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The critics have spoken, and early reviews out of Venice for Ben Affleck’s made-in-Boston thriller “The Town” are mostly positive. The set-in-Charlestown bank-robbery drama debuted at the Venice Film Festival earlier this week, and most of the critics say the flick is a worthy successor to Hub classics such as “The Departed,” ‘Mystic River’ and Ben’s earlier work in “Gone Baby Gone.”

“Everyone in this business was an extra,” said Angela Peri, owner of Boston Casting. “I was an extra.” According to a 2010 University of Massachusetts study, the Bay State is among the fastest growing states in the country for film production. And while employment is down, film production jobs have increased, the study said. Case in point: Ben Affleck’s “The Town” was shot here and opens Sept. 17.

The stars of director Ben Affleck’s new shot-in-Boston heist drama will attend the Sept. 14 screening at Fenway Park. Warner Bros. yesterday announced that “The Town’’ will premiere at the ballpark, and the all-star cast, including Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively, Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, and Chris Cooper, will join Affleck for the special event in the outfield.

The production company Moderncine has spent the past four weeks in mostly remote parts of Greenfield and Montague shooting the movie “The Woman,” and some of the scenes are not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. 



Massachusetts native Taylor Schilling is taking Hollywood by storm. Best known for her role as tough Iraq vet nurse Veronica Callahan on NBC’s “Mercy,” Taylor will hit the silver screen as Zac Efron’s leading lady in the film adaptation of the Nicholas Sparks’ novel “The Lucky One.”

Despite the extraordinary passion of Mark Wahlberg, who started training almost four years ago for the lead role as the real-life boxer Micky Ward, “THE FIGHTER” still had to survive a grueling behind-the-scenes struggle before landing on the schedule at Paramount Pictures, which plans to release it on Dec. 10, as the awards season hits full stride.

Just a day after Dorchester’s own Mark Wahlberg premiered his comedy “The Other Guys’’ in New York with costars Will Ferrell and Eva Mendes, he took the film to Hingham — more specifically to Alma Nove, his brother Paul Wahlberg’s new restaurant in the Hingham Shipyard.

Filmmaking in the county has operated at a steady pace since “Pretty Poison” became the first major motion picture made in Berkshire County. It was shot in 1968 in North Adams and Great Barrington and was followed a year later by “Alice’s Restaurant.” This past spring, two out-of-town filmmakers came here to shoot low-budget short feature films.

The New York Times reported this week that “The Woman” could begin shooting Aug. 2. Massachusetts offers filmmakers a 25 percent tax credit on money spent in the state. In recent years, that has been enough to draw movies like “Shutter Island” and “Gone Baby Gone” to the Bay State. In 2008, parts of the Mel Gibson movie “Edge of Darkness” were filmed in Northampton and Deerfield.

The credits have been like Miracle-Gro for our industry. Over the past five years, there has been a national race — a fierce competition to attract the high-spending film and TV industries, with states across the country vying to create incentives to lure movies and TV companies and their lucrative spending to their states. The surprise winner: Massachusetts.

An odd wrinkle in the globalization of popular culture has given Massachusetts a certain currency as a place where traditional forms of masculine virtue still thrive. Movies have played a key role. The state’s efforts to attract film production, especially the film tax credit, have enabled a string of movies — “Mystic River,’’ “The Departed,’’ “Gone Baby Gone,’’ “Edge of Darkness,’’ and, next up, “The Fighter’’ and Ben Affleck’s “The Town’’ — that glorify white-ethnic (usually Irish) styles of toughness associated with working-class neighborhoods in places like Boston and Lowell. Native storytellers like Affleck, Wahlberg, and Dennis Lehane are responsible for this lionizing of Boston-area regular guys, but so are internationally prominent mythmakers from elsewhere like Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, and Mel Gibson. With the help of local casting consultants and dialogue coaches, they come here, of all places, to get some of that potent homegrown stuff.

Productions of all types and sizes are hitting the road and bringing into
play what this country has to offer beyond the glitz and glamour of Tinsel Town. With tax incentive programs, a deep crew base and bountiful infrastructure, filmmakers will find themselves hard pressed to find a reason not to film in this great state.

Newton homey John Krasinski (THE OFFICE) and his British-born fiancee, Emily Blunt (THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA), finally exchanged vows this past weekend at the Villa D’este in Como, Italy. “John and Emily were married on Saturday in a private ceremony,” Krasinski’s rep told Us Weekly mag. Blunt won a Golden Globe in 2007 for her performance in the TV movie “Gideon’s Daughter.”

“I had Angie Harmon out here for three or four days shadowing the homicide unit,” said Boston Police Detective Russell Grant. “She got to see a real homicide scene in Dorchester. And then I had Lee Thompson Young (who plays another detective) get a feel for the homicide unit, and Jordan Bridges, who plays Jane’s brother who is a uniform guy, rode along with the guys from District 4.” So, Detective, got a lead on why this TV show is not being filmed in Boston??? “Oh, don’t get me started,” he laughed. “I know at one point they wanted to come here to film but the actors thought it would be too much of a hardship.

If the nonprofit Dreamland Foundation has its way, its goal of reviving the much-loved Dreamland Theatre, which closed in 2005, is closer to realization than any previous efforts have been, lifting the hopes of 10,000 islanders and some 40,000 vacationers. With millions of dollars raised and a few million more to go, the foundation expects to break ground on a new 340-seat theater this fall.

While taking a breather from Hollywood, visual effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull (“2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) re-located to the Berkshires in 1987 — ultimately begetting a cluster of visual effects companies in the area.

The cluster has seen several core companies depart since the mid-1990s. Now, Trumbull, who remains in the Berkshires, hopes to inspire a new wave of visual effects firms to migrate to the area. His plan to accomplish this? Produce a sci-fi film entirely in Western Massachusetts.

The story involves glitz, intrigue, and indictments. No, it’s not a soap opera plot. It’s the amazingly true story behind the still-proposed Plymouth Rock Studios in Massachusetts…

“The Biggest Loser” is coming to Boston looking for contestants at an open casting call on July 24th.

“Grown Ups,” starring Adam Sandler and an ensemble cast including many other former “Saturday Night Live” cast members, came to Essex last spring and did the majority of its filming on location on Chebacco Lake, with Centennial Grove used as a Connecticut lake house visited by Sandler’s character, four of his childhood friends and their families. The cast and crew’s presence on Cape Ann was felt throughout last summer, both financially and as a cultural boost. The town was paid $150,000 for the use of Centennial Grove from Lakefront Productions Inc. and received another $500 daily from September until November to keep the site untouched in case re-shoots were necessary. Many of the sets were decorated with pieces from Essex’s antique shops, and regular celebrity sightings around town created a buzz that lasted long after the crews left town.

Produced by the makers of the Peabody Award-winning series “Hopkins,” each episode focuses on critical cases at Massachusetts General Hospital, Children’s Hospital Boston and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Boston Med” is the cure for summertime TV blues.