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Hollywood East (of Erie)

Attention, shoppers. Today’s bakery special is a movie camera with a side of sound boom. Quiet on the set.

If this supermarket were in LA, no one would even notice. But shoppers at Hegedorn’s, a small grocery store in the town of Webster near Rochester, New York, aren’t too jaded to get a kick out of watching the filming of a real movie, appropriately named “Checkout“.

They should get used to it. Rochester, the Finger Lakes region and western New York are becoming popular alternatives for film makers, making us a real contender for the title of Hollywood East. Admittedly, we’re not the only community to claim the name. Other such locations include Toronto, Miami, Vermont, Hong Kong - actually, nearly every part of the globe except Hollywood. But take a look at our evidence:

Last summer, the psychological thriller After Image starring John Mellencamp, Louise Fletcher and Terrylene was shot in Rochester. The film about a crime scene photographer who becomes psychically connected to a brutal killer is scheduled for release in 2001 at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, where writer-director Bob Manganelli developed the script in 1992.

That’s as close to Redford as Rochester film buffs have gotten, having lost out to neighboring Buffalo on the chance to provide the baseball stadium for the actor-director’s film The Natural. Western New York has been the location for Frank LaLoggia’s 1988 thriller Lady in White, and of scenes for such films as Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Ironweed, and Hide in Plain Sight, not to mention television programs ranging from Ken Burns’ documentary on Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to General Hospital.

What’s the attraction? The number of thrillers and grim dramas shot here might be a clue. If your script calls for overcast skies and gray mood lighting, your cameras could sit idle for a long time in southern California. Come to western New York, and you’ll never have to delay shooting while you wait for rain.

Another possible link is the presence of Rochester Institute of Technology and its school of photography and film. Bob Manganelli is a 1983 graduate, and he was reportedly urged to film After Image in Rochester by his co-producer and former RIT classmate Chris Nakis. His cinematographer Kurt Brabbee also attended RIT.

But Hollywood’s debt to Rochester goes beyond film locations. It goes back to film. Rochester entrepreneur George Eastman founded the Eastman Kodak Company, which in 1928 introduced Kodacolor film for making motion pictures in color.

If you’re travelling in the Rochester area you can see the very spot where George announced the new product to a gathering of scientists and friends including Thomas Edison, as well as the rest of Eastman’s 50-room house at 900 East Avenue. It’s now a preeminent museum of photography whose exhibits feature the more than 400,000 photographs and 17,000 films in its collections. If you’d like to see George’s actual birthplace (his family moved to Rochester when he was five), stop by Mumford, New York just west of Rochester where this far more modest abode is now part of the Genesee Country Village.

And if you’re planning on shooting a movie, check out Rochester/Finger Lakes Film & Video Office. What’s Hollywood got that we haven’t got - besides sunshine?

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