Above: A trailer for Knuckle Jack, an independent film shot in and around Roscoe by local filmmakers Toby Poser and John Adams.
This weekend, film buffs will get a rare chance to see Roscoe on the big screen, as Knuckle Jack -- a film shot in and around the little Sullivan County hamlet -- screens at the Hoboken International Film Festival in Middletown's Paramount Theatre.
Billed as a film about a Catskills "small town foul-mouthed drunk with an artistic gift for thievery" who finds himself responsible for his eight-year-old niece for the summer, Knuckle Jack was released earlier this year, and is making the rounds on the film-festival circuit.
Husband-and-wife filmmaking team Toby Poser and John Adams, who co-directed the film with Adams in the role of Jack, put the Catskills landscape in a key supporting role, the Sullivan County Democrat reports:
“There is a wealth of locations we were able to make use of in Sullivan County, since we know a lot of people there, and they were very generous with their homes, land and businesses,” Toby adds. “Plus, the Catskills, the rivers, the country roads are incredibly cinematic. Much of the time we could literally walk out of our own house and begin shooting – a real perk. The familiarity and love we have for the region made shooting ‘Knuckle Jack’ a very personal and rewarding experience.”
Poser and Adams are erstwhile Catskills regulars, who keep close ties to the region despite having moved to the sunnier, more Hollywood-friendly West Coast:
“My family is from Roscoe. My grandparents settled there after coming over from Ireland, and it’s been a place and always will be a place that we’ll call home,” John says. “Over the years, we built a house from the ground up, so now we have a spot that no matter where we travel we can always come back to.”
“John’s been coming or living here since he was little, and I fell in love with the area when I fell in love with John in 1996,” Toby adds. “We’d been living in the city but began building a house in Beaverkill around 1999, and in 2011, after a wild year on the road with the kids, we finally settled into the house; the kids went to Roscoe Central School for a year before we moved back to Topanga Canyon, CA.”
Knuckle Jack will be shown at 4pm on Sunday, June 2 at the Paramount Theatre on 17 South Street in Middletown.
