The Lovely Bones in My Backyard

Tonight I took a little field trip and wandered over to downtown Royersford, where Peter Jackson is filming The Lovely Bones. I joined the small group of onlookers gathered at Fourth and Main and chatted with Jim McNutt, “your friendly PA.” Jim was on lockup duty, which consisted primarily of keeping folks like me corralled by the barricade. He had most recently worked on M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening and Mark Webber’s Explicit Ills, both also filmed in the area.

From our location there wasn't much to see, just several takes of some Seventies-era cars, a motorcycle, and even a street cleaner turning the corner by the Main Street Deli. Nonetheless the locals were thrilled that Hollywood had descended upon their little town, if only for a few days. Girls in their tweens, hoping for an autograph from Mark Wahlberg, clustered in the bitter cold with their mothers. Many of them had never seen a Peter Jackson film, some didn’t know the title of this film, still others were a trifle concerned that their town might be standing in for nearby Norristown, which itself stood in for Malvern in the novel by Alice Sebold.

At this time of year, it was not unusual to see the town festooned with Christmas lights and decorations (definitely not, according to one semi-disapproving resident, “Royersford’s lights”), but it was quite surreal to see a street I’ve driven a thousand times set up for a major film production. That was indeed a Paramount tractor trailer parked behind the H&R Block where I’ve had my taxes prepared. Weird—but good weird. I knew it wasn’t Hollywood so much as New Zealand that had arrived in my backyard, as if one of those bloated Third Stage Guild Navigators had just up and folded time and space, and that the Universe was winking yet again. Mostly, I was relieved that the planet’s equilibrium had finally been restored, now that Pete had come here after I had gone there. Pics tomorrow!