Hanging Mud Flap Productions shoots scene at Bellows Falls Train Depot

By BILL LOCKWOOD
BELLOWS FALLS — After dark on March 27th Hanging Mud Flap Productions of Waterbury Center, VT came with a film crew and four lead actors to shoot ‘40s night time scene at the Bellows Falls train depot. They are making a feature length film in the black and white style of the old classics called “The Farm Boy”. Extras needed to play passengers both waiting for and on the train were recruited from local community theater participants as was retired conductor Dick Gassetts.

According to George Woodard, writer, director, and cinematographer, The story is set in the fall of 1944 and reflects the sacrifice of American farm boys during WWII. The lead character, Calvin Dillard, played by Henry Woodard, the director’s son, is a milk truck driver living on a small hillside farm in Vermont. He falls in love with a girl he meets at a barn dance, and then he is drafted in to the Army. Calvin comes home for two days leave and marries his sweetheart. Then he is shipped off to the war in Europe. His convoy is attacked, and Calvin is left for dead. He is found by a French woman who nurses him back to health and accompanies him on a successful escape to freedom. The story is loosely based on Woodard’s parents life story.

Henry Woodard was accompanied by Grace Woodruff who plays the new wife and Jan Bailey and Robert Nuner who play Dillard’s parents. All are community theater participants “up north”. Their roles for the Bellows Falls shoot were to arrive at the station, say good-bye, and watch their soldier board the two era appropriate cars of the old Green Mountain Flyer excursion train pulled by a vintage engine to go off to war.

Locals involved in the shoot were Caleigh Plunkett and Jeff Semprebon of River Theater Company in Charles Town, Samaira Aldrich and Sharon Miller of River Theater and the Walpole Players, Gina Richardson of Main Street Arts in Saxtons River and Jeanie Levesque and this writer who have worked with all three groups. They all expressed having fun dressing up in ’40s attire and riding the train even though it hardly left the station and kept backing up for the next shot.

Richardson said, “I was thoroughly overjoyed to be a movie extra… to actually see how much involvement a movie takes, to get the right shot, the right angle, the right look.” Multiple shots were set up and taken, then re-taken, from about 6 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. It was a long night for all the volunteers involved.

Aldrich said, “I think Bellows Falls is a wonderful place to do a film shoot…Even more so for a film set in the 1940 era… The architecture of the houses and buildings … is amazingly beautiful. Of course the train station is, in my opinion, at the top of that list.”

George Woodard and Producer Joan Brace O’Neal both said how grateful they were of the resources, cooperation, and great staff provided by the Rail Road. Woodard says they picked the station in Bellows Falls after scouting it while transporting an old Army truck he had purchased in Massachusetts back to Waterbury Center. Back in 1998 the same

station and some Green Mountain Flyer cars were used for scenes in the film version of John Irving’s novel “Cider House Rules”. For that “Hollywood made” movie a steam engine was brought from New York for daylight scenes and an all day professional filming session.

Henry Woodard said the shooting is “about 70% completed”. Other scenes have been shot in the Waterbury Center area. Henry says WWII re-enactors gave their time for the battle scenes, and George Woodard said they have used three buildings “in the woods” for the French countryside and an interior set up in a garage. He is also pleased that he was able to find fluent French speakers in the area willing to participate and who fit their parts.

Producer O’Neal says she is struck by how invested and wonderful the volunteers are to work with, and it is “the wonderful thing about doing a grass roots project.” Woodard himself is by day a dairy farmer milking 25 cows on a 200 acre farm his grandfather bought more that 100 years ago. Woodard did spend some time in Los Angeles learning the movie trade and is, in his spare time, an actor and entertainer.

This is George Woodard’s second movie. His first was “The Summer of Walter Hacks” in 2010. An eight year younger Henry Woodard plays the lead. It has been a Vermont Film Festival winner. It is also a period piece about coming of age set in rural Vermont and filmed in black and white. George Woodard says. “It sets a particular time period since most things in that era were black and white” and it does “a lot authentistically to pull people into that era.”

Once completed Woodard will show his film in various town halls and local venues around Vermont and at film festivals as he has been doing with his first film. No date has been set for Bellows Falls. We must anxiously await.