Paul Hoffman, author of King's Gambit, has an entertaining story on Meryl Streep at the NPR website. I have my own Meryl Streep story!As I recall, it was summertime in the late 1990's when one block of Linden Avenue [where I was living at the time for 24 years, before moving four blocks away in 2004] in Kearny NJ had wooden sawhorses blocking off traffic for three weeknights. On Monday evening, I arrived home from work and tried nosing my vehicle past the sawhorses to park my car in its usual spot. One of the men in Wes Craven's film crew ran up, knocked on the driver side window, and shouted, "Hey, man! You can't park here. They're about to start shooting any minute now!"
I must have looked startled at the mention of shooting because he quickly explained that they were filming scenes for an upcoming movie starring Meryl Streep and Cloris Leachman that was tentatively titled Fifty Violins. They later changed the name to Music of the Heart. It turns out that Roberta Guaspari, the music teacher portrayed by Streep, had grown up on Linden Avenue in Kearny although she had since moved. Wes Craven, the director, wanted the childhood scenes to be authentic. So these were filmed on location, one block from where I lived. The shots of Guaspari's childhood home can be seen during the rolling of the film's opening credits.
It was on the third night, Wednesday, that Meryl Streep made her appearance before what seemed to be half the population of Kearny, all jammed on one block of Linden Avenue which is only three blocks long. After she had left and the crowd subsided, I knocked on the front door of the house. The woman who currently resided there was kind enough to let me enter where I stood on a movie set for the only time in my life!
