Boston Marathon bombing movies filmed during Monday race
BOSTON (AP) - With the real-life Boston Marathon underway Monday, Hollywood film crews took to the marathon finish line and Fenway Park to shoot scenes for competing movies about the deadly 2013 marathon attacks.
Actor and Boston native Mark Wahlberg donned a Boston police uniform while filming for "Patriot's Day," a re-telling of the April 15, 2013, attacks that's expected to open as early as this December.
The 44-year-old Wahlberg was filmed standing along with other officers on the marathon course as part of the security detail during the race.
He plays a fictional police officer named Tommy Saunders, who is a composite of law enforcement officials who responded to the multi-day manhunt after the bombing and unprecedented shut down of the Boston area. The movie is based on a firsthand account from former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis.
Jake Gyllenhaal, meanwhile, was at Fenway Park on Monday morning shooting scenes for "Stronger," a film slated for release sometime in 2017 and based on bombing survivor Jeff Bauman's memoir of the same name.
Bauman was a spectator who lost both his legs in the attack that killed three people and injured hundreds more. From his hospital bed, the Chelmsford, Massachusetts, native helped police identify brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev as the attackers.
The 35-year-old actor and Bauman also threw out the first pitch as the Boston Red Sox took on the Toronto Blue Jays.
The film crews have been shooting scenes throughout Massachusetts in recent months. Gyllenhaal and Bauman were at a Boston Bruins game shooting scenes at TD Garden earlier this month.
Wahlberg's production has been rebuffed at a few key locations, though, as some victims' families and survivors have voiced concerns the movies are being made too soon after the attacks.
The University of Massachusetts turned down a request for crews to shoot scenes at its Dartmouth campus. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was sentenced to death last year for the attack, had been a student at the time and returned to his college dorm afterward.
And the Town Council of Watertown also denied the filmmakers' request to recreate the scene where Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a fiery shootout with police, although residents were overall supportive of the idea.