Poughkeepsie Regatta central to latest Clooney movie

Will you go see "The Boys in the Boat" movie, scheduled for a Christmas Day release? If you do, keep your eye out for a key sequence late in the movie which revolves around the Poughkeepsie Regatta, which determined which rowing team would represent the U.S. in the Olympics.

"The Boys in the Boat" is based on the 2013 Daniel James Brown book of the same name. The movie stars British actor Callum Turner as Joe Rantz, a homeless University of Washington student who tries out for the school’s rowing squad in 1936. His aim at first is just to make it so he can pay for school and have somewhere to live, but he turns out to be pretty good. So does his junior varsity team: When they upend the UW varsity squad, the young Huskies coached by Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) are sent off to compete against other colleges before ending up at the Berlin Olympics and taking on the mighty Germans.

George Clooney is the director. As he sums it up, “You gotta beat the seniors, and then you gotta beat the legacy schools, and then you gotta beat the rich kids, and then you gotta beat Hitler. The final bad guy's Hitler.”

Clooney had never seen “a really exciting version of a rowing film,” he says. “That was a challenge, but at least there was a space for us there.”

Spoiler alert: No, not whether the University of Washington rowing squad made the Olympics. But according to NPR and other media sources, the movie was not filmed in Poughkeepsie or the Hudson, or even in Washington State, but in England.

Brown, who lives in Redmond, Washington, told the Cascadia Daily News that he was dismayed by the choice of filming location.

"We were a little disappointed they didn't shoot it here. They shot the whole film in the U.K. for tax reasons," the book's author said.

Marist College, which in 2009 hosted a special Quadricentennial Poughkeepsie Regatta, did advise producers of the film in areas including costume design, the style of the boats ("shells") and colors on the oars, and even train tickets from that time.

"We were delighted to hear from the producers and set designers of the film," said John Ansley, Marist College director of archives and special collections, in an interview with the school. "It’s a story we know very well, and we believe we have more materials than anyone that could assist them in painting an accurate picture of what everything looked like during the regatta in 1936."

About the Poughkeepsie Regatta

For more than 50 years, the Poughkeepsie Regatta was one of the biggest sporting events in the United States. Formally known as the Intercollegiate Rowing Association National Championship Regatta, it was held in New York from 1895 to 1949. The regatta relocated to Marietta, Ohio in 1950 and rotated venues across the country. In modern times, the IRA National Championship has been held in Camden, N.J.

A special Quadricentennial Poughkeepsie Regatta was held in 2009 at Lakeview Park on the Marist College campus, just off the Hudson River's east shore. The regatta was again held in 2010, canceled in 2011, and held in 2012, billed as an "annual" event.

And in 2021 the Hudson River Rowing Association held a new Poughkeepsie Regatta, named after the historic course.

"The Poughkeepsie Regatta was a great thing, went on for along time, and everybody enjoyed going there," said Frank Collyer of Ithaca in 2009, and who was the stroke for the Cornell junior varsity in 1947 and the varsity in 1948.

The Poughkeepsie Regatta had a sense of magic and magnitude. There was a spectator train with grandstands on the west side of the river where one could follow the races. There were parades and social events. Boats, yachts and Navy destroyers would show up to watch the event. Newspapers and radio stations covered the event extensively. In many published photos of the races, there are people as far as one can see.

In the movie, Clooney does make the sport seem electric, with heroic camera angles during races, the coxswain percussively pounding the side of the boat while oars hit the water together in propulsive, rhythmic harmony. The filmmaker looked to the Netflix car-racing show “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” for inspiration. “We had to build the constant drilling of speed because the truth is, they're flying. We couldn't keep up in our speedboat with cameras on it when they were really going.”

He also had to essentially turn his actors into Olympic rowers in five months. They spent four hours a day on the water and another hour a day in the gym. “We were a professional sports team," Turner says. "We did everything together and we created this bond that will live with us forever.”

Clooney says he saved filming the final Olympic race to the end “so they were as trained as they could be,” and Turner and Co. got up to the same speed – 46 strokes per minute – as the real boys in the boat. “Now, (the actors) did it for 30 seconds, and the other guys did it for five and a half minutes, but the truth is that's a really hard mark to hit.”

Here in the Hudson Valley

While "The Boys in the Boat" wasn't filmed in the Hudson Valley, Visit Westchester maintains a list of productions filmed in that county, as does Rockland County. This year, filming was done for "Bernard and the Genie," starring Melissa McCarthy, filmed in Nyack this past March.

The Hudson Valley Film Commission notes these horror movies, which debuted this year, were produced locally:

"Blackout" - Directed by Larry Fessenden, a Fine Arts painter is convinced that he is a werewolf wreaking havoc on a small American town under the full moon. Stars include Marshall Bell, Michael Buscemi, Kevin Corrigan, Rigo Garay, Jeremy Holm, James Le Gros, and Steve Heller. Fesserden also acted in this movie; and

"Crumb Catcher" - Directed by Chris Skotchdopole, a newlywed couple is held captive in a remote lake house by a maniacally optimistic inventor and his sour wife who are desperate to finance his dream project with a half-baked blackmail plot. Stars include Rigo Garay, Ella Rae Peck, John Speredakos, and Lorraine Farris.

Phil Strum and Brian Tuitt contributed to this story.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Boys in the Boat movie centers around Poughkeepsie Regatta