LAKE PLACID - Lori Kelly-Bailey said the Adirondack Park is her favorite place to shoot movies.
"There is no better place to shoot, in my opinion, than up here," Kelly-Bailey said. "The people here are wonderful."
Kelly-Bailey spoke in a question-and-answer session after a Thursday night screening of her movie "Mineville" at the Palace Theatre at the kickoff event of this year's Lake Placid Film Forum.
She said any time she needed anything while filming, a local person on the set would run off and find it. And if they couldn't find it, they would make it.
Kelly-Bailey said she has plans to shoot one of her next two projects in the Adirondacks and has already been in talks with "the local powers that be" about it.
"Mineville" is a dark story (which Kelly-Bailey said was originally darker) about the difficult time mining families had at the turn of the 20th century, struggling to unionize against fat-cat mine owner Charles Weston.
Kelly-Bailey said the characters in the main family were based on her own family, with her dad and his half-paralyzed brother mirroring characters Michael O'Roarke and his brother, though the plot was mostly fabricated.
The film was shot in black and white last year in and around Moriah and features a number of scenic shots of Adirondack lakes and mountains.
Theatre 1 at the Palace Theatre was packed with movie-goers for the screening, the third locally after two in Moriah earlier this week.
The movie features Paul Sorvino, who played Paul Cicero in "Goodfellas," William Sadler of "Die Hard 2" and "The Shawshank Redemption," and Nick Wechsler, from the TV show "Roswell."
Sorvino's son Michael also appears in "Mineville," playing his character's son.
Kelly-Bailey said she drew much of her casting pool from the Adirondack area, enlisting a number of local people including Moriah town Supervisor Thomas Scozzafava.
Kelly-Bailey said that at one point during the production process, a distributor picked up the movie and changed the name to "Switchback," but that company put it on the back burner. It was two years before Kelly-Bailey could touch the movie again, she said, so she changed the film's name back to "Mineville" when she picked it back up.
