Matt Damon Sidney Lumet Sian Heder Casey Affleck Brendan Fraser Gus Van-Sant Malina Saval Associate Ben Affleck state Massachusets city Boston city Cambridge, state Massachusets city Concord film actor shootings Matt Damon Sidney Lumet Sian Heder Casey Affleck Brendan Fraser Gus Van-Sant Malina Saval Associate Ben Affleck state Massachusets city Boston city Cambridge, state Massachusets city Concord

Massachusetts Incentives Boost Hollywood Productions in the State

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variety.com

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesIt was the late 1990s and future Oscar-winning “CODA” filmmaker Siân Heder was ambling across Harvard Square, close to the home in which she grew up in Cambridge, Mass.

There, near the Au Bon Pain sandwich shop on Brattle Street, Heder spotted two buddies from Cambridge Ringe and Latin School, then-unknowns Ben and Casey Affleck, shooting a scene for “Good Will Hunting,” the 1997 film that would score two Academy Awards, help usher in the era of Big Screen Boston and turn the Affleck brothers and Matt Damon, all actors in the movie and Massachusetts natives (“Massholes” in the local vernacular), into giant Hollywood stars.“I knew Ben and Casey from high school — their mom was my teacher in third and fifth grade,” Heder says. “I think I shouted at Ben, ‘Put me in your movie!’ And so I was an extra in ‘Good Will Hunting.’” But filming in Massachusetts in the 1990s was exorbitantly cost-prohibitive.

Save for about two weeks of gathering external footage, Gus Van Sant’s drama about a math genius-cum-M.I.T. janitor was shot primarily on a Toronto soundstage.

Until then, with the exception of a few projects such as the 1992 Brendan Fraser-starrer “School Ties” (shot in Concord), most Massachusetts-set films and TV series — from “Cheers” to Sidney Lumet’s courtroom classic “The Verdict” — were filmed elsewhere.

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