Chatham Area Business and Arts Blog

Cannes in Chatham

FilmColumbia touts impressive array of festival circuit favorites in 20th year

Berkshire Eagle, October 11, 2019

FilmColumbia is a festival for early adopters. While Sundance and Cannes are destinations for top-notch movie premieres, FilmColumbia has often been one of the next landing spots for those films.

“We are basically, in some ways — and I love this — a very modest, regional, local festival bringing to our neck of the woods films that might not otherwise play, and it doesn’t matter to us if they’ve been shown at many other film festivals,” said Laurence Kardish, co-artistic director of the Chatham, N.Y., festival. “In fact, that’s where we make our discoveries.”

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Organically but Intentionally, the Amuse Gallery Grows in Chatham

Rural Intelligence | July 31, 2019

When Janice and Rick Patterson met on the set of a video shoot in the ’80s, the chemistry between the two was unmistakable. He was a rangy sound engineer and she a striking segment producer and skilled photographer.

After they had their first child, they came to a house in Columbia County, first for weekends and later to live full time. It was a former cider mill with an adjacent churchyard, right in the center Old Chatham. Rick continued to travel the world working on documentary films while Janice stayed upstate and became an interior designer, operating from a tiny, unheated house with great bones.

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Curtains Up On Summer: Mac-Haydn Theatre in Chatham enters 51st season

TimesUnion.com | May 24, 2019

On a sinuous country road lined with emerald fields and foliage, between the John Deere dealership and the county fairgrounds, sits a theater with a round stage 22 feet across, nestled amid 350 seats that each summer hold crowds exceeding 35,000. Now in its 51st season but the first without either of its founders, Mac-Haydn Theatre is a throwback that’s also finding its future. It is a true summer-stock company, in the old-fashioned sense of the term, meaning it is built on guest artists in leading roles and a core group of young actors who stay for the whole season to act in or otherwise work on most if not all of the seven Main Stage and three Children’s Theatre productions that run from Memorial Day through Labor Day weekends.

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Inside One of the Last VHS Rental Stores in America

Inside Edition | April 6, 2019

Nestled in the quiet town of Chatham, New York, is Video Visions, one of the last-remaining video stories in America. Steven Campbell opened Video Visions in 1984 with Jim Donovan. At the time, they had just 200 titles. Now, they have over 26,000 that customers can rent for a few bucks a day.

Watch the video.