A film I Line Produced is finally here for all yalls, THE HAMMER, starring Adam Carolla.  Check it out.  Opening weekend is wicked important for box office so asking for a favor everyone. 

We had our fancy red carpet premiere last night in Hollywood (me a little hungover) and the film opens in theaters tomorrow (21^st).

There was a packed screening and afterparty, with great buzz about the film.  To see some clips from the red carpet, go to http://www.theinsideronline.com/news/2008/03/16713/

As you will see, most of the interviews are about Dancing with the Stars, but it was great publicity I guess.

The reviews have been largely positive, and we're told we'll be receiving "Two Thumbs Up" on Ebert and Roeper this weekend

      The director previously directed Kissing Jessica Stein and Legally Blonde 2

Adam Carolla will also be appearing on Jay Leno tomorrow night, Friday 3/21.  We are not sure yet which clip they're playing, but it may be one with yours truly, so set your TiVo!


The New York Times says :

"The Hammer has dry wit and unforced working-class swagger, and hits some surprising emotional notes....in classic sports-movie tradition, the real love
story is in the central male friendship... The Hammer has Jerry slowly forge a friendship with [Robert] based on competitive drive and
grudging mutual respect, then builds it to a payoff that's as unexpected as it is moving."

SCORSESE'S NEW FILM "ASHECLIFFE"

Prepping for a MA shootPatients (and nurses) are a virtue
Taunton and Medfield have landed roles in Martin Scorsese's new film, "Ashecliffe," based on Dennis Lehane's novel "Shutter Island." The pic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Michelle Williams, drew a few thousand people to an open casting call at Boston University this weekend. Casting directors were looking mostly for people to play mental patients, concentration camp prisoners, and soldiers. Dylan Smith of Medfield hoped to play a patient, but others had different roles in mind. "They don't just need mental patients; they also need nurses," said Dana Sullivan, 23, of Wayland. Mary Hunt of Westford arrived in costume in hopes of working as an extra. "I'm an imposter nurse," Hunt said. East Bridgewater's Susan Conant figured being a real psych nurse at Brockton Hospital would give her a leg up. Three months of filming is scheduled to begin in March at Whittenton Mills in Taunton and the former Medfield State Hospital.  With less than two hours to go in the six-hour casting session, movie reps walked through the lines asking for SAG actors to move forward to be seen for possible speaking roles in the movie that is expected to film for three months starting in March. "I caught a break," said Becki Dennis who has worked on more than a half dozen films since moving back to Andover. "I got to go ahead of the line. I keep seeing some of the same people on the different movies."

http://www.boston.com/ae/celebrity/articles/2008/01/29/giseles_a_fan/?page=1

A little self promotion here folks.  Feel free to skip. 

I'm happy to announce I have two projects that were accepted into Sundance '08.  A feature titled ADVENTURES OF POWER, starring Adrian Grenier, Jane Lynch, Ari Gold, and Michael McKean) and also a short film directed by Kirsten Dunst titled WELCOME.  It stars John Hawkes and Winona Ryder.

Is anyone else making the trek to Sundance ?

Cheers ~ Chris Stinson (Live Free Or Die Films)

The year of filming profitably

 Movie boom of 2007 enriched Commonwealth with dollars, jobs

   Dec 1, 2007

Statistics are starting to pile up that show just how good a year 2007 is turning out to be for the Massachusetts film industry.

In September, Massachusetts Film Office executive director Nick Paleologos told members of the Massachusetts Production Coalition (online at massprodcoali tion.com) that the tax credit that went into effect in January 2006 really is working. There is now a 25 percent credit on all spending that film productions do in the state, and all state taxes on production spending are eliminated.

Before the credit, made-in-Massachusetts movies actually spent very little time (or money) shooting here. "The Perfect Storm" spent 98 percent of its $140 million budget out of state, and just 2 percent ($3 million) in or around Gloucester, where the on-land portion of the story is based.

That's the same, too, for "Mystic River" and "The Departed" - Massachusetts's share of the $30 million "Mystic River" budget was 13 percent, or $4 million, and its share of the $90 million "Departed" budget was just 7 percent, or $6 million.

