To Garry Pastore, film and New Jersey fit well together, and have done so for a long time – long before Pastore’s young film production company got extraordinary attention earlier this summer for its staged reading in Hoboken of “On The Waterfront,” the 1954 Marlon Brando movie famously filmed on the docks of Hoboken.
As an actor, Pastore played one of the gangsters in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 “Goodfellas,” and he knows that one of the most memorable scenes, in which a character is brutally murdered, was filmed in the Palisades. As a set dresser for the 2004 remake of “The Manchurian Candidate,” Pastore knows that the early scenes of brainwashing in the Iraqi desert were actually filmed on a sand mine in Eagleswood, north of Atlantic City.
Indeed, many of the dozens of other movies and television series with which he has been involved as an actor or a set decorator or a prop master were filmed at least partly in New Jersey (such as “You Don’t Mess With The Zohan” and “August Rush”) or depict New Jersey without being filmed here, or both depict New Jersey and were at least partly filmed here (such as “Copland,” “World Trade Center,” and of course “The Sopranos”).
But to Pastore and Deborah Mello, now film producers and partners in Hudson Film Group, there could be a lot more.
“Look at that view,” Pastore said, pointing to the Statue of Liberty from the balcony of his company’s 18th floor office in a tower next to Liberty State Park. “There’s no backdrop like that anywhere else.
Then look over there,” he said, moving his finger south. “You get the urban over there.” Then lifting his finger, he added, “and you get the mountains past that. Just in this area alone,” he summed up, “you could get a better Manhattan, and avoid the traffic and the noise. The people here are probably a little more film-friendly too.”
Formed last year, Hudson Film Group is planning 10 different film projects and television series, all expected to be filmed in New Jersey.
They are also “in talks” to create a $25 million entertainment complex that will start in Hoboken and expand into Jersey City, with a legitimate theater, a film screening room, a film studio; maybe a restaurant. “It could create hundreds of jobs,” Pastore said.
The money, in Pastore’s vision, would come from the federal government and from private real estate developers.
Their great confidence in their future plans surely got a boost from their first completed project, the staged reading of “On The Waterfront,” featuring many former cast members of “The Sopranos,” including Vincent Pastore (who played “Big Pussy”), Garry Pastore’s cousin. The timing was nearly surreal. A week before the reading of this movie about corruption, the mayor of Hoboken was arrested.
Exactly a week after Budd Schulberg, the 95-year-old author of “On The Waterfront”, traveled from the Hamptons to attend the reading, he died.
Inspired by these events, Garry Pastore has taken on a new project for Hudson Film Group – a documentary film about its production of “On The Waterfront.”
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