Arts & Entertainment

Film Commission Awarded Grants for Outreach Work, Student Production

The Fort Lee Film Commission will receive a Bergen County History Grant and one from the NJEA.

The Fort Lee Film Commission was awarded two grants this week—a $2,000 Bergen County History Grant for the production of Mack & Mabel to be performed in May and a $5,000 New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) grant for its outreach work.

Executive director Tom Meyers of the Fort Lee Film Commission said they won the 2012 Bergen County History Grant because the review panel deemed the musical Mack & Mabel “a great project that touches on an important part of Bergen County history and will have great appeal to the public.”

The Jerry Herman musical, which will be performed by high school students under the direction of Drama teacher Jodi Etra, is about film pioneer Mack Stennett’s founding of Keystone Studio in Fort Lee in 1912, and then moving it to California.

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“We will integrate a recently found lost film, A Grocery Clerk's Romance,” Meyers said in a statement announcing the award. “This 1912 Keystone film is one of the first films shot by that studio, and it was shot on First Street in Fort Lee outside Rambo's Saloon—that building still stands near [].”  

He added that the film provides “our first glimpse of how the building was used in films and what the neighborhood looked like on film in 1912.”

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The production Mack & Mabel will integrate the found footage, along with other archival footage from Fort Lee, by projecting it on an on-stage screen during the musical.

Meyers said the Film Commission applied for the history grant late last year, specifically earmarking it for the Mack & Mabel production.

“They granted us the full amount of $2,000 based on our use of the funds,” Meyers told Patch.

The three performances of the musical are Friday, May 18, at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, May 19, at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. in the Fort Lee High School auditorium. 

The Film Commission also received $5,000 from the NJEA for the second year in a row, which Meyers said is “very unusual.”

The grant award was announced on the eve of the start of the annual Garden State Film Festival (GSFF) in Asbury Park.  

“[The grant] is for our outreach to the student community via the [Jersey Filmmakers of Tomorrow] festival, our work with the Garden State Film Festival and doing symposiums to educate people about things like women filmmakers and the work we do within Fort Lee in terms of outreach with the school community—things like Mack & Mabel,” Meyers said.

Participation at events like the GSFF gives the Film Commission the opportunity to do outreach on a state level, which Meyers said is very important and part of the reason they were awarded the grant for a second consecutive year.

“You might get some people asking, ‘Well, what is the Fort Lee Film Commission doing in Asbury Park?’” Meyers said. “Well, number one, we don’t have a movie theater in Fort Lee. Number two, we don’t have a movie theater in Fort Lee. And number three, we don’t have a movie theater in Fort Lee. If they expect us to hold a high-end film festival in the basement of the library, it’s not going to work. So until we do have a proper venue in Fort Lee, we have to do the best we can at no cost to local taxpayers.”

Meyers pointed out that Film Commission members host symposiums, , at the festival in Asbury Park on their own time.

“It’s not costing the Borough of Fort Lee anything,” he said. “At the same time, part of this is trying to get a dialogue going about the merits of a tax credit for film and television production. Frankly, if we didn’t do the outreach we do with groups like the GSFF, I doubt very much we would have won [either grant] because many of these grants—if not all of them now—are based on your ability to do regional programming.”

He also said being awarded the NJEA grant was a “team effort and a team victory for Fort Lee in terms of all of the outreach we do with the schools within Fort Lee and also throughout Bergen County.”


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