“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.

The episodes jump among both routine and unusual cases at three local institutions — Mass. General, Brigham and Women’s, and Children’s Hospital — without hokey manipulations.

For the first time ever, two major motion pictures shot extensively in Massachusetts are opening in the same week. “Knight and Day,” starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, opens Wednesday. It was shot in Boston and other locations including a field in Bridgewater, where an airliner was blown up. “Grown Ups,” a comedy starring Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, Kevin James and Rob Schneider, opens on Friday. Much of the film was shot in the town of Essex.

Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz met with a group of special needs students from Bridgewater-Raynham High School. Their teacher, Kara Kuntupis, had invited the stars to visit the school and eat at the cafeteria that the kids run. Cruise and Cameron instead invited the kids, teachers and one parent each on location. The actors treated them to an ice cream bar, chatted and posed for individual pictures, which they later autographed and mailed back to the students. “They still feel like they’re these little stars,” Lynn Temme, one of the classroom aides, said Tuesday.


A pack of Bridgewater State College students were honored earlier this month for creating the funniest film at Campus MovieFest, a national film festival for college students.

Adam Sandler pays homage to the local colleges in his new made-in-Mass. flick, which opens Friday. In “Grown Ups,” Adam wears a different New England university T-shirt or cap in almost every scene, including swag from BU, Harvard, and UMass.

“Knight and Day’’ is a movie that indulges our local audiences with a balletic high-speed shoot-out through the highways of downtown Boston. (The fantasy lies not in the flipping cars and trucks but in the notion that any traffic could move this fast on the Southeast Expressway.) After 40 minutes or so of casually destroying our fair city, the movie moves on to Salzburg, Seville, the Azores; tax credits or no, it’s flattering to think we’re in the same league. Oh, and it’s apparently illegal to shoot a movie in Boston without getting a chopper shot of the Zakim Bridge. Accept it — as far as Hollywood is concerned, the Zakim’s our Eiffel Tower.

Rugged seaside beauty has lured scores of filmmakers and actors to Cape Ann, as they discover what an ideal setting it is for making movies.

An all-star comedy roundtable starring Ben Stiller, Sarah Silverman, Andy Samberg and Zach Galifianakis yesterday during the Nantucket Film Festival devolved into a debate over YouTube.

Academy Award-winner Tilda Swinton came to the Provincetown Film Festival yesterday to promote her new flick, “I am Love.” She had no idea she would be taking home the Cape festie’s Excellence in Acting Award.

“Knight and Day’’ opens Friday and gives her and Cruise another crack at each other. The new playing field appears to be level. It’s a comedy. He grins and runs and cracks some jokes. She gawks and laughs and waves her arms in ecstasy. That is the Diaz way. This is the rare beauty who’s made a career out of being a dork.

Three of Boston’s best hospitals – Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Children’s Hospital Boston – get prime-time exposure in the new series “Boston Med,” premiering Thursday at 10 p.m. on WCVB, Ch. 5.

The screams coming from behind the Coolidge Corner Theatre on a recent Saturday night weren’t the blood-curdling kind. They were more like the raucous howls that greet rock stars, which is pretty much what it looked like when Tommy Wiseau, the writer, director, producer, and star of “The Room,’’ materialized to press the flesh before a midnight screening of his film. “Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!’’ chanted the throngs, waving their cellphones and jockeying for a chance to take a picture with the man responsible for what many believe is the worst movie ever made.

Dennis and Falmouth would like people to know they are open for business … the movie business, that is. Both have developed Web pages promoting their attractiveness as potential film sites and promising assistance with the permitting process if film crews need to shut down roads or work on public property. The Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce also maintains a similar site, www.filmoncapecod.com, that promotes the entire region.

In the second episode of “Boston Med,’’ a cardiothoracic surgeon at Children’s Hospital Boston makes this matter-of-fact assertion: “It’s a tough situation, but it’s not hopeless, and if anybody can fix it, we can.’’ He is describing a particular case: a baby born with a rare heart abnormality whose father, a US soldier, has returned from Iraq for the surgery. But his words also reflect the core assumption at the heart of “Boston Med,’’ an eight-part ABC News documentary series that premieres June 24.

Tom had a helluva time in the Hub making the pic. Cruise told Entertainment Weekly he and his fam had their best Halloween ever in Boston, because the Hollywood heavy, his bride Katie Holmes, daughter Suri, and Tom’s kids Connor and Isabella, roamed the streets of Beacon Hill – in costume – and no one recognized them!

With beaches, sunshine, and a summer party atmosphere, it isn’t difficult to lure visitors, even film buffs who plan on spending lots of time in the dark, to Cape Cod. But the Provincetown and Nantucket film festivals raised the bar early on: both consistently deliver impressive and eclectic events worthy of the towns’ artistic and bohemian traditions.

Despite the prevalence of sprawling multiplexes and the eternal appeal of Hollywood blockbusters, the area hosts a number of smaller movie houses showing lesser-known independent films, including the Capitol Theatre in Arlington, the West Newton Cinema, the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, the Embassy Cinema in Waltham, and Maynard’s Fine Arts Theatre.