UPDATE (October 23, 2022): This feature has been updated to correctly reflect the relationship between Sadie Kanin and Garson Kanin.

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“The ABCs of Newtown” is a series tying each letter of the alphabet to something in Newtown. This week we continue with a look at three prolific actors who each spent part of a film’s production in town.

While Newtown has long been home to many actors — including some who continue to enjoy relative anonymity among us — at least three other favorites visited the community during their long and very illustrious careers. Katharine Hepburn, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Bacon each filmed scenes for films that found their way to the big screen.

Far Away From Manhattan

Segments of the 1949 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy feature Adam’s Rib were filmed at Far Away Meadows.

A favorite film for many Hepburn fans, Adam’s Rib tells the story of one Manhattan-based couple — both lawyers — and the legal battle that nearly tears apart their marriage. Katharine Hepburn plays Attorney Amanda Bonner and Spencer Tracy is her on-screen husband, Assistant District Attorney Adam Bonner.

Early in the film the Bonners host a dinner party during which they show a home film of featuring their farm in Connecticut, which they have just finishing paying for.

The home film opens with exterior shots of the Connecticut house and then guests are treated to scenes of Mrs Bonner playing tennis, Mr Bonner kneeling poolside with the couple’s dogs, the couple running into a barn, paddling on a calm pond, and generally mugging for the camera.

The couple is also seen gleefully accepting from their banker the now paid-off mortgage note for their new piece of property, which they have named Bonner Hill. Another exterior shot of the farm toward the end of the film shows a view of the main house at Bonner Hill at dusk.

What many people in this area may not know (or remember) is that the property depicted in Adam’s Rib as Bonner Hill was Far Away Meadows. The property was, at the time, the Sandy Hook estate of married actors-turned-screenwriters Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, who also wrote the film with its co-stars in mind.

While most filming for Adam’s Rib was done on location in Manhattan during the summer of 1949, the screenwriters also opened their Sandy Hook home for filming of the outdoor/home film scenes that year.

The property is also well-known as the former home of the opera singer Grace Moore.

It is also the former home of Elin Hayes, who visited The Newtown Bee office in 2003, shortly after the death of the legendary Hepburn. Hayes carried with her a photo of Katharine Hepburn and Sadie Kanin — the mother of director Garson Kanin — sitting on the steps of a porch at Far Away Meadows.

The black and white photo with a quarter-inch border is very typical of a photograph style that used to be popular during the 1950s and later. The undated photo measures approximately two by three inches.

The two women are sitting side-by-side, with shoulders touching. They’re looking at each other and smiling. Kanin is wearing a dress. Hepburn, of course, is in pants.

According to Hayes, a 1985 movie called That’s Dancing! also features footage of Tracy and Hepburn dancing on the patio at Far Away Meadows. Hayes believes that footage was likely shot at the time of the filming of the outdoor scenes for Adam’s Rib.

Adam’s Rib opened during the 1949 Christmas season. It earned $2.9 million in the United States and Canada, and $976,000 elsewhere. It also earned an Academy Award nomination in the category of Best Writing, Story and Screenplay for its creators and Newtown hosts Kanin and Gordon.

‘Good Things’ Along The Lake

Nearly 60 years later it was Kirsten Dunst — with co-star Ryan Gosling and others— who visited Newtown to film scenes for the 2010 crime drama All Good Things.

The film was inspired by the life of Robert Durst, eldest son of New York City real estate magnate Seymour Durst. All Good Things — which goes from love story to crime-thriller — revolves around David Marks (Gosling) and Katie McCarthy (Dunst).

Set in the early 1970s, the film opens with wealthy David Marks meeting working class Katie. The two fall in love, marry, and move to Vermont.

Upon their return to the city a few years later, however, things go sideways and David becomes very abusive. Katie disappears without a trace in 1982 while the couple is at their weekend home in Connecticut. She is never found, and while David is suspected, he is never charged with any crime.

Nearly 80% of this film’s principal photography was done in Connecticut, including a few scenes in Newtown.

For a few days in summer 2008, mysterious notes were taped to the Main Street flagpole. The message only said AGT, and was accompanied by arrows pointing north. Residents later learned those were directional posters for the production crew of All Good Things.

(Then-Keeper of the Flagpole David Lydem was not amused at the use of the flagpole as a bulletin board.)

