I’ve been following the filming of the movie "Taking Woodsotck" by director Ang Lee, as quite a bit of the filming is being done on and around US Route 20 in New York. Here’s the latest update on filming on location; toward the end it discuses the most recent activities on US 20.
Stephentown gets star turn in Woodstock film
Producers of film about legendary show make use of several areas in town
By BOB GARDINIER, Staff writer
First published: Tuesday, September 16, 2008
STEPHENTOWN -- This rural town is going Hollywood as several locations are used to film the Ang Lee directed movie "Taking Woodstock" over the next few weeks.
On Monday a section of Route 43 was closed near Tinley Road for the filming of a scene depicting the famous traffic jam that occurred at the outset of the August 1969 rock festival in Bethel, Sullivan County.
Hundreds of extras dressed in tie-dyed clothing and loaded into period vehicles clogged a section of the state route near Calvin Cole Road Monday. They came to the site in tour buses to re-create the infamous Route 17B traffic jam that prompted concertgoers nearly 40 years ago to abandon their cars and hoof it to Max Yasgur's alfalfa fields at the junction of Hurd and West Shore roads just off the highway.
"The producers told us they had carried around a picture of the actual traffic jam and when they traveled that section of the road, they stopped in the middle of the road and said 'This is it,' " said Larry Eckhardt, town councilman and liaison between Tuxedo Terrace Films, the company shooting the movie, and town residents.
"They told us that the section of road looked just like Route 17B did in 1969," Eckhardt added.
The film is based on the memoirs of Eliot Tiber who, while managing the bar at the El Monaco Motel in the Catskills in 1969, played a key role in organizing the festival.
According to town officials who met with film producers in late August, they planned to have about 300 extras for the traffic jam scene along with vehicles from the '60s or earlier. The site was prepared and a rehearsal held Sunday, and clean up will be done today.
Eckhardt said later Monday that he had received no complaints from residents along the road. Though the road was closed to traffic most of the day, people who live along the stretch were got special placards to allow them access to their homes, Eckhardt said.
Representatives of the film company did not immediately return calls for comment Monday.
Filming will continue in town early next month when crews take over the old Stephentown Hotel. Work has already been done to make the hotel look like the El Monaco, which was owned by Tiber's parents. Discussions at the hotel bar in 1969 led to the staging of the rock festival.
Filming at the hotel is scheduled for Oct. 6 and 7.
On October 2 and 3, the Evangelical Community Church near the intersection of routes 22 and 43 will have a role in the film.
The church will become a church in Bethel where the Town Council had its meetings in 1969 with much discussion of the rock fest.
Production crews are also working in two fields in Schodack on School House Road off Route 20. One field near Route 20 resembles the large 'bowl' of the original Woodstock site. Workers Monday had rainmaking equipment at the site and a resident, who did not want to be named, said crews were filming the Woodstock mudhole scenes. It rained during the concert turning Yasgur's field into a muddy mess.
Here are the other entries from my US20 blog covering the film:
Taking Woodstock Set Pictures and Filming Information
Woodstock Movie Filming in New Lebanon
A “Taking Woodstock” Update
The US Route 20 Blog homepage can be found here.
Stephentown gets star turn in Woodstock film
Producers of film about legendary show make use of several areas in town
By BOB GARDINIER, Staff writer
First published: Tuesday, September 16, 2008
STEPHENTOWN -- This rural town is going Hollywood as several locations are used to film the Ang Lee directed movie "Taking Woodstock" over the next few weeks.
On Monday a section of Route 43 was closed near Tinley Road for the filming of a scene depicting the famous traffic jam that occurred at the outset of the August 1969 rock festival in Bethel, Sullivan County.
Hundreds of extras dressed in tie-dyed clothing and loaded into period vehicles clogged a section of the state route near Calvin Cole Road Monday. They came to the site in tour buses to re-create the infamous Route 17B traffic jam that prompted concertgoers nearly 40 years ago to abandon their cars and hoof it to Max Yasgur's alfalfa fields at the junction of Hurd and West Shore roads just off the highway.
"The producers told us they had carried around a picture of the actual traffic jam and when they traveled that section of the road, they stopped in the middle of the road and said 'This is it,' " said Larry Eckhardt, town councilman and liaison between Tuxedo Terrace Films, the company shooting the movie, and town residents.
"They told us that the section of road looked just like Route 17B did in 1969," Eckhardt added.
The film is based on the memoirs of Eliot Tiber who, while managing the bar at the El Monaco Motel in the Catskills in 1969, played a key role in organizing the festival.