Compare that to the spending by more recent productions. "Gone Baby Gone," "The Game Plan," and "21" all spent 50 percent or more of their budgets in the state, according to the film office.

When the dollars from those films are added to the spending on such upcoming releases as "The Women," "Bachelor No. 2," and "Pink Panther 2" - which were all shooting in and around Boston in recent months - the numbers really pop.

The combined budget for those six films: $277 million. Massachusetts's share? Fifty-six percent - $154 million, spread out over 2006 and 2007.

That's meant more jobs, with membership in Local 481 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts now topping 500.

Paleologos also noted that in July the Hollywood-based P3 Update Magazine ranked Massachusetts in the top five locations in which to shoot, along with New Mexico, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Louisiana. The magazine said the state is "back on the map as one of the most up-and-coming contenders in the tax incentive arena."

Joe Maiella, president of the Massachusetts Production Coalition and senior vice president of CrewStar, a Southborough agency, says "now that the MPC has been successful in fostering production-incentive legislation, we're turning our focus on to workforce development."

Ed Peselman, spokesman for the MPC and principal of Gray Matter Entertainment in Watertown, added that the coalition has been talking about ways to fill out the services the state presents to out-of-town productions. Ideas include offering symposiums to educate local crew and production professionals and providing supplemental training.

"The MPC is also working on letting people know that these incentives are not just geared toward Hollywood, but can also benefit the new media and advertising communities as well," Peselman says. "The influx of revenue can trickle down to other sectors such as transportation, hospitality, and retail."

Meanwhile, the website for the state film office continues to get stronger. It now features a database alphabetical by town name of whom to contact about getting permits, with links to e-mail addresses and websites. It's at mafilm .org.

NEW ENGLAND DIRECTOR: Judith Wechsler will present her 45-minute work "Monet's Water Lilies" Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. and next Sunday at noon at the Museum of Fine Arts. The film tells the story of how Monet came to paint his huge panel images of the water lilies at his pond in Giverny.

Wechsler, a professor of art history at Tufts University, was commissioned by the Orangerie Museum in Paris to make this film for its reopening. The movie is now shown several times a day there.

Wechsler has had a fascinating career, making 22 films on art - Cézanne, Daumier, Pissarro, and Manet among her subjects - and writing three books on art history. A little over a year ago, she was awarded the prestigious Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government for her 50-year focus on French art.

She'll lead a discussion after both screenings of "Monet's Water Lilies." Details are at 617-267-9300 and mfa.org/film.

CALLING ALL MENTORS (AND MENTEES): Members of Women in Film & Video/New England are invited to apply to get (or become) a mentor. The program is designed to help create more webs within the region's network of filmmakers. Mentees will participate in a four-hour workshop to clarify their goals, while mentors commit to two face-to-face meetings and four phone calls.

Applications are due Dec. 15. Information is at wifvne.org.

SCREENINGS OF NOTE: The films of Shohei Imamura, who died last year, are at the Harvard Film Archive this weekend through Dec. 14 (617-495-4700 and hcl.harvard.edu/hfa) . . . The best of the "Do It Your Own Damn Self!!" National Youth Video and Film Festival, produced by the Community Art Center in Cambridge, plays on Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre (617-876-6837 and brattlefilm.org) . . . And two 1980s works by Peter Greenaway, "The Draughtsman's Contract" and "A Zed and Two Noughts," are showing Thursday and Saturday at the MFA.

http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2007/12/01/the_year_of_filming_profitably/?page=1

Film industry is at home in Allston

By Leslie Brokaw

When Allston held its Open Studios a few weeks ago, the public had a chance to wander through the warren of artist spaces in a pair of red brick buildings on Braintree Street, right alongside the Mass. Pike at the Everett Street Bridge.

Also in the buildings are office suites that most people don't get to visit. Inside are companies that employ dozens of people in the film industry, making the spot one of the epicenters of the Boston movie business.

Boston Casting, a top talent agency, is here, as is Image Makers, a modeling agency. The Boston Comedy and Movie Festival, which was held last month, has offices here, as do 42°N Films, a documentary and post-production company, and EditShare, a company that offers media sharing and storage for multi-user editing. Previous tenants included Scout Productions, best known for its "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" show, and now in Los Angeles, and the now-defunct Boston Film/Video Foundation.