Lake Lillinonah became Lake Truesdale, and a private Newtown home served as the film’s version of the weekend home in Westchester purchased by the Dursts/Markses in the early 1970s.

Then-Associate Editor John Voket bumped into Dunst within walking distance of the flagpole one afternoon in August 2008. He was surprised to discover the petite actress sitting on the bench reading in front of Newtown General Store, greeted and welcomed her to town, and respectfully moved on respecting her privacy.

Nevertheless, it was a celebrity interaction he still counts among his favorites.

All Good Things was released in December 2010. As Voket wrote that month, the scenes shot on Lake Lillinonah were “immediately recognizable” and its principals “do a great job sustaining their interactive continuity from the starting point of the film in the early 1970s, to the point about a decade later when the cops finally start investigating Goslin’s character as a likely suspect after his once effervescent wife suddenly goes missing.”

Audiences witness Dunst, he said, and “her hopeful, even joyous personality begin to slough away a growing suspicion and paranoia.”

Co-star Gosling, according to Voket, “certainly gets points for his portrayal of the troubled Durst…”

As with Adam’s Rib, Newtown’s appearance in All Good Things accounts for just a few minutes of the 101-minute film. It’s enough to make local residents take note, however.

One Degree Of Kevin Bacon

Newtown is ground zero for anyone looking to play the game adapted in 1994 from the phrase “six degrees of separation.”

This town’s Bacon Number — the number of degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon — is a proud 1, thanks to Bacon’s work on the grounds of the former Fairfield Hills State Hospital during the filming of Sleepers.

The drama brought Bacon along with fellow location cast members, a film crew, and Director Barry Levinson to the campus for location work that began in late August 1995. It continued into early September, and then returned in November for autumnal scenes.

At the time, the property was still owned by the State of Connecticut. It was in the final days of its use as a state hospital and a few buildings were still being used as residences for state employees.

For Sleepers, the campus and a few buildings served as Wilkinson School for Boys, a 1960s era reformatory. The time-frame of the film has four young boys from Hell’s Kitchen arriving in mid-1967.

Many local high school age boys were hired as extras to play inmates at the juvenile prison. Other local men were hired as guards. Additional extras were used to fill the stands for the scene of an annual football game between the prison’s inmates and guards.

The 1996 crime drama also featured Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Patric, Brad Pitt, Brad Renfro, Billy Crudup, and Minnie Driver among its leads along with John Slattery, Wendall Pierce, and Bruno Kirby.

Based on Lorenzo Carcaterra’s book of the same name, Sleepers opens in 1967 in Hell’s Kitchen. After four generally good boys steal a hot dog cart and end up severely injuring an elderly man during a prank, they are sentenced to no less than a year at Wilkinson. During their stay the boys are subjected to abuse and torture by the guards.

Bacon was a decidedly unlikeable character named Nokes. He was the main antagonist, the corrupt lead guard who abused the boys in his care. Nokes was not an audience favorite.

Fortunately, Bacon has said that despite the tense on-screen relationship between his characters and the boys on screen, it was a very enjoyable atmosphere to work in.

In a 1996 interview with Arts Beat LA, he told interviewer Pauline Adamek that he was initially afraid he was going to be withdrawn and stay away from the younger actors due to his character. The work turned out to be the complete opposite.

“We laughed all the time,” he said. Director Levinson was very careful, according to Bacon, to make sure the atmosphere was safe, “that Barry would be handling things with good taste.”

Bacon was concerned, he said, that no one involved in that project was scarred by it.

“God forbid the making of something like that should become in any way a painful experience,” he said. “And it wasn’t. We had a great time.”

Laughing and goofing around between scenes, he said, put the younger actors at ease.

“For them to be able to trust me meant that they had to get to know me outside of the character,” he said. “They couldn’t really relate to me as the character. For their parents to be able to trust me, they had to see that I wasn’t some actor over in the corner getting ready to do all this stuff, some wacko, psychobag.”

According to numerous reference sources, the film was a box office hit, grossing $165.6 million against a $44 million budget. The scenes filmed at Fairfield Hills occupied approximately 20 minutes of the final film, which ran 2 hours, 27 minutes and was rated R.

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Managing Editor Shannon Hicks can be reached at shannon@thebee.com.