Hollywood-on-Hudson: The Grand Tour

Kingston Point used to simulate the Cuban landing site for the Bay of Pigs invasion in the 2023 HBO miniseries The White House Plumbers. (Photo by Frances Marion Platt) There’s a certain vicarious thrill that comes with spotting a familiar local haunt in a movie or TV show, and residents of the mid-Hudson and Catskills region have been treated to such pleasures increasingly often in the past decade or so. The phrase “Hollywood-on-Hudson” started popping up after the working-class Matteawan neighborhood in Beacon in southern Dutchess County became the primary setting for the Robert Benton movie Nobody’s Fool in 1994, standing in for the fictional town of North Bath in Richard Russo’s novel. The visibility of Nobody’s Fool , and its stellar cast headed by Paul Newman, created a rather premature buzz that our region was about to become a hub for film production, though it took some time before the concept really took off. The Hudson Valley Film Commission was founded in Woodstock in 2000 to help connect filmmakers with locations and resources, and in 2004 New York State initiated its film and television tax credit program to incentivize production. But most movie shoots were still happening in New York City, and it wasn’t until 2016 that the state made several mid-Hudson and Catskills counties eligible for the full 40 percent write-off of “below-the-line” production and postproduction costs. Since then, local production has been noticeably on the upswing, both for movies and for TV. Public versus private settings Whether you’re an area resident, a second-home owner, vacationer or daytripper, there are now filming locations aplenty in our area that you can use as excuses to plan an outing. We don’t recommend stalking private homes used as movie sets, so don’t ask us for directions to the Woodstock-area home where Jane Fonda played the hippie matriarch in Peace, Love & Misunderstanding (Bruce Beresford, 2011) or the farmhouse in Pawling where the Abbott family hides from