Eran Lobel founded two of the companies. Element Productions makes commercials, Web content, and documentaries; it won a New England Emmy Award in May for its "My Boston, My Globe" TV spots, and produced the recent documentaries "Not a Photograph," about the band Mission of Burma, and "Rumbo A Las Grandes Ligas," about baseball in the Dominican Republic. His new company, Boston.TV, is a website that officially launched in the spring.

Boston.TV is a kind of professionally produced version of YouTube for the local market. All the videos on the site are made by the company's staff of 15 and a huge team of freelancers. Videos are divided into channels such as Food, Lifestyle, and Sports, and include a daily one-minute "Boston.TV Beat," super-short clips about Boston chefs (like Ken Oringer, who says his last meal on death row would be a hot dog), a weekly rundown of high school sports (episode 10: the Weymouth boys and girls soccer teams), and Red Sox fans doing their versions of pitcher Jonathan Papelbon's dance.

"For eight years I've been incubating online ideas," says Lobel, 40. "I bought names like Boston.TV with the hope that they would be good distribution vehicles." In mid-September Lobel moved the nascent company out of Element's offices and into the space formerly occupied by Scout Productions. The companies are all good friends, with Element working with Scout on this past summer's dating game show "Sox Appeal."

Boston.TV grew from 50,000 views in January during beta testing to 1 million views in November, according to Lobel. His focus now is on "developing video content that is sponsorable and compelling," as he puts it, and finding partner websites that want to syndicate the material.

"The analogy is that we're like a microbrewery and the established outlets are like the bars - we make a unique, consumable asset," he says. He's looking at rolling out similar sites in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Atlanta - culturally rich cities with good sports and music scenes

Lobel was born in Jerusalem (his first name is pronounced "eh-RON") and grew up in Brookline. He went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and then Boston University for a business degree. He lives in Needham with his wife, Lisa Lobel, who is a partner at Boston Casting, and their three children.

Boston.TV's newest experiment is trying out user-generated content. Lobel seems a little skeptical, though, about whether that will work or not. The spots produced by his company guarantee one big thing that user-generated content doesn't: copyright-clear content.

"A lot of the stuff on YouTube is illegal," says Lobel, who maintains a library of 75,000 music tracks that the company owns the rights to. "I see the pain that artists go through to create their art, so I pay people to do that."

CONVERSATIONS WITH: Robert P. Weller, a Boston University professor and chairman of the school's anthropology department, will talk about the outsider's experience after a screening of the sci-fi film "The Man Who Fell to Earth," which stars David Bowie, tomorrow at 7 p.m. The event takes place at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and is part of the ongoing "Science on Screen" series, co-presented by the Museum of Science and New Scientist magazine. It's the Criterion Collection's newly restored and uncut version of the film that will be shown, which the Coolidge says features "nearly 20 minutes of crucial scenes and details" (617-734-2500 and cool idge.org).

On Wednesday, local improv comedienne Marty Johnson will show her television pilot "Strange Faculty" and other comedy shorts at the monthly "Chicks Make Flicks" discussion series held by Women in Film and Video/New England. Johnson was one of the writers on the 2006 theater piece "P.S. Page Me Later," which was drawn from materials in Found magazine and presented by the Alarm Clock Theatre Company. That show won the 2006 Elliot Norton Award for outstanding production by a local fringe company. This week's event takes place at 77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 6-120, on the MIT campus, but space is limited so sign up by e-mailing rosalie@womeninfilm video.org or calling 781-788-6607. More about WIFVNE is online at wifvne.org, and clips from "Strange Faculty" are online at psychic-improv.com.

SCREENINGS OF NOTE: The Regent Theatre in Arlington hosts a return engagement of "Sing-A-Long Mary Poppins" - featuring an MC, bag of props, and onscreen lyrics - today at 2 p.m. (781-646-4849 and regenttheatre.com) . . . Also today, the Harvard Film Archive presents silent films from the 1920s starring Louise Brooks and featuring live piano accompaniment by Martin Marks. At 7 p.m. it's "A Girl in Every Port," and at 8:30 p.m. "The Canary Murder Case." Caroline Yaeger, assistant curator of George Eastman House, will introduce the program (617-495-4700 and hcl.har vard.edu/hfa).

"Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind," a film by Emerson College assistant professor John Gianvito, is at the Museum of Fine Arts on Thursday at 8:15 p.m., Friday at 6:30 p.m., and Saturday at 10:30 a.m. Writing on the Toronto International Film Festival blog in August, Gianvito said the film focuses "on traces of progressive US history."

"My approach to this topic is a rather unorthodox one," he continued, "as my film is an accumulation of three years of wandering, on and off, across the United States, mostly frequenting out-of-the-way cemeteries and small-town roads in search of evidence of this past. Ironically, given how much time I spent in front of gravesites, it proved an avenue for bringing this history to life for me" (617-267-9300 and mfa.org/film).

http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2007/11/25/film_industry_is_at_home_in_allston/?page=1

REAL SOUTHIE MEN (11.27.07)

Shooting began in Southie yesterday on the Ethan Hawke-Mark Ruffalo-Amanda Peet-Donnie Wahlberg flick "Real Men Cry."

The crime drama, written by Wahlberg and ex-Southie bad guy Brian Goodman and directed by Goodman, kicked off with a scene where Hawke runs out of a triple-decker and jumps into an old silver Lincoln after banging on the window. Which the "Fast Food Nation" star did over and over and over again for the cameras.

Goodman's bad-boy tale about two friends who join a local gang of criminals is based on his own real-life experiences and those of a pal who is now serving 100 years for armed robbery.  BTW, Southie homey Jay Giannone of "The Departed" and "Gone Baby Gone" fame, plays neighborhood weasel, Matt, in the flick.  'Golden' days

And in more Mass. movie news, "The Golden Boys," the little flick formerly known as "Chatham," broke box-office records during a five-day special engagement at the Cape Cinema in Dennis.

The flick, by Harwich homeboy Dan Adams, stars David Carradine, Bruce Dern and Rip Torn as crusty Cape Cod sea captains who decide that one of them must marry Mariel Hemingway so that she can take care of all three.

The flick grossed $36,290 over five days ending on the day before Thanksgiving, beating the previous record-holder, "Fahrenheit 9/11." The filmmakers are currently in talks with several distributors to take the flick national. Stay tuned.

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'Black Irish' sees light'

Baseball pic labor of love for first-time director

Brad Gann knows what it's like to move up to the Major Leagues.

Gann, the writer and director of the baseball-family film "Black Irish," cobbled together a small budget to make the movie of his dreams. With a brilliant run of success on the festival circuit, the independent drama is now enjoying a limited release in American theaters.

The movie chronicles a 16-year-old South Boston boy's rise to acclaim as a high school pitcher while his Irish Catholic family's dysfunction complicates the picture. "Black Irish" has been lauded for the breakout performance of star Michael Angarano, the supporting work of veteran character actor Brendan Gleeson, and Gann's insightful, authentic script and directorial chops.

But "Black Irish" also led Gann to bigger things, most notably the surreal experience of showing up on the set of the football movie, "Invincible," with Mark Wahlberg, that Gann wrote the screenplay for.

"I think the craft services budget for 'Invincible' was more than the entire budget of 'Black Irish,'" Gann said with a laugh. "But I couldn't have done one without the other."

Gann said the idea for "Black Irish" came from a friend of his who grew up in a similar family.

"He would tell me all these stories of his messed-up family, and even before I was writing, I found it to be really interesting, heartbreaking yet hilarious stuff," Gann said. "I thought, 'Man, if I ever was a writer ...'"

But he became a director, too, and it was all because of his love of the "Black Irish" project.

In fact, the film was close to being a huge project involving big industry names such as director Jim Sheridan and Academy Award-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis, but that fell through when Day-Lewis inexplicably took a hiatus from movies to become a shoe cobbler in Florence, Italy.

That's when Gann decided to take matters into his own hands.

