Movies in Boston: A Brief, But Essential History

From gritty streets to ivy-covered walls, Boston has played a starring role in countless flicks; it would take a cinematic eternity to marathon through the region’s entire celluloid legacy. And while Damon and Affleck might be current Hollywood royalty, it’s good to remember that before Good Will Hunting thrust Southie into the spotlight, Tinseltown and the Hub were already locked in a long romance. “Even people in the industry don’t grasp how long filmmaking has been going on in Massachusetts,” says Adam Roffman, an on-set dresser who, along with editor and producer Vatche Arabian, created the nearly four-hour Made in Massachusetts compilation that premiered this year, which shows clips from a century of films created in the Bay State. “They just don’t realize the scope of everything that is shot here.”

Massachusetts’ on-screen debut began without sound in the silent features of the early 1900s. There was Rip Van Winkle, a series of short films shot on Cape Cod from 1896 to 1902, and Vanity Fair in 1915. Once sound came into play, a handful of movies were filmed in Massachusetts—if only partially. That included 1937’s Captains Courageous, about a kid who fell overboard and was rescued by a New England fishing boat, which was shot in Gloucester and MGM studios in Los Angeles; and Mystery Street, a 1950 murder-mystery noir filmed in Cape Cod and Boston.

Hollywood Comes to Boston

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• Behind the Lens: The Local Industry Pros
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From there, film production continued to grow in fits and starts. When urban renewal changed the face of the city in the 1960s, more and more filmmakers wanted to showcase the new Boston, resulting in the likes of The Thomas Crown Affair, The Boston Strangler, and Love Story. But it wasn’t until Jaws was filmed on Martha’s Vineyard in the early 1970s—ushering in a new wave of tourism in the process—that we fully realized our silver-screen potential. Following in the footsteps of policymakers in Colorado and Georgia, which were the first to found government-sanctioned film commissions, state legislators established the first iteration of the Massachusetts Film Office (MFO) in the late 1970s, with the goal of increasing revenue, jobs, and tourism by promoting the Hub as a destination for film production.

Steven Spielberg shooting Jaws off Martha’s Vineyard in 1974. The film helped spark the creation of the state’s first film commission. / Photo by Dick Yarwood/Newsday via Getty Images

The office had plenty of challenges to overcome, including limited equipment availability, no sound stages to speak of, and a shallow crew base. “All of the things that productions need were really bare bones,” says Tim Grafft, who served as the deputy director of the MFO for more than three decades. In the 1970s, filmmakers “would bring everyone in” from New York or L.A., says Tim Van Patten, owner of Scituate-based Central Booking, which helps staff crews on projects. That meant even a few days of filming could cost big, big bucks.

Matt Damon and director Martin Scorsese taking a break on the set of The Departed in South Boston in 2005. / Photo by George Rizer/the Boston Globe via Getty Images

Despite the high cost of production, films did come to Massachusetts in the decades after the MFO’s founding, thanks in part to the office’s work in pitching the state’s beautiful locations. But they usually didn’t stay long: The crew behind The Departed, for instance, shot for a few days in Boston in 2005, then hightailed it south to New York. “There was a lot of public to-do about why this Boston movie was being shot elsewhere,” says Nick Paleologos, who headed the MFO from 2007 to 2011. “There were some comments made by some of its Massachusetts-based stars wondering, Why can’t we make this movie in Massachusetts?” The reason: New York had a film-tax-credit program with big incentives for bringing movies to the Empire State, and Massachusetts, at the time, did not.

Luckily for the stars and filmmakers, it wouldn’t take long for the state to remedy that and dive into the movie business like never before. The stage was set, the cameras ready to roll, and Boston was about to steal the show.

See: How Massachusetts Became a Booming Film Production Hub

Photo illustration by Comrade

Hollywood Comes to Boston

• How a State Tax Credit Fostered the Boston-Movie Boom
• Behind the Lens: The Local Industry Pros
• The Five Best Indie Theaters in Greater Boston
• The Dream Maker VIPs (Coming soon)
• 17 Essential Boston Movies (Coming soon)

First published in the print edition of Boston magazine’s December 2024/January 2025 issue as part of the “Hollywood Comes to Boston” package, with the headline, “Movies in Boston: A History.”