| Originally Published on APP.com
Here’s to the 1946 musical, “Three Little Girls in Blue,” where three sisters from Red Bank get on a train to Atlantic City to meet the men of their dreams.
It would never happen today. You can’t take a train ride from Red Bank to Atlantic City that doesn’t zig-zag across the state. But the film is an early example of the Jersey Shore’s appeal to Hollywood.
More than 1,900 feature films have been shot in New Jersey, with many of them at the Shore, since 1978, according to the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission.
However, the future of feature filming in Jersey is an issue these days as Gov. Chris Christie last month vetoed $60 million in enticements for film production in the state, according to NJ.com. A New Jersey tax incentive program was created in 2005 to lure film and TV production in the state, but in 2010 Christie suspended it and canceled a $420,000 tax credit to the producers of MTV’s “Jersey Shore” for what he termed was the negative portrayal of the state in the series.
“There won’t be filming in New Jersey as long as there are no tax incentives,” said Diane Raver, founder of Garden State Film Festival, which takes place March 31 through April 1 in Atlantic City.
Still, we have our memories — and our films.
To mark the upcoming Academy Awards, 7 p.m. Sunday on ABC, here, in alphabetical order, is our list of 9 Jersey Shore films that mattered:
“Amityville Horror” (1979)
The house at 18 Brooks Drive in Toms River is not haunted, nor did ghastly murders take place there. But sure enough the house was featured in the 1979 sequel-producing hit “The Amityville Horror.”
The movie was based on a quadruple murder that took place in a Dutch Colonial house in the town of Amityville on Long Island. Filmmakers came to Toms River to re-create the Amityville house. After rearranging the facade of 18 Brooks a bit, it was showtime.
The film starred James Brolin as George Lutz, who moves his family, which includes Margot Kidder as wife Kathleen Lutz, into a dream home that turns into a nightmare.
Incidentally, several scenes were shot around town, including City Hall and and the Sunken Garden at Georgian Court College in nearby Lakewood.
“Annie” (1982)
There was no other place to film the 1982 version of “Annie” other than at Woodrow Wilson Hall on the grounds of the then-called Monmouth College in West Long Branch, said Roger Paradiso, production manager for the film.
“When I met the (‘Annie’) production executives at the Hotel Pierre in Manhattan, I told them I had the perfect location for Daddy Warbucks’ home. I went to college there for two years. It was in New Jersey. I knew the scale of the show and there was only one place to shoot, in my mind — Woodrow Wilson Hall,” said Paradiso to the Asbury Park Press in 2006.
Wilson Hall, Monmouth’s administration building, was built in 1929 as a home for Hubert Templeton Parson, president of the F.W. Woolworth Co.
On screen, it’s Hollywood magic as the life of the Little Orphan Annie is transformed from grimy orphanage to early-20th century Jersey Shore opulence.