"I started taking (film-making) classes, putting one foot in front of the other," Gann said. "Eventually, we got some financing and some people to back it, and we made the movie."

But it wasn't easy. While major studio productions often last up to 12 weeks, Gann and his crew had to bang out "Black Irish" in 22 days.

"The main challenges were not just as a first-time director, but more as a first-time director on very limited budget, Gann said. "We just didn't have a lot of time, so it was very challenging from that perspective. Still, I think we got a lot of the baseball stuff right."

Helping in that arena was Angarano, whose baseball ability surprised Gann.

"He's not a big kid, but, man, he can throw," Gann said. "In fact, when I first met with him, I took a friend of mine who's a great baseball player just to throw the ball around with him.

"My friend said, 'This kid has (an authentic throwing) motion and he's good. We can definitely get away with him.'

"It wasn't like Anthony Perkins (who played Jimmy Piersall in the 1957 movie "Fear Strikes Out"), where he swings a bat and he looks ridiculous. ... Michael is a good athlete, so it was a big relief."

In fact, Angarano is a believable enough baseball player that he also landed a role in "The Final Season," the real-life story of the successful high school baseball team in Norway, Iowa.

Meanwhile, Gann continues to work in and out of the sports-film world.

He has written an action-thriller, which shows that he can do a lot more than sports movies, but he also has many projects in the works, including the true tale of a father and son who played on the same college basketball team.

"One of the good things about being in the (sports) genre is that you run across stuff that you just can't believe," Gann said. "I just know there's inherent drama in who's going to win any game. There's just a natural dramatic arc to a good game or a good championship series or anything like that.

"You don't have to fake it, and people get it. You don't have to add to it. There's natural stakes, natural twists and turns, and that lends itself to great storytelling."

Doug Miller is Senior Writer for MLB.com/Entertainment. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.

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OCTOBER 31, 2007
FILM REVIEW | Disappearances
Setting the Western Back East: A deep sense of place inspired Jay Craven's Disappearances

BY JOHN STOEHR

Disappearances
Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art
Nov. 2, 8 p.m.
Free
Simons Center for the Arts, Room 309
54 St. Philips St.
(843) 953-5680
www.halsey.cofc.edu

Some time ago, filmmaker Jay Craven decided to make a Western, the kind of story that typically features characters whose epic struggle unfolds in a land devoid of law, tradition, religion, and culture.

In this mythical world, men settle their disputes with guns and guts. Everything seems to happen for the first time. There's no past, there's no future. Only with time comes a sense of loss and regret, a recognition that a way of life, and the people who lived it, are vanishing.

Such are the conventions of the Western genre, but Craven wanted to do something different: What if this Western took place in New England, where culture and tradition were firmly rooted, where characters were aware of the consequences of their actions, but were forced to pursue a dark path partly driven by human desire and folly, partly driven by fate?

The setting of Craven's Disappearances, to be screened at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, as part of its 2007-2008 Southern Circuit Film Series, is set in the Prohibition Era in a part of the Vermont north country called the Kingdom.

There we find Quebec Bill Bonhomme (played by Kris Kristofferson), a former bootlegger-cum-family man whose barn is destroyed by a lightning strike. Also lost is an entire winter's worth of hay. Now there's no way to feed the family's herd of cattle.

To save their livelihoods, Bill embarks with his young son, Wild Bill (Charlie McDermott), on one last whiskey run across the Canadian border. Hence the set-up for an epic story chock full of mythical characters (like "whiskey pirates"), suspense, and danger. It's a Western, but it's not a Western. The film's values and character are unmistakably Northeastern.

"Bill is a dreamer and a schemer," Craven said from his office at Vermont's Marlboro College, where he teaches film studies. "His sister, Cordelia, warns against taking the risk. There's a sense of timelessness and a streak of magical realism expressed by Cordelia."

In fact, Cordelia (Genevieve Bujold) is one half of the ideological pairing that influences Bill's son. While Quebec Bill is the trickster, the risk-taker, the philosopher, the materialist, the adrenaline-junky (a kind of Yankee Odysseus), she is the idealist, the mystic, the bellwether, the Transcendentalist, the palmist with sight beyond sight (a kind of Puritan Cassandra). Such is the groundwork for the film's second story: Wild Bill the boy turning into Wild Bill the man.

