If it’s Sunday, it must be …. Wait a minute; let filmmaker Jay Craven think for a second about where in New England he’s driving to next to screen his most recent feature, Peter and John.
Oh, yeah: The Chandler Music Hall in Randolph at 7 on Sunday night. Next comes the music hall in Portsmouth, N.H., on Thursday, before a three-night run on Nantucket island — where he shot his adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant story about the impact on a family of an unexpected inheritance. He’ll return north the following week for appearances in Bethlehem, N.H., Bennington, Vt., Peterborough, N.H., Stowe, Vt. and Peacham, Vt., before the end of August.
“My travel in the course of a year is often 30,000 to 35,000 miles,” Craven during a telephone interview Wednesday morning, on a break from both the Peter and John tour and the editing of his upcoming sci-fi feature, Wetware. “Last summer we had 64 dates on Cape Cod and the Islands.
“There are a lot of towns in New England.”
At this point, there aren’t many towns in Vermont, especially, to which Craven hasn’t brought one of his movies. Starting in 1993, with Where the Rivers Flow North, he’s made New England the setting for most of his movies, including A Stranger in the Kingdom (1999), Disappearances (2006), Northern Borders (2013) and now Peter and John.
“You make a movie, you want to be out there with it,” Craven said. “It’s never predictable. It’s never secure. But it’s been great. … The whole barnstorming of a film is essential to what the whole thing is about: Making movies that are made in New England.”
After years of shooting primarily in Vermont and New Hampshire — Northern Borders and Stranger in the Kingdom, for example, both include scenes shot in Chelsea — Craven, who relies on lead actors performing for scale and on production teams that include students from Marlboro College, chose Nantucket for the setting of Peter and John.
Shot in the off-season, it takes advantage of whaling-era buildings and cobblestone streets in the island’s main village, and of the remote, windy beaches and wide skies as the backdrop to the tale, set in post-Civil-War New England.
It also helped, Craven added, that he had cooperation from island homeowners, officials and institutions such as the Nantucket Historical Association, which made its collection of 35,000 period artifacts available to move onto sets for verisimilitude.
“Every time we needed a prop on set,” Craven recalled, “there were three options.”
The movie’s cast includes Jacqueline Bisset and Emmy-winning Norwich resident Gordon Clapp as the parents of two young-adult brothers between whom a rift develops, after one receives a bequest from a family acquaintance and then wins over the exotic widow whom both siblings are pursuing.
“Gordon was a key asset to the production, from the moment he agreed to play a fairly challenging part — the cuckold who retains his humanity and even an edge,” Craven said. “Gordon’s a trouper, always fun to have around.”
Clapp, who grew up in North Conway, N.H., before moving on to a busy career in television (NYPD Blue), movies (Flags of Our Fathers and several John Sayles features) and theater, “provides an anchor to the whole cast, who are less grounded in New England,” Craven said.
“His authenticity flavors the entire production with the distinctive touch of New England that he brings to it.”
Clapp also has been attending screenings of Peter and John whenever possible, among them last weekend’s appearance at Dartmouth College’s Loew Auditorium.
“We brought in 209 people,” Craven said of the Dartmouth screening. “That’s a good crowd.”
He’s crossing his fingers to fill most of the Chandler Music Hall’s 575 seats come Sunday night.
“This is the fourth or fifth film we’ve shown there, and we’ve always done well,” Craven said. “The Chandler is the kind of place we love: an old-fashioned Vermont performance venue. It’s a graceful and elegant old Vermont theater that harkens back to the days of vaudeville, when they’d show a short film before the live acts came on.”
The Chandler also will require less scrambling on Craven’s part than venues in more isolated parts of Vermont, particularly the Northeast Kingdom, where he lives. In his blog, he recalls a showing of Disappearances at an old hall in Irasburg, where he found himself unfolding and setting up dozens of heavy chairs from two big stacks on a hot night, and deputized author Howard Frank Mosher, whose novel Craven adapted for the movie, to a nearby store to buy garbage bags to tape over the windows — all while a crowd queued up outside.
“Having a shared experience like you get with films is important,” Craven said. “You experience it together.
“A virtual community is fine, up to a point, but the physical community is where we live.”
Jay Craven screens and talks about his latest release,
For its next Free for All film of the summer, the Hopkins Center brings Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to Dartmouth College’s Spaulding Auditorium in Hanover next Thursday night at 6:30. The 1971 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory stars Gene Wilder as the factory owner in an incarnation less creepy than Johnny Depp’s depiction in the 2005 version directed by Tim Burton.
Court Street Arts continues its series of free movies at Alumni Hall in Haverhill tonight at 6:30 with a screening of the sci-fi comedy The Goonies. Co-written by Steven Spielberg, the 1985 film was an early stepping stone for actors who went on to long careers, particularly Josh Brolin, Sean Astin, Martha Plimpton and Joe Pantoliano.
Monday is the deadline for patrons of Hanover’s Nugget Theaters to vote for which movie they think should represent the 21st century at the end of its Nugget Centennial Film Series of monthly screenings of 20th-century classics.
With an aim of showing the winner on Oct. 23, the Nugget has posted an online ballot at nugget-theaters.com/about-us/new-millenium-vote that lists the following options: Gladiator, Amelie, Mystic River, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Little Miss Sunshine, No Country for Old Men, The Dark Knight, Slumdog Millionaire, Avatar, Inception, The King’s Speech, The Artist, Lincoln, SilverLinings Playbook and Gravity. There is also an option to write in a favorite.
If I had to choose from films on the ballot, I’d lean toward The King’s Speech among the films on the ballot. Given the choice of a write-in, I’m now struggling among Beasts of the Southern Wild, O Brother, Where Art Thou and such recent features as Sing Street and The Hunt for the Wilder People.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.