- Long Island Oughta Be in Pictures -

By Danny McCarthy

The Long Island Museum “up-island” in Stony Brook presented an exhibit called Lights! Camera! Action! Long Island in the Movies from September to October 2005. Hundreds of films — some classics, some forgotten — have been shot on Long Island locations or have chosen this as their setting. Before 1925, New York dominated the motion picture industry. Long Island had space and scenery. Among some of the locations selected before Hollywood became the booming center of the movie studios were: Astoria, Farmingdale, Old Westbury, and Oyster Bay. Astoria was within walking of the Queensborough Bridge. The studio there was known as The Big House. Hollywood boomed when it was discovered that it was the “lavish gold coast” in the 1950s. The Astoria studio reopened in 1975.
Visitors would enter the Long Island Museum exhibit by walking past a re-created old studio back lot set, an early movie camera, lights, a boom microphone, and other film , bringing them into the behind-the-scenes story of how to make “reel” movie magic.
Many pictures were shot across Long Island during the silent and early talkie picture days and included such stars as Rudolph Valentino, Valentino was spotlighted in the exhibit in one of his last films, A Sainted Devil, shot in 1924, at the Paramount Studios in Astoria. Gloria Swanson, the highest paid silent film star, was shown in a glossy taken from the 1924 Wages of Virtue film, which was made in six weeks in Astoria.
Some movies shot on Long Island mentioned in the exhibit included: The Perils of Pauline (1914), Sally of the Sawdust (1914), So’s Your Old Man (1926), Fast and Loose (1930), Emperor Jones (1933), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Godfather (1971), Raging Bull (1980), The World According to Garp (1980), Rollover (1982), The Kid (1984), Scent of a Woman (1997), Cruel Intentions (1998), Judy Berlin (1999), Man on the Moon (1999), Meet the Parents (2000), Something’s Gotta Give (2003) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).
Those that were about Long Island included: Humoresque (1949), The Girl from Jones Beach (1949), The Great Gatsby (1974), Jaws (1975), The Amityville Horror (1979), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Simple Men (1992) and Love and Death on Long Island (1997).
At the exhibition, I remembered distinctly seeing Al Pacino’s face and nose molds from Angels in America and Dennis Quaid’s headcast from 1999’s Frequency. Both were created by Mt. Sinai, Long Island disguise genius John Caglione. The Marx Brothers were featured with memorabilia from The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, which were both based on stage plays and filmed in 1935 at the Astoria Studios. As I “ease on down the road” at the exhibit, I discover costumes from the 1979 film The Wiz. Of course there was Ann Reinking’s lame silver outfit from All That Jazz, the 1980 award-winning film about director/choreographer Bob Fosse. At the museum there was a listing that that film won Best Picture. Actually, it won for Best Costume Design, Original Score, Set Decoration, Art Decoration, and Film Editing. Kramer vs. Kramer won that year. 1982’s Deathtrap, staring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve was remarkably remembered. Mounted on the walls at the exhibit was an actual speaker taken from the Old Westbury drive-in movie theatre. There was even a trivia game to see how much of a film buff one is!
I wondered why the 1997 thriller The Devil’s Own wasn’t spotlighted at the exhibit. Remember when its two stars, Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt, were all over downtown Greenport shooting scenes from the film? The story-line about a police officer discovering an IRA terrorist house guest wasn’t set on Long Island but it was filmed on Long Island.
In 2005, the Robert De Niro-directed film, The Good Shepherd, staring Academy Award Winners De Niro, Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, relating the early days of the CIA, was filmed in Nassau County in Manhasset.