Table of Contents
A few years back, citing a couple of cinematic releases of some distinction, I suggested to a friend that the time had come for our hometown of Medford to get the Hollywood treatment.
To support my case, I pointed out that the two films in question – “The Departed” (2006), directed by Martin Scorsese, and “The Town,” a 2010 Ben Affleck production, set in South Boston and Charlestown, respectively – had demonstrated a certain box office appeal.
Though I didn’t mention it at the time, Clint Eastwood – Dirty Harry himself – also had a go at portraying the Hub’s eccentric underworld ways when he directed a screen adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s evocative “Mystic River” in 1997.
And it would be absolutely criminal to overlook the capo di tutti capi of the Boston noir genre, one-time prosecutor George V. Higgins, whose classic caper “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” inspired a memorable 1973 film adaptation starring Robert Mitchum.
Of course, another noteworthy production – Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s 1997 breakthrough film, “Good Will Hunting” – deserves an honorable mention here. But the two Cambridge Rindge and Latin-educated lads chose to ignore Boston’s seedy underbelly and instead relied – a little too heavily, in my opinion – on the Hub's working-class accent and vernacular to set the scene.
With these respected films in mind, it’s my belief that Medford possesses the essential ingredients – an embattled history and contentious present-day politics, a cast of larger-than-life personalities, and gritty film-friendly surroundings – for a popular and potentially Oscar-winning motion picture.
In fact, as I opined to my pal Joe back in the day – when Boston was emerging as a film-making mecca – our agreeably disreputable hometown contains more characters and stories and colorful language than any Scorsese film. And the soundtrack, featuring the music of Boston area bands and singers over the years, would be equally awesome.
In retrospect, maybe my pitch was a bit over the top. But Medford does deserve a storyteller of the highest order, someone to sing the city’s praises and hang out the community’s soiled laundry for a wider audience to enjoy. There’s certainly plenty of material in both departments. In fact, my junior high school years alone have all the makings of an award-winning mini-series, comedy, drama, or crime thriller, take your pick.
Of course, there was a time when you’d admit to being from Medford as a prelude to a brawl, or as an excuse for a perceived lack of social graces. Not anymore. Medford is now Cambridge once removed, home to young professionals and activists as well as new immigrant communities. And like its more illustrious counterpart on the Charles, it enjoys the benefits of being a college town.
But despite its richly checkered past and potentially promising future, Medford has rarely featured in fiction or in film.
The city’s most accomplished literary son by a good measure – novelist, travel writer, and occasional script doctor Paul Theroux – has been known to engage his local roots in his work, recalling some distinctive images and episodes from his youth in North Medford, near enough to the Sheepfold that he often tramped the woods there before the disruptive intervention of Route 93.
Theroux’s most convincing portrait of Medford occurs in a 1979 essay called “Traveling Home: High School Reunion.” His few fictionalized excursions back home – in “My Secret History” and “My Other Life” – are less compelling. Even a writer of his considerable talents, it seems, can find it difficult to bring the Medford experience to life on a broad canvas.
So where are we to find the fiction writers or filmmakers who can do the city justice? I’m afraid the required work will not come from somebody born and reared in Medford who continues to reside there.
By the time his masterwork “Dubliners” was published in 1914, James Joyce was 10 years removed from Ireland and he made only four brief return visits, the last in 1912, before his death in 1941.
Likewise, an enduring work about Medford will have to be undertaken by an ex-pat author or director possessing the clarity of vision that exile brings, not to mention the sublime turn of phrase and selective recall that a good novel or film demands.
Medford native Steve Coronella has lived in Ireland since 1992. He is the author of “Designing Dev,” a comic novel about an Irish-American lad from Boston who's recruited to run for the Irish presidency. His latest publication is the column collection “Entering Medford – And Other Destinations.”
