Movie screening to aid Springfield non-profits

Date: 6/8/2017

SPRINGFIELD – Actor, writer and director John Shea recalled with obvious fondness how he would ride his bicycle from his home in Sixteen Acres to the Bing Theater to see the newest Disney film.

    “My mind was blown,” he said of the films he saw.

Years later, the Springfield native and Cathedral High graduate who has had a successful career on stage, film and television, is paying the Bing back. He is bringing his new film “Grey Lady,” that he wrote and directed for a special benefit screening that will raise funds for the Bing Arts Center, adult education programs at the Gray House and for the Community Foundation’s Dr. John V. Shea Scholarship Fund.

The event will start at 6 p.m. June 29 at the Basketball Hall of Fame. There will a cocktail party before the audience moves into the theater at 6:45 p.m. He will also host an exclusive party after the film. Tickets are $100 each.

“Grey Lady” is a crime thriller and mystery starring Eric Dane as a Boston police officer who goes to Nantucket to solve a murder, but finds much more than he could imagine. Shea shot the film almost entirely on Nantucket, where he now lives. The cast includes Amy Madigan, Rebecca Gayheart, Natalie Zea and Adrian Lester.

Living on an island in Massachusetts may not sound like a logical home for a busy actor such as Shea. He lived in New York City for years and worked there and Los Angeles. He later moved to Los Angeles. Two innovations changed the need for that he explained: the cell phone and the Internet.

“We can live anywhere,” he said, speaking from his back porch at his home on Nantucket. He added he commutes to work from the island.

Clearly that system works well as in the past few years, Shea has been a recurring character on “Gossip Girl and “Agent X.” He was on his own series, “Mutant X,” for three years and played Lex Luthor on “Lois and Clark” and appeared in dozens of other films and TV series.

This is the second film Shea has directed, with his first effort being “Southie,” a drama about Irish-American families in South Boston he made in 1998. He said his new films is “the spiritual sequel to ‘Southie.’”

Shea said, “I’m hoping audiences will get an inside look at Nantucket.”

There are 30 speaking roles in the film and while there are  “Hollywood actors,” filling the leads, he said, many of the supporting performers are performers from Nantucket. Shea has been the artistic director of the Theater Workshop on the island and got to know “every creative person on the island.”

He added that much of the financing for the film also came through his connections to Nantucket, as his fellow Nantucket resident Armyan Bernstein, the chair and co—founder of Beacon Pictures, helped make the film a reality. Shea recalled how he and Bernstein took a walk together and Bernstein said the two men should make a thriller together set in a resort in the off-season.

The film took six years in development and then once the funding was set, Shea shot it in 25 days.

Shea said he wanted to “transcend the genre” and make a suspense film “with a touch of poetry.” He added, “I’m not going to pretend it does, but we tried.”

During the two years in which Shea worked on the script, he said Bernstein gave him some advice. He recalled the producer told him, “Don’t forget the fist fight at the end of the film.” Bernstein told Shea that many of Harrison Ford’s biggest hit films end with a climatic fight.

The other advice was to make sure the lead character, “threw a punch, kissed a girl and shot a gun.”

For Shea, he sees the story as having elements of a classic John Ford Western with the lead character – a stranger – riding into town.

Shea is pleased to try to raise funding for the three groups with the screening. He said for him growing up, “The Bing is the coolest place in Springfield.” In its current role as an arts center, he added, “It’s one of the hearts of Springfield.”

Shea said, “You need a place like the Bing.”

The benefit has been made possible through the corporate sponsorship of Florence Bank and John F. Heaps as well as The Basketball Hall of Fame Hall and Max’s Tavern.

Tickets are available online at The Bing Arts Center Facebook Page. For mail orders, send your check to Keith Sikes, 61 Texel Drive. Springfield, MA 01108. Checks should be made out to The Bing Arts Center. The Bing Arts Center box office will also be open at 716 Sumner Ave., starting on June 8, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

“The reason I’m doing this is to return as much as I can to the town where I grew up. I’m looking forward to renewing relationships with many of my Springfield friends,” Shea said.