'We struck gold': Comics Lenny Clarke, Jimmy Tingle play brothers for short film in Chatham

CHATHAM — Comedian/actor Lenny Clarke stood on Chatham Lighthouse Beach early Tuesday morning, wearing thick waders in a steady drizzle and wind, and asked exactly what he should do next.

“Just stop and clam,” Matt Ott, director of the short film “Clam Shack Blues,” said with a smile. Clarke trudged off across the sandy expanse to join comedian Jimmy Tingle, already holding a rake calf-deep in the chilly ocean and acting like the longtime fisherman he was playing.

The two veteran stand-up comics and on-camera personalities have known each other for 50 years, since they were early-70s teens together at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. In this independent short film by first-time writer/producer Mike Yocum, Clarke and Tingle play brothers and found it was an easy rhythm.

Even though neither had ever been clamming.

“When we're on the set, we are like brothers because we're cut from the same cloth,” said Tingle, who plays the more serious brother to Clarke’s “hyper and wild” one. “We grew up in the same neighborhood, we know a lot of the same people. … Lenny started (comedy) ahead of me, but I got into it in the early days about a year or two after him, so we've come up through the industry together.”

A story inspired by Chatham

The nationally known Boston-area comedians were in town this week for just a few days of shooting for what will likely be a 15-minute film that Yocum hopes will soon play at festivals and generate enough interest to make a feature film in the same world in the same locations. The crew also filmed in a beach parking lot, on local roads and at the Chatham Squire restaurant and bar.

That location included a scene that was due to be shot later Tuesday between Tingle and best-selling author Bernard Cornwell, a Chatham resident often seen as an actor in Monomoy Theatre productions who in the film is playing a wealthy local.

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Clam Shack Blues,” a dark comedy, tells the story of brothers Ted and Jimmy, longtime New England commercial fishermen, who have seen their town go upscale. Dreamer Jimmy wants to open a clam shack, and while raking the sand flats one day, he tells Ted that he has an idea to get the money to do it.

“I'm a guy who is chasing my dream and it's a ridiculous dream, but it's my dream,” Clarke said. Tingle’s character “is more solid” and says they’re too old to do more than the fishing that has been their livelihood, he said. “We're close brothers because we’re with each other every day working, but we don't see eye to eye.”

Yocum said he based the idea of the men and what happens next on his longtime knowledge of Chatham, where his parents have lived year-round for three decades. The major themes, he said, are "the lives of working class and wealthy residents of a small coastal New England town. And, what do we do when we reach the back half of life and are faced with the realization that we simply cannot accomplish all we wanted to."

The comedians got involved before the pandemic began, after Yocum heard Tingle on the “WTF With Marc Maron” podcast and emailed Tingle out of the blue to say he’d be perfect for the part.

Tingle read the script and called Clarke about co-starring in their second movie together after playing poker buddies in 2014’s “Clear History” with Larry David. Clarke said “yes” before he even heard what the story was about, he said: “It was just the chance to work with Jimmy.”

Clarke, who has Nantucket ties, has a long list of TV and movie roles, including “Fever Pitch,” “Here Comes the Boom,” “Rescue Me” with comedian/friend Denis Leary, his own “Lenny” sit-com in 1990 and his “Dirty Oober” short film that last month played at the Boston International Film Festival. He started work on “Clam Shack Blues” this week just after wrapping filming Friday in Provincetown on writer/gallery owner Arthur Egeli’s “Art Thief.” In that movie about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum robbery, Clarke said he played a wealthy art collector who was “a bad man … with undertones of an Irish mob guy.”

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Tingle, who has a home in Wellfleet, was seen in “Boondock Saints” and “Next Stop, Wonderland” but is better known for his one-man political shows that have often played at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater and elsewhere (“my one-man-show empire,” he joked); his real run for lieutenant governor (which became the basis for a show); and his commentary on life and politics for CBS’ “Sixty Minutes II” in the late 1990s.

'It's been amazing'

Both comedians had high praise for the “Clam Shack Blues” crew, and Tingle said the filming this week “was just a really fun experience … just to do something different.”

The film shoot realized a dream for Yocum, who works in tech sales but writes at night as a creative outlet. He raised more than $25,000 with donors’ help to realize “Clam Shack Blues,” and hopes to realize a feature-film version. Looking out at the ocean, Yocum acknowledged, “You probably have a better chance of getting bitten by a shark than selling a film … but if it doesn’t happen, we got a chance to do something like this and it’s been amazing.”

Ott signed on without having been to Cape Cod before. But he has worked extensively with comedians on the New York City scene and said “they all know (Clarke and Tingle), who are legends to them and now all my friends are jealous,” he said with a laugh.

“They’re just so much fun and look like brothers – we struck gold. … Mike wrote a great script, but the second they’re on screen talking to each other, it’s 100% better” – an opinion Yocum readily agreed with.

Chatham as movie backdrop

The filming conditions were challenging in Tuesday's rain as cold and wet crew members tried to keep equipment as dry as possible and get the actors, both good sports, ready for the scenes — including having to come out of the water to change shirts and go back in. But with only a few days of filming, Ott and company had to take what weather Cape Cod had to offer.

Even in the rain, he and director of photography Marshall Chen had only good things to say about the natural beauty they were able to film, discussing the angles to shoot the beach to use different views, plus Chatham Light at the top.

“You just turn around and there’s something amazing,” Ott said of Chatham. “The locations add so much value to the production,” Chen said.

They also had fallen in love with the Squire, which Yocum said he’d incorporated because of sentimental reasons but also for its unique and iconic look. “It was so cool,” Ott said of the popular restaurant. “You couldn’t make up that location, even on a backlot.”

People in Chatham have been helpful and supportive, Yocum said, and seem to have gotten used to filmmakers being attracted to the town, including for “The Finest Hours” that was filmed in 2015 at the same spot about a real-life Chatham rescue.

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Tingle said he thinks the growing Massachusetts movie-making industry, as the state's film tax credits have become permanent, is good for everyone. “I think there’ll be a lot more movies, so it’s really good for the local economy and (for me) just personally, to stretch as an entertainer and as a performer and to just do other roles."

With "Clam Shack Blues," he and Clarke are "helping local filmmakers and hopefully helping the local film industry, and helping ourselves because it’s just a fun thing to do.”

Contact Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll at kdriscoll@capecodonline.com. Follow on Twitter: @KathiSDCCT.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Comedians Lenny Clarke, Jimmy Tingle star in movie filming in Chatham