Horse-drawn carriages returned to the streets of Troy, New York, in August, along with equipment trucks, honey wagons and camera cranes. HBO’s The Gilded Age is back with scenes for the second season of the series, which explores the lives of financial families and the people they serve in New York in the 1880s. The year before, production covered the streets of Troy Monument Square with trucks loaded with dirt to turn it into a downtown Manhattan shopping district, and also used the city’s well-preserved 19th-century buildings (population: 51,400), 152 miles north of Manhattan, including Rensselaer County Court House, Savings Bank Music Hall, and Troy Public Library, along with the Washington Park neighborhood and Oakwood Cemetery.
“Buildings [in Monument Park] They were built between the 1820s and 1880s, and many have been completely restored,” says show site director Lori Petkus. “You can walk through entire buildings and feel like you’re in the West Village, near Gramercy Park, or maybe the Upper East Side. [in the late 19th century]. While Manhattan still has a great deal of 19th-century architecture, Petkus says, “There isn’t a block in New York City where we can really shoot. The city is covered with scaffolding.”
Troy is one of the localities in the state outside of New York City’s five boroughs that is seeing a significant increase in film and television production. An abundance of well-preserved 19th-century architecture isn’t the only thing that paints it there.
With the art department adding fake street signs and fake subway entrances, Hulu’s “The Ultimate Playlist of Noise” (2021) was able to earn the Syracuse double for contemporary Manhattan and Brooklyn.
says Eric Vinal, vice president of film, television, and entertainment at Visit Syracuse.
Producers of the upcoming HBO miniseries “White House Plumber,” starring Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux, have even gone so far as to recreate the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion using Kingston Point Beach on the Hudson River in Ulster County. Cuba.
“The terrain is very different, depending on the county,” says Laurent Rejto, director of the Hudson Valley Film Commission. “For example, Orange County is farmland, then if you go up north into Ulster County, you’ll find more hills and streams and woods. Green County is all the mountains and Dutchess county has lots of horse farms and all those beautiful mansions from the golden age. The east side has always been From the Hudson the river was richer because it had a railroad, and on the west side there were more workers for all the quarries and brick docks which were used for shipping. [goods] All the way to New York City.”
Jim Meckel managed to film the bulk of the post-apocalyptic East Texas vampire road movie “Stake Land” (2010) in the area around his home in Margaretville, New York.
“I was so shocked when we went out to explore that part of Texas – it actually looks like upstate New York with pines and that kind of wet feeling,” says Meckel, co-founder of the current Netlix series Sweet Tooth.
When “Stake Land” was filmed in 2009, the area was hardly a production hot spot. Things began to change in 2015 when New York State revised its already popular tax credit 30% (lowered to 25% in 2020), adding an additional 10% on labor costs below the line for projects with budgets of $500,000 or more. In certain areas outside New York City. The following year, previously excluded counties in the Hudson Valley also became eligible for the additional 10%, and the production boom began.
In the years since, the area has hosted a long line of shows from HBO, including “I Know This Much Is True” and “The Sex Lives of College Girls”, along with projects from Showtime (“Billions”, “The First Lady”). and “Three Women”), Apple TV+ (“Severance,” “Invasion”), Netflix (“Manifest,” “Things Heard and Seen”), Hallmark (“A Holiday Spectacular,” “One December Night,” and “Redemption.” in Cherry Springs”) and Amazon (“Master”).
Two of upstate New York’s top productions, “A Quiet Place” (2018) and “A Quiet Place II” (2020), attract fans looking for filming locations like Springtown Bridge in New Palz, where John Krasinki’s character races to save his son from The invisible aliens in the first movie.
Troy also attracts tourists eager to see the locations featured in “The Gilded Age,” also filmed in Albany and Cohos, and other recent productions including Edward Norton’s “Motherless Brooklyn” (2019).
“When people get here, they are amazed at the built-in walkability,” says Denny Ziegler, Troy’s Chief Economic Development Technologist. “You can almost look at all the architecture as you walk through all these different time periods.”
As production levels continue to rise in the region, so has the number of eligible production facilities, which include Umbra Stages in Newburgh (Peacock’s “Poker Face” and Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale”) and Upriver Studios in Saugerties (HBO’s “Pretty Little Liars”: Original Sin” ) and Amory Studios in Schenectady.
Armory Studios occupies the former site of the Schenectady Armory, which was home to two units of the New York Army National Guard from its opening in 1936 until 2008. Jeff and Ray Legere, owners of Legere properties and the Legere Group, bought the site at auction in July 2012 for $260,000 and spent The next decade in modernizing the four-acre, 30,000-square-foot site. The main building with 50-foot ceilings, adding 250 tons of air conditioning and raising its power from 600 amperes to 4000 amperes.
The second season of Amazon’s “Modern Love” was filmed at Amory Studios in the fall of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when the ability to be self-sufficient and isolate from strangers was paramount.
“They took over the entire facility, because they wanted to protect their production staff,” Legere says. “Most importantly, the city and county came together and took care of all of their off-site needs.”
An even bolder transformation was made by filmmaker Jeremy Garlick (“The Wedding Ringer”) and his business partner Will Phelps, who bought the former AV Zogg Middle School in Liverpool, New York (population: 2242), for $1 million in 2017 and about The 89-year-old building into a production facility dubbed American High, dedicated to making teen comedies. Armed with $50 million in funding and an agreement with Hulu, they have produced over a dozen films, including “Big Time Adolescence” (2019), starring Pete Davidson and Jon Cryer, “Plan B” (2021) and “I Love My Father.” (2022).
American High offers college students courses and training programs for locals, and its products draw workers from elsewhere in the state to the village, a suburb of Syracuse, giving people reason to believe the good times might be here to stay for the locals. Film and Television Society.
“We have a large number of short-term furnished rentals that people are using now and our hotels are full,” says Visit Syracuse’s Vinal. “It was cool seeing this thing transform.”?
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