Illustrator: Tatjana Junker
A guy knocked on the front door. This was late summer. I was getting ready to move, packing up the house in Ridgewood, where my family had lived for a decade. The kids had gone from high school to college, and my husband and I had decided to go the way of many empty nesters.
When the guy knocked on the door, the dogs started barking. They didn’t want me to let him in—or they wanted me to let him in so they could bite him. I cracked the door an inch. I figured the guy was working for a utility company. He wasn’t. He was, he said, an advance location scout for the movies. He passed a piece of paper through the crack.
When he was gone, and the dogs stopped their bloodthirsty barking, I looked at it. Adam Sandler’s production company was filming a movie in our neighborhood. They were using the school across the street for their main location, but needed a house for a scene or two. If we were interested, there was a number to call and a name: Chris.
My husband agreed with the dogs at first. We were in the midst of packing to move. Why let a stranger into the house? But the piece of paper softened him up a little bit. About an hour later, he was on a walk around the neighborhood, saw Chris, and invited him back.
Chris returned. The dogs liked him fine. He walked around, nodded, made some notes on a pad of paper, and explained the project further. Adam Sandler’s daughter was starring in the movie, Don’t Say Good Luck, about a girl who gets the lead in her school musical at the same time she learns that her mother is sick. My home office would double as her therapist’s office. Before he left, he asked us if we’d be up for having a larger group come by. “Sure,” I said. Later that week, Chris came back with the group in tow: the location manager, the director and some of the crew. They also walked around and nodded.
“We’ll let you know,” said Sascha, the location manager.
“She will,” Chris said.
She did. She wanted us—or at least she wanted our house.
There was a wrinkle, of course: We were leaving. We had bought the house when both kids were tweens and lived there through middle school and high school. We had nested there during the Covid pandemic. But now it seemed too large for us, with rooms that weren’t doing anything but reminding us of the kids.
Sascha wasn’t concerned that we were mid-pack. If anything, it made it easier for the film crew. They offered us money for our trouble, but I was more motivated by the idea that the house would appear in a movie. What a perfect goodbye present.
When the day came, my husband was out of town with our sons. I greeted the crew and then went out for a walk. By the time I came back, the first floor was covered in brown paper, the walls were covered with cardboard, and the stairs were covered in plastic wrap. Signs were everywhere: “Crew only,” “Do not enter.”
That was prep day. The next day was supposed to be the filming. As it turned out, it was also rainy. It delayed the shoot and, in the end, redefined it. Sascha called me in late evening. “It turns out we’re not able to get over there,” Sascha said. She asked me if she could take my furniture and move it across the street, where they would recreate the therapist’s office in the school. I agreed.
The next day, when everything was back in place, I explained to the house that it wouldn’t be in the movie after all. I tried to be gentle. I even told it a joke a crew member had made—that this had been the most expensive chair rental in movie history. The house didn’t answer, but it also didn’t object. I think it understood.
The world’s first movie studio. The country’s first film hub and drive-in cinema. The coining of the term “cliffhanger.”
New Jersey’s diverse towns are excellent shoot-ready chameleons that easily mimic cityscapes, suburbs and other locales.
