It’s not a remake of “Gone With the Wind” being filmed in downtown Maysville, and frankly, folks in Maysville do give a damn.
The reason: for nearly two months, the Ohio River town of 8,639, a little more than 62 miles southeast of Cincinnati, has been the set for “All That Glitters at Christmas,” a holiday film scheduled for release later this year.
Alan Forbes, a Cincinnati location scout, said Maysville was chosen over Paris, Elizabethtown and Shelbyville.
“Maysville is like a little Hollywood back lot,” Forbes said last week. “It’s almost like somebody built it here.”
Maysville Main Street director Caroline Reece said the filming has accomplished something Maysville events often don’t.
“The huge surprise is how many people – it surprised even me – have come downtown just to get a look,” she says. “There are people stopping and having their pictures taken with all the Christmas ornaments. We have parades, we have concerts, we have festivals, but a lot of times it’s hard to get people from Maysville in downtown Maysville. But this has done it.”
Good and bad boyfriend
Reece wasn’t expecting the late-April phone call from Forbes, who said a movie crew was looking for a location to shoot a Christmas film.
“They saw enough and really liked it, took a gazillion pictures and sent it to the producers and the director,” Reece said.
“Glitters” is not the first movie to shoot in Maysville. The 2022 romantic horror film “Bones and All” featured several scenes.
“It just was not the best experience,” Reece said.
Reece’s offered Forbes some no-nonsense words.
“So I told him right off the bat … ‘Alan, you would be a new boyfriend, and we had a bad boyfriend’,” she said. “And so you’ve got to prove your worth.”
It turns out Maysville was a perfect fit for “Glitters”: There were empty buildings and a cobblestone street. Within a week, producers and directors from California, Washington State, Tennessee and Georgia were in town.
Reece said filming could also be a nearly $300,000 blessing to the local economy; she said the crew was everywhere, patronizing local businesses.
“They’re in the restaurants, they’re in the bars, they’re in the churches,” she said. “They go to the Christian Church every Sunday; they’re going to Mass at St. Patrick (a Maysville Catholic church).”
Visitors came to watch the filming on Market Street, too. Robby Trimble, his wife Donna, daughter Kacey Goins and granddaughter Raegan Davis were in town from Lexington; they lived in Maysville from 1990 to 2008.
“We knew this street,” Donna Trimble said, “and we wanted to see how they changed it to Christmas.”
From Maysville to Forest Glen
“Glitters” is a faith-based rom-com set in small-town Forest Glen. Claire Yearwood (Greer Grammer) is a cynical craft shop owner who’d sworn off religion after being stood up at the altar, and James Yearwood (Tom Cavanagh), a stressed-out Wall Street widower, comes to town to pastor a church struggling to prepare for Christmas.
Maysville was not Forbes’ first visit to Kentucky. He had just finished films in Somerset and Midway when DeWitt, with whom he’d worked with before, told him director Paul Joiner wanted to make a Christmas movie.
“We like Maysville,” Forbes said producer JD DeWitt told him. “( Joiner) had been Google Earth searching, you know, all of Kentucky, and he thinks Maysville looks pretty good.”
A one-block cobblestone portion of Market Street is the main set, and the First Christian Church on East Third became Shepherd’s Grove Church. And the snow is a concoction of recycled paper.
“At the heart of it, it’s a story about coming home, having second chances, finding faith in family again at Christmas time,” Marcus Cooley, the production designer, said.
The logistical challenges of shooting a holiday movie in June are obvious: finding snow, bundling up in 80-degree heat, filming while Maysville businesses remain open. Cooley says the first task is determining what shops would look like in the summer; he calls it a “contradiction.”
“So it becomes, you know, how do we accomplish this feeling, and you’re now building that feeling pretty much from the studs up,” Cooley said. “So, you know, kind of in a strange way, making a Christmas movie in the summer forces you to be a lot more deliberate about the magic that you’re creating. You can’t really shortcut anywhere.
“We’re out here in Kentucky in the heat, hanging all this garland, the dressing, and we have over 24 storefronts that we’re having to design for the town’s main street. Plus, we’re building out a big craft fair, a big Christmas celebration.”
And the snow? Forbes said it’s a benign paper protein.
What was more, Reece was hired as an extra.
“I get to be, actually, a commissioner,” she said. “So it’s already above my pay grade.”
Filming started in May; Cooley said shooting will be done by July 3. Air dates and times are yet to be determined (bit.ly/4eNAOcw).
