Other media notes

Robert Downey, Jr.'s new film "The Judge" is being partly filmed in SHelburne Falls, MA, not fifiteen minutes from where I live.  A very pretty little hill town, by the Deerfield RIver, connected to  the equally cute town of Buckland by an adorable iron bridge. Beyond the town New England hills rise sharply; Buckland (also part of the film set) is nestled against a ledge of granite up which the town's back streets climb.

The difficulty -- the conceptual difficulty anyway -- is that these scenes in the movie are set in Indiana, another place I lived for years.  Either the movie's producers did not know or did not care that there is no town in Indiana situated as Buckland/Shelburne is.  There are no sharply rising maple-and-fir clad heights.  There are no steep granite ledges.  Massachusetts families left Massachusetts to get away from those things, and farm in the soft soil and flat reaches of places like...Indiana.  I'll have to see the movie to know if they CGI'd out the mountain,

I knew Robert Downey Jr.'s father slightly in NY in the 60s and 70s.  His name was Robert Downey.  He made some hilarious "underground" movies (as they were then called) -- Babo 73, Chafed Elbows -- and a couple of small features, Putney Swope and Pound (about a bunch of dogs awaiting execution in a pound; my friend Don Calfa -- cult favorite in Return of the Living Dead, as I understand -- played a greyhound, in running shorts with a number card on his back.)