By Nathan Duke
Queens and Michigan may share little in common geographically, but the borough stands in for the Great Lakes State in David Ross' “The Babysitters” after a state tax incentive drew the indie film's production to sections of Maspeth and Long Island.
The film, which debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in September and opens in Manhattan May 9, is a sure-to-be-controversial teen drama about a group of high school girls who develop their own call-girl ring under the guise of a baby-sitting service after their ringleader, Shirley (Katherine Waterston, daughter of Sam), finds herself in a paid-for affair with struggling ad executive Michael Beltran (Jackson Heights native John Leguizamo).
The film also stars New Yorker Cynthia Nixon, who will appear later this month in the “Sex and the City” movie, some of which was shot at Long Island City's Silvercup Studios.
One of the film's key scenes was shot in Maspeth's Clinton Diner, which has also appeared in “Goodfellas” and “Brooklyn Rules,” while a number of other driving sequences were filmed along borough and Long Island streets.
Ross said the state's film and television incentives, which give tax breaks to movies that complete a majority of their production in New York, lured him to the borough.
“New York has a lot of great incentives that drew us here as well as a great crew and talent base,” he said. “It's a magic combination. The film is set in Michigan, but it wasn't a very good option to shoot there.”
But Ross, who grew up in Southfield, Mich., said he wanted the film to feel as if it could take place in any small town in the United States.
“I didn't want it to be set in some glamorous place like Laguna Beach, but I also didn't want it to be one of those suburbs where strange things happen,” he said. “I wanted [the setting] to look as normal as possible.”
In the film, Shirley and three of her pals shake up suburbia by operating a high-priced ring that services Beltran's friends and other middle-aged men that is, until the situation spirals out of control. Early in the film, Shirley and Beltran stop for a bite to eat at the Clinton Diner after he offers to drive her home following an evening of actual baby-sitting.
“The script was kind of specific. I wanted a diner that was out-of-the-way and had a 1950s feel to it,” Ross said. “I wanted a place with a counter and a jukebox. Then somebody told me it was the diner from 'Goodfellas.' That was a bit intimidating.”
But the diner is not the movie's only shared element with Martin Scorsese's 1990 film. Shirley's character begins to take her role as head of the ring seriously as the film progresses, and Ross tips his hat to the gangster genre toward the end of the film.
“The film is supposed to be about people getting in over their heads,” he said. “I thought, 'It's really gotta snowball and [Shirley] has to do something she could never in a million years imagine herself doing.' I liked the idea of a girl who's extremely organized and anal-retentive about her schoolwork. She takes those obsessions and skills and applies them to a kind of business.”
But Ross, who lives in Los Angeles, said he did not get the idea for the film, which he also wrote, from watching mob movies but from flipping through weekly arts publications.
“They have these ads for prostitutes in the back of L.A. Weekly and other local hipster magazines,” he said. “I thought, 'What if regular people tried to do this and it didn't go too well?' I like stories about good people who make bad decisions.”
He said he was more concerned about the story's moral ramifications than the legal ones while writing the script.
“I wanted the story to be less about dodging the cops and more about the right and wrong of it,” he said. “Getting caught by the police is almost too easy of a consequence. I get annoyed when a public figure gets caught and they immediately say they are sorry. Of course, they are sorry they got caught.”
Ross said the film will open on 20 screens in Manhattan Friday, including the CC Village East Cinemas on Second Avenue at 12th Street.
