Past, present and future booming
Region continues to be a draw for Hollywood film, TV productions
Somewhere in the first half of 1987, Meryl Streep was kicked out of the Troy Public Library on Second Street for falling asleep in the ornate, second floor reading room beneath the glow of the Tiffany glass windows. Or rather, her homeless character Helen Archer was shown the door for snoozing during a scene shot there for the movie “Ironweed.”
Now, 34 years later, the exterior of that building is doubling for the outside of a 19th-century
New York City gentleman’s club for another film crew, this one from the forthcoming HBO series, “The Gilded Age,” that took over whole sections of downtown Troy the past few weeks. And those curtains you’ll see in the front windows when the histor
ical drama premieres later this year, they’re there to obscure what lies beyond: the library’s beloved and sprawling children’s department, aka the Young People’s Room.
“I’m in there making 40 takea-nd-make kits with crafts and science activities,” said Amy M. Relyea, a youth services librarian, while outside, characters are interacting in front of what’s supposed to be a place men go to smoke, drink, talk about women and business, and who knows what else.
The cast of “The Gilded Age” is toplined by A-listers Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon and Carrie Coon, and features a female-dominant who’s who of Broadway royalty, including Audra Mcdonald, Kelli O’hara and Donna Murphy. Chosen as the young ingenue for the romantic plot was just-turned 30 Louisa Jacobson. Who’s that? None other than the youngest of four siblings birthed by … Meryl Streep.
Recurring on the show as Ward Mcallister, the real-life arbiter of social standing in Victorian-era America, will be three-time Tony winner Nathan Lane. A then-unknown Lane made his film debut as a scab trolleyman in “Ironweed,” during scenes shot at the north end of Lark Street in Albany depicting the city’s actual 1901 trolley strike.
It’s this connection to the past that’s been at the core of many of the productions that have come to the Capital Region over the years, from “Ironweed” and “The Gilded Age” to “The Age of Innocence,” “The Time Machine,” “Billy Bathgate,” “Seabiscuit” and “The Bostonians.”
Even more recent history, like that of Watergate-era Washington, D.C., has been replicated in Albany through such productions as “Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight” and “The White House Plumbers” with Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux, which just finished a few days’ shooting in downtown Albany.
“I think we have an up on a lot of cities, that a lot of our buildings double for Washington, D.C., that a lot of other cities don’t have,” said Debby Goedeke, the longtime Albany County film commissioner. “But I also think that the ease of filming here is another big reason that they come. We really set it up so they have a one-stop contact. We don’t have layers and layers of paperwork or anything else.”
This sort of streamlined process is echoed in Troy, where Deputy Mayor Monica Kurzejeski has taken on de facto film commissioner duties as part of her job.
“Coordination is easier. You’re not trying to sift through layers of departments. In Troy, you’re literally calling me.”
And coordination among themselves is also key, with Goedeke and Kurzejeski, as well as their counterparts in other local communities, regularly keeping in contact and touting each other’s benefits to potential film projects. They view a win for any of them as a win for all because it brings money into the area and supports local businesses.
Ask them about the other reasons location shooting has ramped up dramatically, and they are similarly in sync: word of mouth in the industry; the rise and quick spread of streaming services; the difference in costs between here and, say,
New York City or Los Angeles. But the biggest might be the expansion of the tax credits available by shooting upstate.
Both women also point to the lessening of COVID restrictions as key, with films and shows anxious to move past the pandemic and start working again, and local residents happy to be out and about, road closures and inconveniences included. Kurzejeski said that in the case of “The Gilded Age,” filming was supposed to have taken place more than a year ago, so the working relationship between the city and the production has been a long and therefore more comfortable one.
A stop by “The Gilded Age” set on Monument Square one Saturday evening found the production just breaking for “lunch,” a sure sign filming would go into the night, just like it did the day before. Perhaps buoyed by a high vaccination rate in New York and a growing sense of complacency with the Hollywood invasion, onlookers remain, some of them close-up peppering the young production assistant, tasked with keeping people off the set, with multiple questions.
