Date: Fri 04-Oct-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: SHANNO

Illustration: C

Location: A9

Quick Words:

Sleepers-Bacon-Warner-Bros.

Full Text:

(follow-up on film "Sleepers," opening Oct 18, 10/4/96)

WAKE UP! `SLEEPERS,' STARRING NEWTOWN, ET AL, HITS THE BIG SCREEN OCTOBER 18

(with photos)

BY SHANNON HICKS

During the summer of 1995, much of Newtown was abuzz over visits from a movie

studio for the filming of scenes to be included in the feature film Sleepers .

At the time, it seemed it would be forever before Newtown residents would see

its rolling hills on the big screen, to be able to point out friends and

members of the community who had been hired for small "stand-in" parts in the

early minutes of the film.

The film is now about to be released, with a pre-release screening planned for

October 15 in Stamford. Sleepers will open nationwide October 18.

Principal photography began late last summer for Sleepers , an A-list movie in

terms of its stars (Kevin Bacon, Billy Crudup, Robert DeNiro, Ron Eldard,

Dustin Hoffman, Jason Patric, Brad Pitt and Brad Renfro) and its

producer/director (Barry Levinson).

Filming moved to Newtown in late August and early September, then returned in

November for fall-timed scenes. All local filming was done at Fairfield Hills

Hospital, which was transformed into the "Wilkinson Home For Boys" for the

film.

Sleepers is a Propaganda Films/Baltimore Pictures production; Warner Bros. is

handling its domestic release.

Tom Mahoney, manager for the Edmond Town Hall theatre in Newtown, presented a

proposal to Warner Bros. in September that outlined the possibilities for an

opening at the Newtown movie theatre. What better place to premiere a movie

than in one of its filming locations, after all. Unfortunately, Warner Bros.

turned down the proposal.

Instead, Warner Bros. has teamed up with the Connecticut Department of

Economic Development in choosing the Stamford Center for the Arts' Rich Forum

as the site of a pre-release screening of Sleepers . Invitations were being

printed this week for the 7,000-person mailing list for the event, which is

also open to the public.

The evening will begin with a dinner reception at 7 pm, followed by the film's

presentation at 8:30 pm. The dinner has a seating limit of 300 people, but the

theatre itself can accommodate 750 people. According to Doug McAward, chairman

of the Connecticut film commission, "everyone in the movie, and other area

celebrities, have been invited to the screening. All of them are being

contacted to see if they are willing to come."

As of this week, Mr McAward said, "We haven't heard from anyone yet," but the

contacts were just going out.

Tickets for the screening, which is open to the public, are $25 each, or $35

for priority seating. For those who would like to attend the screening and

reception, tickets are $75. Contact the Rich Forum box office, 325-4466, for

reservations.

Proceeds from the pre-release screening's tickets will benefit the

Mid-Fairfield Child Guidance Center in Norwalk.

"Warner Bros. agreed to a premiere [in Connecticut] if the commission attached

a charity to it," Mr McAward stated this week. "We wanted to find a charity

with a similar theme to the movie. [The Child Guidance Center] is an

intervention center for troubled youth. It was a nice match."

Sleepers is based on events in Lorenzo Carcaterra's autobiographical book of

the same name. The book, and movie, is Mr Carcaterra's story of his youth in

New York's Hell's Kitchen during the 1960s, and the close and unshakably loyal

friendship he formed then with three other boys: Michael, Tommy and John. A

close community, Hell's Kitchen at that time was the kind of place where the

code of street justice outweighed the justice of the courts.

When the four are sent to a reformatory school - the Fairfield

Hills-transformed Wilkinson School For Boys - for a street prank gone bad,

they experience brutality which transforms each of them. Years later, after

taking different paths with their lives, the four friends are reunited by an

act of revenge.

Kevin Bacon is Sean Nokes, the sadistic head guard at Wilkinson, where boys

are routinely tortured and abused. The young boys in the immediate story are

played by Jonathan Tucker, Brad Renfro, Joe Perrino and Geoff Wigdor. Their

adult counterparts are Jason Patric (Lorenzo), Brad Pitt (Michael), Billy

Crudup (Tommy) and Ron Eldard (Ron).

Robert DeNiro is Father Bobby, a neighborhood priest still saying Mass at the

Church of the Holy Angels, who befriended the boys when they were young and

continues to pray for them as adults.

Tommy and John have turned into hardened Hell's Kitchen hitmen and drug

addicts. The two enter a local restaurant one night and come face to face with

Nokes, the guard who scarred them for life at Wilkinson. The two men gun down

Nokes in full view of restaurant patrons.

When Michael, now an assistant district attorney, learns of the crime he

contacts Lorenzo, a reporter for The New York Daily News . The two who

committed the act are aided by the other two, and by Father Bobby, who

provides pivotal support.

Also featured in the film are Dustin Hoffman, Bruno Kirby and Minnie Driver.

A number of local actors, most of them high school-age boys, were hired as

extras to play inmates at the juvenile prison. Some area adults were also

hired to fill the roles of guards. Additional extras were used to fill the

stands for scenes of an annual football game between the prison's inmates and

guards.

The scenes filmed at Fairfield Hills will occupy approximately twenty minutes

of the completed feature film, Neri Tannenbaum said last summer. Ms Tannenbaum

was the film's location manager.

According to production notes provided by Warner Bros., the school Lorenzo

Carcaterra renamed the Wilkinson Homes for Boys was one of 12 reform schools

that received children from New York City. During the course of

pre-production, film researchers learned that the Wilkinson School horror Mr

Carcaterra described was not an isolated case. Research identified dozens of

cases that documented serious abuse in juvenile detention centers throughout

the country.

For the central reformatory sequence, locations were scouted in all five of

New York City's boroughs plus the suburbs of New York, New Jersey and

Connecticut before production designer Kristi Zea and producer Barry Levinson

chose the Fairfield Hills Hospital campus.

A mental institution dating back to the 1930s, the Newtown location had

exactly what Ms Zea was looking for: a deceptively placid exterior that

disguised the horrors within. Spread out over acres of rolling lawns, the

former hospital has all the calm institutional beauty of a college campus. It

was the perfect setting to mislead young boys into believing their stay in

juvenile prison would not be as awful as they may have feared.

When screened at the Venice Film Festival a few weeks ago, Sleepers opened to

"mixed reviews," said Mr Mahoney. Newtown audiences will have the chance to

make up their own minds on the film - and the part their home town played in

the feature production - when Sleepers opens in two weeks.