According to town officials who met with film producers in late August, they planned to have about 300 extras for the traffic jam scene along with vehicles from the '60s or earlier. The site was prepared and a rehearsal held Sunday, and clean up will be done today.
Eckhardt said later Monday that he had received no complaints from residents along the road. Though the road was closed to traffic most of the day, people who live along the stretch were got special placards to allow them access to their homes, Eckhardt said.
Representatives of the film company did not immediately return calls for comment Monday.
Filming will continue in town early next month when crews take over the old Stephentown Hotel. Work has already been done to make the hotel look like the El Monaco, which was owned by Tiber's parents. Discussions at the hotel bar in 1969 led to the staging of the rock festival.
Filming at the hotel is scheduled for Oct. 6 and 7.
On October 2 and 3, the Evangelical Community Church near the intersection of routes 22 and 43 will have a role in the film.
The church will become a church in Bethel where the Town Council had its meetings in 1969 with much discussion of the rock fest.
Production crews are also working in two fields in Schodack on School House Road off Route 20. One field near Route 20 resembles the large 'bowl' of the original Woodstock site. Workers Monday had rainmaking equipment at the site and a resident, who did not want to be named, said crews were filming the Woodstock mudhole scenes. It rained during the concert turning Yasgur's field into a muddy mess.
Here are the other entries from my US20 blog covering the film:
Taking Woodstock Set Pictures and Filming Information
Woodstock Movie Filming in New Lebanon
A “Taking Woodstock” Update
The US Route 20 Blog homepage can be found here.
I was an extra on the set yesterday and can confirm the details you have. It was crazy--400 extras, Demetri Martin, Ang Lee, Stephen Schamus, and an army of staff, parents of kids/extras, caterers, etc. The call for the extras started around 4:30, though, so most of us were probably too sleep-deprived to remember much.
ReplyDeleteThe scenes were all focused around the standstill traffic jam on the way to Woodstock. You'll be pleased to know that I think Route 20 is portrayed very well. It has a major supporting role--literally!
Pretty much the entire day's filming, really just 3 scenes, were spent on the closed section of the highway.
It sounds exciting! I'm glad that my favorite road is getting such attention. I wish I was there. I can't wait to see the final film!
ReplyDeleteJust a note about how the book titled TAKING WOODSTOCK got into Ang Lee's hands in the first place, some backstory info:
ReplyDeletetrue story, too:
TAKING WOODSTOCK
movie how came to ANG LEE, feel free to quote from this article
this is NEWS scoop, never reported before! i did a little research!
DANNY BLOOM
in Taiwan
==============================
Ang Lee's new movie "Taking Woodstock" has backstory of pure serendipity
cooment from Danny Bloom
comment person in Taiwan, SMILE!
email me for details:
danbloom AT gmail
Taiwan-born Hollywood director Ang Lee, 53, is tackling a new movie
project, a comedy this time, about America's
famous Woodstock hippie music festival in 1969. Titled Taking
Woodstock, the film's screenplay was written by
longtime Lee collaborator James Schamus, 49, from a book by Elliot
Tiber with the same title.
Tiber's memoir was quietly published with little fanfare in 2007 by a
small publisher in New York, but now the book,
subtitled "A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life," has become
Lee's entree into the world of film comedy. It's
tentatively set for a premiere in New York on June 26, 2009 --
according to sources and several movie websites on the Internet --
around the time of the 40th anniversary of the 1969 Woodstock
festival. The three-day concert took place in the middle of August of
that year, beginning on August 15.
Rudy Shur is the president of Square One Publishers, a book company in
New York, which bought the book and
released it in 2007 without really knowing if there was a Hollywood movie in
it. But ten months after publication, a
movie deal was signed with Focus Features in New York. Focus Features
is owned by NBC Universal, with James
Schamus serving as the independent studio's CEO. Tongues are already
wagging on blogs and websites about what Lee's
take on the Woodstock era will be like. The principal location
shooting in upstate New York is set to be completed
by the end of this month, according to Variety magazine, a film
industry publication.
In a recent email interview about how the book and movie sale came
about, publisher Shur, 62, explained the book's
curious backstory.
"Two friends of mine told me about a man they knew who had a very
interesting and unique 'story' to tell, and they
asked me to call him and see for myself if the memoir project -- still
unwritten -- would make a good book. After
talking to Elliot Tiber and listening to his story about Woodstock in
the Sixties, I told him that it would make a terrific
book, but that our book company usually didn't publish those types of
memoirs and that he would be better off with a
larger publishing house that had more experience and marketing clout."