He tries his best but admits that much of the information is above his pay grade. How many people are employed on the production? Between 600 and 700, he thinks. What’s the total cost for all 10 episodes? He’s heard anywhere between $100 million and more than $300 million.
A week later, the Monument Square location is still buzzing. Costumed extras and various horse-drawn conveyances repeat intricate patterns of movement on Troy’s dirt-covered streets as a chain of “Rehearsal!” or “Background!” or “Rolling!” are called out on a series of walkie-talkies.
As the last of those commands is heard, one of the horsemen not in this shot and stationed with his steed farther up Broadway begins loudly singing the theme to the 1960s TV western “Rawhide” (“Rollin,’ rollin,’ rollin’ … Rawhide!”). No one minds.
As one can expect when standing outside for hours in the recent summer-like temperatures while weighed down in corsets and bustles and threepiece wool suits, the extras and horses begin to wilt. One of the background players, in a formal black suit and top hat, fills a bucket with water and goes horse-to-horse dipping each one’s snout into the cool liquid until they start lapping it up.
That same man later distributes ice packs to his human companions, passing one to a woman rider dressed as a typical 1880s male, who immediately places it on the back of her neck. Her refreshment is shortlived, however, when “Background!” is suddenly called again. She smiles nervously, looks around and then does the only thing she can — she lifts herself slightly off the horse’s back, shoves the ice pack under her and then sits down on top of it.
The bucket, meanwhile, was placed next to a prop barrel, alongside soda cans, sports drink bottles and a spray bottle. The lack of concern for such modern distractions means they are either out of the camera’s perspective or the show will be dealing with its own “Game of Thrones”/starbucks cup controversy in the future.
Speaking of the future of the Capital Region as a continued Hollywood on the Hudson, Kurzejeski said, “One of the things that we’ve been talking about as a region is also looking at how do we start looking at this as one of our industries. What we want to do is create a little bit of
an incubation system in the region.”
That would include a ready list of local production assistants, food vendors, local actors and artists.
“I think we need to get a bona fide soundstage here in the Capital Region,” Goedeke said, “and maybe some kind of a hub that goes along with it that does training.”
She envisions a place with multi-purpose event spaces, room for production offices, hair and makeup and wardrobe.
The promise of a brighter future by preserving the past is exemplified by what Relyea saw at the library. She said the advance crew removed metal signs on the front of the building that had been attached for at least 60 years, cleaning out the decades of dirt and decay beneath and generally spiffing up the façade of the American Renaissance-style landmark (which, psst, wasn’t yet built at the time “The Gilded Age” is set, but don’t tell anyone).
They repainted the badly-in-need-of-it front door and frosted its windowpanes, and replaced the faux candle-lit lanterns that light the entrance, frosting their glass panels, too. Unlike the curtains, this work gets to stay.
What does the future hold for the region in terms of film and TV projects? Goedeke and Kurzejeski can’t give too much away, especially when no deals are yet signed and some are only in the scouting stages. But they do tease things like another big period piece, a blockbuster and an independent feature and much more from our frequent visitor, HBO. That includes the premium TV network’s most recent forays into our area, “The White House Plumbers” and “The Gilded Age.” Goedeke said the former is tentatively scheduled to come back to Albany for more filming in the early fall.
Kurzejeski and her office are in talks with HBO should “The Gilded Age” prove successful and be renewed for a second season.
And those library curtains? They, too, provided their own mini-drama. When they were about to be installed, it was found they didn’t have the proper pocket for hanging. Relyea then witnessed a prolonged back-and-forth between crew members and departments over exactly how “married” the production was to these particular treatments.
In the end, it was all figured out, but the promise to donate them to the library after filming concluded was retracted:
They were rentals.
Relyea said her children wanted the family to be extras, but she explained to them, “I don’t really have any Victorian gear.”
Their compromise was urging her to peek out the sides of the curtains during filming, a challenge she took up once or twice, even if that meant feigning ignorance when a crew member later asked why the curtains were askew.