Mary Stuart Masterson’s The Cake Eaters is said to be showing tonight at 7 pm at Hudson’s Iron Horse bar—one of the locations that Masterson used during her 2006 shoot. It’s a leisurely, understated and thoughtful drama about three romantic relationships among the members of two intertwined Upstate families.
When I saw The Cake Eaters at the Green Mountain Film Festival back in 2008, the film was still looking for a distributor according to screenwriter Jayce Bartok, who was staying at the same Montpelier B&B. During the screening, I jotted down the following list of identifiable local locations:
- Cedar Park Cemetery, Hudson
- Iron Horse, Hudson
- Main Street, Catskill
- Middle Ground Flats, Hudson River
Greene County residents will no doubt spot a lot more, since most of the shooting took place on that side of the River, though the filmmakers bunked at the increasingly run-down St. Charles Hotel during their stay.
“The Horse” is one of the more popular movie locations in the Hudson Valley, having been included in Paul Newman’s Nobody’s Fool and several indie films. A few local residents appear in Cake’s credits, such as Otto Stockmeier (who like the Coen Brothers is a Simon’s Rock grad and is now making movies of his own).
Those under the age of 20 know this once-obscure but now frequently-Netflixed film because one of its stars, Kristen Stewart, later went on to fame in the wildly-popular Twilight vampire movies. She here plays a teenager living with a debilitating neurological disorder, making it something of a curiosity to Stewart completists. Her newfound popularity is reflected in the cheezed-out new DVD cover design (below, right) which is much less appealing than the original (at left).