Despite Shur's advice to take his book project to a bigger publishing
company, Tiber kept coming back to him and
Shur finally said that he would take on the book, but with the same
earlier reservations he had expressed before.
"I decided that maybe it was time to take a chance with this kind of
book, and since it was my company, well, I
would do as good a job as I could," Shur added. "So I called Elliot up
and said 'Lets go for it'."
The book's genesis was complicated. "The story he wanted to tell was
basically all Elliot, but to tell it in a manner
that presented a balanced story in the way that I was looking for
meant calling in a co-writer, Tom Monte," Shur said.
"Elliot's normal writing style was very creative and
stream-of-consciousness, but I wanted more of a traditional story
narrative. I had worked with Monte before, so I signed him to put
Elliot's material into the style I was looking for.
Joanne Abrams, my senior editor, worked with Elliot to get his memoir
into a more finalized form, and Monte did his
magic with the book, too. When it was done, Elliot approved, and we
had our book."
The title of the book, and the movie, also has an interesting
backstory. Shur explained that the title was the brainchild
of Square One's marketing director, Anthony Pomes.
"We had lots of titles in mind, but 'Taking Woodstock' seemed to fit
best based on the story," Shur noted. "We felt
the title meant two things: Taking stock of your life and, in a sense,
control of your destiny -- and also taking the
experience of Woodstock, and what that cultural event meant, with you
for the rest of your life."
"Woodstock was a moment of freedom as well as a coming of age for a
new generation in America," Shur added.
"So we used that title for the book, and Lee and Schamus are using it
for the movie as well. We are delighted."
"
The book's narrative reflects a young Elliot Tiber in his 20s who was
on the brink of financial ruin at the time but
who was also in a position to help pull off one of our generation's
greatest rock concerts," Shur said. "I wanted to
include some of the most important, yet overlooked, facts of the
coming together of the concert, and Monte (Eliot's
co-writer), having also lived through the period, was able to do just that."
When the book was first released, there were only a few reviews since
Square One was not a large publisher and
did not have the same kind of marketing clout as the larger book
companies in New York. But the reviews were
nevertheless positive, and slowly, word of mouth began to spread on
the Internet at book websites and blogs.
"We could see a real 'grass-roots' interest starting to build around
the book," Pomes, the marketing director said.
"The audience was growing week by week, and we felt we held a sleeper
title that had what it took to turn into a
winner."
How the book became a Hollywood movie to be directed by Academy Award
winner Ang Lee is also a story that
Shur tells with relish.
"It will sound like a Hollywood myth, but it really happened this
way," he said. "Tibe
r was scheduled to appear on
a West Coast television show to promote the book, and while he was
waiting in the green room to go on the show, who
should sit down next to him, by pure chance, but Ang Lee."
It turns out that Lee was also scheduled to appear on that same
interview show to promote his latest film, "Lust, Caution".
"Elliot," continues Shur, "introduced himself and spent the next hour
chatting with him about his book."
"Well, when Lee went on the show, the host finished the interview by
asking Lee where he usually got his ideas
from for his movies, and Lee said that he really doesn't go looking
for stories, that they seem to come to him. And
with that he turned to Elliot, who was sitting across from him, and
gave him a sly wink."
"Nothing really happened until about five months later, when Lee had
finally read the book," Shur said. "Lee
and Schamus felt there was a movie here, and together they went to
upstate New York to visit the Yasgur's Farm
site where the Woodstock festival took place. Elliot joined them there
at the site, and the project was in the can. The agents
finalized the deal, everything was signed, and here we are. It looks
like Lee was right: in this case, the next movie
project really did just seem to come to him."
When asked if he knew there was a movie in the book from the very
beginning, Shur said: "I'll be honest with you.
As we worked on the book, I knew that Elliot's story had the potential
to make a great independent movie. It was
like no other Woodstock story ever published. I believed that we could
find a small independent producer who could
turn the book into a film. However, in my wildest dreams I would have
never thought it to be the likes of Ang Lee and
James Schamus, two Academy Award winners who would take on the
project. So far, it's been an amazing ride."
So get ready for Ang Lee's new movie set for release in the summer of
2009, although the release date is not set
in concrete and may change according to the whims of Hollywood's
scheduling mavens. In the meantime,
readers who want to get straight to the heart of this unique American
memoir can grab hold of Tiber's
book, available in bookstores and on Internet ordering sites
worldwide. No doubt, however, Lee will have plenty to say himself
about how Tiber's book
came to him, and how he and Schamus collaborated on it as a film
comedy. For now, though, Rudy Shur has
told the story his way.