Movie shoot takes over village, affects businesses (with updated photo gallery)

Not surprisingly, it’s tough to stage a bank robbery in broad daylight with hundreds of people watching.

This task is made infinitely more complicated when the target bank is in the middle of a bustling village and the robbery is meant to look like it’s occurring sometime in the early 1990s. But with the help of local police, assistance from more than six dozen bank workers and with some tricky camera angles, the film crew for “The Place Beyond the Pines” managed to pull it off.

From mid-morning through afternoon, Hollywood star Ryan Gosling sped away from the 1st National Bank of Scotia on a dirt bike. With a filled backpack on his chest, he looked to be peeling out fresh from a heist inside.

Crowds of people huddled by the Scotia Fire Department at the corner of North Ten Broeck Street and Mohawk Avenue, hoping to catch some of the action. They erupted with cheers when Gosling first sped down South Ten Broeck Street, running the stop sign at Glen Avenue and dodging an older-model Cadillac bearing New York’s defunct Statue of Liberty plates.

The takes were repeated numerous times and sometimes interrupted by an errant vehicle trying to pass into the bank’s drive-through.

Production crews lined several blocks of the village, trying to block pedestrians from landing in the shot, while Scotia police did their best to shut down traffic when filming commenced.

The original plan was to shoot the scene Wednesday, and Acting Police Chief Tom Rush scheduled up to 14 officers for traffic control. But the day before filming was to begin, the producers abruptly decided to shift their schedule because of weather.

“We kind of had to regroup,” Rush said.

Still, shutting down the village’s main thoroughfare proved difficult at times, especially because of the intermittent nature of the filming. A few traffic cones blocking one lane of South Ten Broeck did little to deter one motorist from trying to navigate into where the film crew was shooting.

The film directed by Derek Cianfrance features Gosling portraying a stunt bike rider who turns to robbing banks to support his newborn son.

The film also features Eva Mendes as the mother of Gosling’s son and Bradley Cooper as the cop determined to catch Gosling’s character. Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn and veteran actor Ray Liotta also play roles in the film, which is expected to be released sometime in 2013.

On Friday, the bank remarkably remained open during filming, though its main lobby was off limits. One worker indicated that just about the entire staff was on hand for the day, either working in the offices upstairs, helping out with crowd control outside or actually appearing as extras during the faux robbery.

Some police also got a chance to make an extra buck from the shoot, though not as many as initially anticipated. Rush said eight officers were given time-and-a-half to direct traffic —all paid for by the film company.

Some businesses also found themselves bustling from the Hollywood action in Scotia this week, while other may have suffered a bit.

Sherry Rios, a manager at Stewart’s across the street from the bank, was glad she tripled her staffing all week, given the level of business her store has seen.

“Anything that goes on in the village helps,” she said, “especially a movie.”

Laurie Kielkowski, the owner of Laurie’s Gluten-Free Goodness on South Ten Broeck, found herself with a lot of unexpected business after one of the film producers discovered her bread. A short time later, another person from the production came in to purchase dinner rolls for Gosling, who liked them enough that the production crew bought a whole platter.

The producer who initially bought the bread cleaned out Kielkowski’s stock. She said he apparently plans to send the bread back to his home in Los Angeles and to his mother in the Hamptons.

“And if she likes it, he said it’ll probably be a weekly order from her,” she said.

Other businesses — namely restaurants with a regular clientele — weren’t as smitten with the production. O’Leary’s Pub & Grill, across the street from the bank, had a full patio, but a nearly empty dining room shortly before noon.

Bartender Tracy Petricca was hoping the traffic and fanfare over the movie wouldn’t deter her lunchtime crowd. She wasn’t sure whether the business had seen any impact, much less a positive one.

“It’ll still be nice exposure,” she said.

It was a different story at San Souci Restaurant on Mohawk Avenue, where owner Shannon Thouin was overseeing an empty dining room during lunch service. She said her business this week was crushed by the filming — from the reports of the shooting on Wednesday to the traffic snarls caused by filming the following two days.

“I expected [an impact to business] a little here and there, but not every day,” she said.

Overall though, the movie shoot is expected to be an economic boon for the area, said Don Ritter, chairman of the Schenectady Film Commission. He said the crew is renting local hotel rooms, homes and office space in the city into the fall.

He estimated more than 40 area residents have gotten speaking parts and roughly 2,000 will be used as paid extras. And that’s before considering the various equipment and other items they’re renting.

“My estimate is when it is over, they will have contributed $2 million or more,” he said.