Disappearances is the last of a trilogy of dreamy films Craven set in Vermont. The others are Where the Rivers Flow North, the tale of an old-time logger played by Rip Torn and his vanishing way of life, and A Stranger in the Kingdom, starring Ernie Hudson and Martin Sheen, depicting a "notorious racial incident," Craven says, in Vermont's history.

The trilogy's strong sense of place came from Craven's decade-long effort to bring grass-roots arts to small-town Vermont life. He established an art-house cinema in St. Johnsbury, Vt. He played the role of impresario by bringing to town Merce Cunningham's dance companies, the late actor Spalding Gray, and Mabou Mines, a theater group. He even co-founded a traveling road show for kids called Circus Smirkus.

As Craven puts it, he "went totally bonkers."

He eventually transformed into a filmmaker, and his love for New England later served as inspiration for "drawing out stories rooted in a place where I'd spent time building the arts." As for the idea of recasting a Western, that idea might have come from his grandmother, a Texas woman accustomed to hard-scrabble living who reared young Craven on John Wayne and Tennessee Williams.

"Red River and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were my staples," he said.

A sense of place influenced the making of Disappearances, but it also influences the experience of it. Craven has shown the film widely and notes that different cultural reference points color the meaning of the movie, at turns addressing the evils of alcohol, expressing a tale of morality and family, or celebrating the psychological formation on an individual's personality.

"I'm fascinated by how different cultural perspectives are," he says.

Now that he's redefined the Western (draining it of John Wayne swagger), how about taking out Tennessee Williams and redefining the repressed homosexual desire saga?

Maybe Larry Craig is available.

http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A35441

No walk in the pahkAttempting a Boston accent is not easy

By David Brooks Andrews

Standard-Times correspondent

October 19, 2007 6:00 AM

When Ben Affleck's film "Gone Baby Gone" opens today, audiences will be listening for the South Boston accents of the cast. With its story about the desperate search for a 4-year-old child who goes missing, the film is set in the gritty corners of Southie.

Initial reports indicate that the actors do well with the accents, which shouldn't be too surprising given that Mr. Affleck, who directs the film, and his brother Casey, who stars in the film, are natives of the area.

But for actors who don't have the Affleck advantage, attempting a Boston accent is no walk in the pahk.

"A Boston accent strikes terror into the heart of every self-respecting dialect coach," said Carla Meyer in an e-mail interview from the set of James Cameron's "Avatar" in New Zealand. She has worked on the such Massachusetts-based films "Malice," "Blown Away," "The Perfect Storm" and "Once Around," coaching Gwyneth Paltrow, Bebe Neuwirth, Anne Bancroft, Jeff Bridges, Forest Whitaker and Holly Hunter in speaking a believable Boston accent. And yet it still terrifies her.

Why? Because American audiences aren't as familiar with the Boston accent as much as they are with a New York or Southern accent, she explained.

"As a rule, everyone thinks Boston means Kennedy-esque, which clearly is not the case."

She and her colleagues have found that they'll work with actors who are really good at the Boston dialect, and "the feedback will still be at best 50-50. And the 50 who don't like it, hate it."

Maybe so, but that shouldn't prevent a Bay Stater from savoring a well-done Southie accent.

And just how does an actor learn a Southie accent?

"By hangin' around the corner or the L Street Bathhouse, playing a little handball," said Mike McGonagle, bartender at The Clock Tavern in South Boston. "You've got to grow up with it, I guess."

Not every actor in a Boston-based film has the luxury of growing up in Bean Town. So directors hire dialect coaches like Ms. Meyer or Eda Roth, who has worked for the past 16 years as a dialect coach for film and theater productions.

Ms. Roth has served as a dialect coach helping with Boston accents on "Monument Ave.," starring Denis Leary, Colm Meaney, Famke Janssen, Billy Crudup and Martin Sheen, on "Once Around" featuring Holly Hunter, Richard Dreyfuss and Danny Aiello, and most recently on the upcoming film "21," starring Jim Sturgess.

