!!) is that this is the second movie that had some part of its shooting based in Tupper Lake in recent years.

"Recreator" used many locations in and around Tupper Lake, Giamatti used Tupper Lake and route 458 for a few scenes as a stand-in for Canada, and there have been a few other shoots in the Tri-Lakes area lately. There was the British boy band that shot a video in the Saranac Lake area last fall, and at the same time scenes were being shot for a Bradley Cooper/Ryan Gosling/Eva Mendes movie in Vermontville.

"Recreator" was a smaller film with littler-known actors, but it's super cool that bigger films featuring the likes of Paul Giamatti and Paul Rudd (<3) are starting to think about using the area. With the amazing scenery up here and our proximity to New York City (we're way closer than North Carolina, or wherever it was that they filmed "Last of the Mohicans," which is set around the Lake George region!), we should get movies filmed up here more often!

It's good for publicity for the area, plus it's a good economic driver. When you bring a whole crew of people into town for even a few days, some money is going to be brought in to local businesses for sure.

The owners of the former OWD factory started to try to capitalize on the attractiveness of the area by marketing the mostly empty factory as a movie studio. Have you seen the website for "Tupper Lake Studios"? If I remember correctly, they got some sort of designation for the town, or at least the building, that gave them a tax break for shooting some "Recreator" scenes there.

So, hey, New York City! Come up and film more stuff here! We looooove it!

For fun, here's the One Direction video (my fave part is at about 1:55, when it goes over the train crossing near American Village laundromat, close to where I live in SL):

Previous Post | Next Post