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Summertime in the BelgradesContentsfor Printing Article Summaries |
On Golden Pond: A Legacy Lives On
by Esther J. Perne Forty countries, twenty-seven languages, three decades after the play On Golden Pond first appeared off Broadway, the classic continues to attract a worldful of lake lovers who live the reality, and many, many more who are lured by the dream. Of course On Golden Pond is universal, it's "wherever you are," but still there's a real setting on a cove on Great Pond in Belgrade Lakes where writer Ernest Thompson recently returned, as he has every year of his life, to the family camp established in 1908 and where he observes, "Everything I see is basically the same as when I was a little kid." "I'm a very lucky man," the playwright, the screenwriter, the Academy Award winner, describes of his lifetime association with this region. "I've gotten to see a lot of the world, but the most beautiful place for me always, without hesitation, is Belgrade Lakes."
"What's so special?" he asks. "Nothing Thompson's reminiscences include a "long time" ago, before Day's was owned by the Day family. "We would come up the Channel (from Great Pond) in a rowboat and go to Bartlett's At age 28, Ernest Thompson wrote a play in a weekend. "The itinerant actor, out of work, sits down one Memorial Day weekend, and writes his first full length play," he describes, pointing out, "It was a long weekend." He named his play On Golden Pond. "I wanted it to be an imaginative place," he explains. It would become one of the most produced plays of all time. "It's bizarre how many people know the title," Thompson comments. He singles out, especially, young people who weren't even born when the play and later the movie were introduced. Given his lifetime of summers in the Belgrades, was On Golden Pond autobiographical? "No," Thompson says. "I stole a few lines," he describes, "I stole shamelessly from my father." Thompson continues, "The things that I wrote about were from a way of life: berries, flies, fishing, canoeing, lesbians (who young Thompson worked for). They were all part of the fabric of life here. I wrote about what I knew, which is what you are supposed to do."
How could a young man know so much about old people? "I didn't," he describes, "I knew myself. I wrote about my own fears, concerns, etc." But if On Golden Pond was written about Great Pond, why wasn't it filmed here in the Belgrades? "It wasn't my decision," Thompson describes. Although a location scout did check out the Belgrade area, the decision came down to economics. Squam Lake in New Hampshire, where the movie was filmed, was 100 miles from Boston and flights to Los Angeles, where film could be developed and returned to New Hampshire within 24 hours. Squam Lake is surrounded by beautiful mountains. And, there were plenty of accommodations for the 150 crew members. Since much of that would be different now, would he do a film here, in Maine? He just might, Thompson allows. Currently in the process of forming his own production company, White Bridge Farm Productions in New Hampton, New Hampshire he has a lot of exciting and ambitious projects for the future. In the meantime he's on Golden a.k.a. Great Pond where there's a lot to be enjoyed: the ritual of swimming around the point to the neighboring cove, rollerblading on the back roads, canoeing, watching the sunsets, and, oh yes, chatting with the mailman, Captain Norm, as he makes his water route rounds. The latter is as close to On Golden Pond as it gets. | |||
