In this age of instant cinematic gratification, you can log on to Netflix, push the “play” icon, and watch … your own backyard.
The Netflix offerings that you can “Watch Instantly” span the globe, the entire history of moviemaking, and every conceivable film genre. Let’s concentrate on Connectictut for a minute. Dozens of movies made in the Nutmeg state are on Netflix, streaming as smoothly as the Connecticut River.
Hollywood comes to Connecticut for the scenery, or for easily grasped symbols of class, privilege and intellectualism. Very few major motion pictures have actually delved into the state’s history. The best-known one that has is doubtlessly “Amistad,” the Steven Spielberg epic about the famous slave rebellion of 1839. Much of the story takes place in the courtrooms, churches and prisons of New Haven. There was some filming done in that city, but for historical accuracy the filmmakers got more bang for their buck at Mystic Seaport.
Some local history isn’t sociopolitical. It’s just plain scary. Perhaps Connecticut is not as creepy as Stephen King’s beloved Maine or H.P. Lovecraft’s Rhode Island, but the state has figured in its share of horror films, particularly ones inspired by the Monroe-based ghost-hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren. The 2009 thriller “The Haunting in Connecticut” is not available for streaming, but the 2013 sequel (sans Virginia Madsen but plus Cicely Tyson) is. Unfortunately, despite its title, “The Haunting in Connecticut 2” is set in Georgia.
Every A-list Hollywood star, it seems, has made a movie in Connecticut at some time or another. “Gentleman’s Agreement,” in which Gregory Peck fights anti-Semitism and closed-mindedness in a New England town, was set in Darien, and partially filmed there.
Robert DeNiro, who’s much more identified with New York than with any other state (consider “Mean Streets,” “Goodfellas,” “New York New York”…) nevertheless has gone over the border to Connecticut on a number of occasions. “Everybody’s Fine” stars DeNiro as a lonely father who road-trips around the country to visit his grown and distant children, but most of the supposedly far-flung locations he visits are played by places in Connecticut, including Yale’s Woolsey Hall. (The musicians rehearsing when DeNiro steps into the grand concert hall are members of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra).
DeNiro’s also featured in “Sleepers,” a dark legal drama (not available for streaming on Netflix) about the court trial of men who’ve wreaked revenge on a sadistic prison guard who’d abused them at a home for wayward boys. The creepy old building in the movie was really Fairfield Hill Hospital, a long-shuttered institution for the “mentally ill” and the “criminally insane,” as they used to say.
A whole other brand of backbiting and undermining can be found in the classic melodrama “All About Eve.” It concerns a gaggle of Broadway folk preparing to launch a new show. Since the movie’s set in 1950, naturally the show in question has a pre-Broadway out-of-town try-out, and naturally that try-out is at the Shubert in New Haven. “New Haven, Connecticut,” intones the theater critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), “is a short stretch of sidewalk between the Shubert Theatre and the Taft Hotel, surrounded by what looks very much like a small city.” One amusing coincidence — a playwright character in “All About Eve” is named Lloyd Richards. A real-life director named Lloyd Richards would run the Yale School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre, a few blocks from the Shubert, from 1979 to 1991.
Like “All About Eve,” “Valley of the Dolls” — based on the Jacqueline Susann’s bosomy bestseller and released in 1967 — features the out-of-town try-out of a play in New Haven. A house in Redding Center was also used in the otherwise L.A-and-New-York-centric sudser, to represent the Lawrenceville, Massachusetts home of Anne Welles (played by Barbara Parkins) when the heroine is still young and innocent.
“All About Eve” and “Valley of the Dolls” may be extreme cases, but many movies set in Connecticut are about broken romances and loveless relationships. “The Ice Storm,” directed by Ang Lee and adapted from the Rick Moody novel of the same name, is an ideal example, setting frigid sexual encounters against a backdrop of wealthy suburban Fairfield County estates and icy New England weather in the 1970s. The ensemble cast is magnificent. However depressing the story gets, you have to keep watching a flick that features Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Christina Ricci, Tobey Maguire, Kate Burton, Allison Janney and Jamey Sheridan.
Another big ensemble film about love and marriage, of a much jollier disposition, is “The Big Wedding,” filmed at several different locations in Greenwich in 2013. It’s a remake of the 2006 French flick “Mon frere se marie,” and features Robert DeNiro, Katherine Heigl, Diane Keaton, Amanda Seyfried, Topher Grace, Susan Sarandon and Robin Williams. This is one of the more recent and more contemporary (not to mention funny) Connecticut-set movies currently on Netflix.
Outside of the theater realm, the Gold Coast, there’s also the Ivy League. Julia Roberts’ drama “Mona Lisa Smile” is set at Wellesley College in the 1950s but was filmed at Yale in 2002 because the university still has that classic old-school look. “Mona Lisa Smile” wasn’t particularly well received when it was released, but has aged beautifully, especially since many of its supporting cast have since become big TV stars, from John Slattery (“Mad Men”) to Dominic West (“The Wire”) to Ginnifer Goodwin (“Once Upon a Time”) and, in her first film role, in the tiny role of “Art History Student,” Kristen Connolly of “House of Cards.”
In a lull between being a Brat Packer and saving the world on “24,” Kiefer Sutherland directed and co-starred in the 1991 indie project “Woman Wanted,” based on a novel by Joanna McClelland Glass. The understated drama, about a housekeeper (Holly Hunter) who helps two men (Sutherland and a college prof. played by Michael Moriarty) put their lives back together, was filmed at a private home in New Haven, with a couple of scenes filmed on or near the Yale campus. Sutherland disowned the film, and the directorial credit was changed to Alan Smithee, a widely used pseudonym that denotes a director’s disgust with a completed project, usually due to disagreements with producers in the editing room. “Woman Wanted” appears to be the only Alan Smithee film to have been partially filmed in Connecticut, a delightful dubious honor for the state.
Sometimes Connecticut isn’t Connecticut. Among the local haunts hiding in plain site on Netflix: The contemporary crime drama “All Good Things,” starring Ryan Gosling, Kristen Dunst and Frank Langella, is set in New York and Vermont but was shot in New York and Connecticut—in Bridgeport, Waterbury, Shelton, Fairfield, Stratford, Newtown and Greenwich.
In the Tyler Perry-produced African-American comedy “Peeples,” directed by Tina Gordon Chism, Cove Beach in Stamford plays the role of Sag Harbor and other scenic New York locations. Scenes were also filmed in Rowayton, Norwalk and Greenwich.
Finally, there are the films where town names have been changed to protect the innocent — or at least the non-robotic. Both film versions of Ira Levin’s eerie social satire “The Stepford Wives” — the horrific 1975 original and its more comical 2004 remake — were filmed in the real-life inspiration for Stepford, Fairfield County. Only the later film (scripted by Paul Rudnick and starring Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick and Christopher Walken) is streaming on Netflix. Choice quote: “I asked myself, ‘Where would people never notice a town full of robots?! Connecticut!”
