Date: Fri 24-Nov-1995

Publication: Bee

Author: ANDYG

Quick Words:

FHH-Sleepers-football

Full Text:

with cuts: At FHH The Cameras Roll, And The Clock Turns Back

B Y A NDREW G OROSKO

Under bleak November skies, the guards and the inmates at the Wilkinson School

for Boys got together to have a football game.

Well, not really.

More accurately... Under bleak November skies, actors playing guards and

actors playing inmates got together at a specially-constructed football field

at Fairfield Hills Hospital, which is being used as the setting for the

fictitous Wilkinson School for Boys in the feature film titled "Sleepers."

Crews Monday photographed shot after shot for the movie now being filmed at a

field just west of Kent House at the hospital campus.

To give the field a wintry look, crew members spread piles of shaved ice on

the ground simulating patches of snow.

Movie star Kevin Bacon participated in the football game, serving as a

quarterback on one of the teams.

As the actors repeated their moves for the cameras, several dozen members of

the film crew watched from the sidelines. Several small tents were set up to

protect cast members from the cold between takes. Two Newtown Volunteer

Ambulance Corps ambulances stood nearby in the event anyone was injured while

the football scenes were being photographed.

In the distance, large catering trucks stood by for film crew members who

wanted to sate their appetites after a day of physical labor in the cold.

As the film was being shot, traffic which would normally pass over the

Fairfield Hills campus on Mile Hill Road, was detoured onto Nunnawauk Road and

Mile Hill Road South.

Allowing the traffic to pass over its normal course would have been disruptive

and distracting, not to mention anachronistic in that vehicles from the

mid-1990s would be passing through the set of a movie which is set in the mid

1960s.

When completed, the film will project an air of realism through its use of

architectural detail such as the 1930s-era buildings on the campus. People in

the movie drive cars from the mid-1960s.

After arriving on the scene, the filmmakers saw the possibilities that

Fairfield Hills holds as a film location which affords an institutional look.

The movie crew has used many of the buildings at Fairfield Hills, including a

tunnel network which interconnects buildings on the campus.

In line with its ongoing policy of psychiatric patient

"deinstitutionalization," the state Department of Mental Health has been

steadily decreasing patient population at Fairfield Hills. The psychaitric

hospital which once housed thousands of patients is scheduled to close by the

end of the year.

Peter Rockholz, the director of Daytop at Fairfield Hills, noted that some of

the people receiving tretament at Daytop have been serving as film extras in

"Sleepers."

Daytop is the adult section of Addiction Prevention Treatment (APT), a

private, non-profit foundation for addcists and alcoholics.

Besides Kevin Bacon, the "Sleepers" cast includes actors Robert DeNiro,

Vittorio Gassman, Jason Patric, Brad Pitt, Brad Renfro, Billy Crudup and Ron

Eldard. The drama is based on events as recounted by Lorenzo Carcaterra in the

best-selling book of the same name.

According to information provided by the producers, "Sleepers" is Carcaterra's

own story of his youth in the Hell's Kitchen section of New York City in the

1960s and the close and unshakably loyal frienship which he formed there with

three other boys.

When the four boys are sent to a reformatory following a prank that goes awry,

they experience brutality which transforms them. Years later, having taken

different paths in their adult lives, the four are reunited by an act of

revenge. Thw two who committed the act are aided by the other two and by a

neighborhood priest who has known all the boys since their childhoods.

Principal photography on "Sleepers" began in late August. Besides Newtown,

filming has been done in New York City.

The movie is being directed by Barry Levinson for Propaganda Films and

Baltimore Pictures. It will be released domestically next fall by Warner

Brothers.