She said a typical Boston accent is "like a flattened Irish accent that has lost some of its musicality and comes from a slight close in the back of the throat."

She mentioned that the cliché of a Boston accent is the line "Park your car in Harvard Yard," with the "Rs" dropped, but she added that in saying the line people often neglect to add a slightly flattened, harsh sound to the "As."

It's one thing to be able to describe a Boston accent and it's another to get an actor to use it so naturally that he or she sounds like a native speaker.

"A friend of mine says coaching dialects is like running between raindrops," said Ms. Roth. It's that difficult.

The first step is to design the accent to fit the story of a film. In "21," which is based on the true story of a group of MIT students who went to Las Vegas and beat the odds, they decided Mr. Sturgess — a young British actor — should have a light Boston accent, in which he says his "Rs" lightly. The reason is that only he and the actress playing his mother have accents, and they wanted to balance them with the rest of the cast. "You don't want everybody focusing on the accent rather than the story," said Ms. Roth.

When she took over from Ms. Meyer as dialect coach on "Once Around," she met Gena Rowlands, who introduced herself by saying, "I don't do accents." That was fine with Ms. Roth, who described Ms. Rowlands as a lovely actress, but knows that not all actors have an ear for accents.

"Some are wired that way, and some aren't," said Ms. Roth. "I would rather have an actor not do an accent than do a bad one."

Besides, there are plenty of reasons that many characters would not have an accent, even in a film set in Boston.

The next step is going out into the community where the film is based and recording people with accents as models for the actors. For "Monument Ave." she found herself taping kids on the streets of Charlestown who dropped their "Rs" and "Gs" in "ing" as they talked to her about stealin' cars. "The life and musicality of their dialect was so fabulous," said Ms. Roth.

Ms. Meyer described these taping sessions as one of the best parts of her job. "You get to hear the most wonderful stories from some of the most unlikely sources. You always have to cast a wide net because the elements that might work well for one character in a script in terms of age, class, education, travel, etc., might not work for another."

Sometimes directors will have dialect coaches present on the film set and will ask them to speak up when they feel there should be another take to try get a better accent. Other times, the coaching takes place off the film set.

The key to a successful accent is not just getting the right sounds, but imbibing the accent.

"It has to be in their bodies, so they're feeling the music of the place, understanding the rhythms, the atmosphere. Everyone gets it when it's happening," said Ms. Roth.

And what is the Boston rhythm?

"It's a certain street, rough love-of-the-earth kind of feel," she said.

"It doesn't work if the accent is tacked on as an effect," said Ms. Meyer. "Once it's embraced and perfected, then the actor can throw the dialect away and speak it as loosely and colloquially as appropriate, as if they owned it."

As for what actors and films have done the best with the Boston accent, Bostonians have little problem speaking their minds.

"The movie 'Southie' was pretty close," said Mr. McGonagle, the bartender. " 'Good Will Hunting' was right up there with 'Southie.' 'The Departed' wasn't too good, being straightforward."

"The love interest (Vera Farmiga) in 'The Departed' is a disaster," said Jerry Bisantz, theater actor, director, playwright and founder of Image Theatre in Lowell, being even more straightforward. "She had the worst accent I've ever heard. Scorsese should have stopped her cold."

"Mark Wahlberg was the one guy in 'The Departed' who nailed it, much more than Matt Damon," said Charles Merzbacher, chairman of the Department of Film and Television and Associate Professor of Film at Boston University. "He came by it honestly. He grew up in that environment where people talked with those accents. He doesn't have to do it in a studied way."

As for "Mystic River," he likes the film but thinks the Hollywood actors had big problems with their Boston accents, particularly Laura Linney, whom he likes as an actor.

Boston theater actor Derek Stone Nelson said, "Sean Penn's accent was pretty good (in "Mystic River"). Kevin Bacon was in and out. Tim Robbins, he was sort of overdoing it."

"What I find is it goes actor by actor, which is part of the problem," said Mr. Merzbacher. "In order to suspend disbelief, you want to enter into the whole world. And if one character is unconvincing, the whole world crumbles."