Lights, Camera, Action!
Nashoba Publishing
By Mary E. Arata
Published: 10/30/2009 07:32:30 AM
AYER -- Eight survivors rounded the Columbia Avenue corner of Town Hall and trudged down Main Street. Dead bodies were strewn along the sidewalk. Some carried air tanks, while another tank was pulled along in a gardening wagon. They passed oxygen masks back and forth between themselves. A man ran up to them, begging for a breath of air from a survivor. The group waved him away. "We can't take any more on," screamed one, "Let's go! Keep it moving -- come on! Move, goddammit, move!"

The lone man crumples to the ground. A female survivor, Jennifer Watson, 21, of Billerica, couldn't stand the thought of leaving the man to die. She ran back to give the man air from her oxygen mask. Just then, another man darts from between two nearby buildings and ripped the mask away from Watson and her charge, hightailing it down the alleyway between O'Hanlons and the bank. He looks back as he books away and say only, "Lady, I'm sorry." Across the street, a man yelled "Cut!"

For three hours Sunday afternoon, Ayer and its residents were cast as players in director John DePew's independent film, CO2, about a small Pennsylvania town devastated by a coal mine disaster. Ayer and the other New England locations acted as stand-in towns for the film.

The story line was borrowed from a real life 1986 disaster in Cameroon. At that time, a magma-spurred geologic eruption occurred some 50 miles under the floor of a Cameroon lake. The carbon dioxide escaped through the water's surface at the rate of 60 mph, releasing about 1.6 million tons of the gas.

The eruption displaces oxygen and so caused the suffocation of 1,700 villagers and 3,500 head of livestock in a 16-mile zone around the lake. For those lining the sidewalks on Main Street Sunday, the theft scene alone, which will take mere minutes once edited, took nearly three hours to shoot. But it's a dramatic episode in the film which is due for release next summer as an independent release or, perhaps, an HBO special.

Ayer was chosen as a filming location after it charmed the movie's producers. Gary Whelpley of FCC Filmscouting says the buildings of downtown Ayer were fixed in his mind following his years drilling with the National Guard on Devens. Ayer joined the list of other locales used including Haverhill, Newburyport, North Reading and Plaistow, N.H. Whelpley said Ayer's different sized buildings and easily diverted traffic also helped bring the production to town. He said town was very cooperative and that he was thankful for the selectmen's approval for the filming on Oct. 6. The film's on a tight schedule and so approval was quickly needed.

Shooting originally scheduled for Oct. 18 was rescheduled to last Sunday, where the crew was treated to beautiful sunny autumn weather. "Thank God the weather worked out because it's been playing havoc with us," said Judy Coleman, the film's executive producer and DePew's wife. The couple is financing the flick on their own. It's their second self-produced venture following the release of their first film, 27 Down.

While it was sunny, it was not so warm for the extras that played dead along the Main Street surface and sidewalk. Fifteen-year old Conor Healy of Bridgewater played one victim. Peering out of his zipped-up hooded sweatshirt, he said he was in the shade of a vehicle prop parked by Town Hall. "It was cold... very, very, very cold," he said, but still was excited - it was his first time as an extra and his first time on a movie set.

The Cottage Restaurant doubled as a dressing room for the cast and refuge for crew as they prepared for the reopening of Main Street and their opening for the lunchtime crowd. Main Street, freshly decorated for tomorrow's Halloween celebrations, plays a starring role in the film. Corn stalks were tied to the light poles and, appropriately enough, large skull cutouts were stuck onto the windows at town hall.

The oxygen pilferring thief was played Doug Cadrette, an Ayer man and Moore Lumber Company employee. Cadrette was downtown Sunday morning, buying his daily paper and coffee at Archer's Mobil, when DePew saw him in the store at 6 a.m. and cast him on the spot. Cadrette says he'd acted once before in an unpaid role in a Veryfine Juice ad that ran during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. "I had no idea any of this was going on," said Cadrette, still a little shocked with disbelief at the wild turn his day took. "I was gonna hole myself up for the rest of the day." It was his three-and-a-half hours of fame, and maybe more, depending on the distribution deals.

He says he would love the chance to do more acting. His legs were tired from shooting the same scene over and over again -- some 15 to 20 times he said. "Sometimes I didn't have a chance to catch my breath," he said. Links about the movie can be found on the movie's Web site, www.CO2movie.com.

Plaistow Town Hall featured in independent film
May 25, 2009 The Eagle Tribune
By Margo Sullivan

PLAISTOW, N.H. — In real life, Main Street's historic Town Hall operates like a hub of government and the address is Plaistow, N.H.. But in a little while, moviegoers may glimpse Town Hall in "27 Down," the movie now in production by Haverhill, Mass., independent studio director John Depew.

He was back on Main Street over the weekend to reshoot a scene in front of Town Hall.

Depew, who also wrote the script, shot the film last summer and used Plaistow in a couple of scenes to breathe reality into his fictional town of Canada, Maine.

An exterior shot of Canada's fictional police station, for example, is actually Plaistow Town Hall. He also used the Plaistow District Courthouse and Selectman Charles Blinn's auto repair shop in other scenes.

Town Manager Sean Fitzgerald said Depew included some familiar faces in the film as extras. Blinn also has a cameo role in the film, but he's not one of the five main characters, Depew said. "It's a murder mystery about a cop who runs over a kid accidentally and he's assigned the case the next day," he said. The film explores "the paths we take when we do something wrong," he added. In the police officer's case, he becomes romantically involved with the dead child's mother before she discovers he is the culprit.

Depew said he chose Town Hall partly because of the cannon on the front lawn. "Plaistow was so helpful in everything we did," Depew said. Blinn also loaned Depew a "couple of Corvettes" for the movie.

In addition to the Plaistow scenes, Depew also used a number of Massachusetts' locations — Boston, Andover, Lawrence, Middleton and North Andover. Except for Boston, where shooting on location posed problems, all the communities were helpful, Depew said.

He ran into few glitches — except for one incident in North Andover. He had obtained a convenience store owner's permission to use her store as the setting for a robbery. In the middle of the holdup scene, someone dropped a dime to the real police. "I should have anticipated someone might do that," he said.

He said it was his first film and he was learning on the job. Depew had alerted police about location shots on public property, as required. But because this scene happened on private property, he hadn't thought to notify the North Andover police before the camera started rolling.

In retrospect, he said he wishes he had. About 500 people saw the film at the Regent Theatre in Arlington, Mass., including North Andover police officers, he said. A couple of film distributors are interested in "27 Down," according to Depew. He redid the Plaistow scenes to improve the film after seeing audience reaction. He made the film on a budget of around $100,000, he said, and took advantage of the Massachusetts incentives and tax credits for filmmakers. His film company, Wild Beagle Productions, is based in North Andover.

Cops Interrupt Filming, Handcuff Actors
25 August 2008 10:36 AM, PDT | Studio Briefing - Film News
See recent Studio Briefing - Film News
Filming of the independent movie 27 Down in North Andover, MA was halted unexpectedly Sunday after police descended on a gas station convenience store after receiving an alert that an armed robbery was taking place there. Director John Depew told KHAS-TV, "They came in and they said 'Drop the gun,' and I couldn't see the officer because he was behind [me]. ... I said, 'It's a movie, it's a movie -- we're filming a movie!'" Undeterred the officers handcuffed two of the actors. The store owner, Tracy Adley, later explained that a movie was being filmed and that the guns being used in it were made of plastic. He said he believed a customer called police as a hoax. »