How Baltimore Came to Play a Role in a Belfast Movie

NEW YORK —  From the lofty Manhattan home of DreamWorks, 22 floors above Madison Avenue, one can peek down at the swarms of holiday shoppers bustling and hustling, traffic jamming up the crosswalks and decorations dotting the windows toward Fifth. You can see Central Park too, where tiny skaters twirl across the milk-white Wollman Rink, under leafless trees and pewter sky. Christmas seems right around the corner. In fact, if Bing Crosby walked in singing “White Christmas” . . .

You’d certainly be surprised.

Miracles can happen, though--even “three or four kinds of miracles,” according to Barry McEvoy. Two years ago, the actor-writer was living on 29th Street, doing off-Broadway theater and “just scraping by.”

“I only had about five videotapes to watch,” he says, just to punctuate his poverty. “ ‘Blazing Saddles,’ ‘Once Were Warriors,’ ‘Duck Soup,’ I think. Something else. And ‘Avalon,’ which was always one of my favorites. I must have watched it about 10 times.”

“Avalon” was, of course, directed by Barry Levinson. And “An Everlasting Piece,” the McEvoy-scripted movie about a pair of toupee salesmen in war-torn Belfast, is directed by . . . Barry Levinson.

Belfast? Along with John Waters, Levinson is the filmmaker most identified with the city of Baltimore. But that’s what was weird, McEvoy says. “The first time I went to Baltimore with my dad; there was this one street, near the stadium, that looked just like Belfast. And when Barry got to Belfast, he looked around and said, ‘This looks just like Baltimore.’ ”

Not entirely, of course. Baltimore may have its faults, but it’s hardly the battle-scarred Belfast, where McEvoy was born and which he left at age 15 with his family, settling in . . . Maryland.

This is getting weird.

And weirder. After appearing in Sidney Lumet’s “Gloria,” McEvoy, who was picking up acting jobs and working in restaurants, started giving readings of his script “all over the city--in pubs, back rooms of pubs. Casting the readings was fun ‘cause I had to find bald Northern Irish guys who could read”--as in read a script--”and there weren’t that many.”

In the audience one night was producer Lou DiGiaimo (“Donnie Brasco”), who had cast McEvoy in “Gloria.” One connection led to another, and DiGiaimo got his associate, producer Mark Johnson, to attend another reading. “The limo was waiting out front,” McEvoy says. “And Mark said to Lou, ‘Should we tell him now?’ I said, ‘Tell me what?’ He said, ‘Steven Spielberg read your script and really liked it, and DreamWorks wants to make your film.’ ”

Did McEvoy just swallow?

“DreamWorks was the last company on Earth I thought would make this film,” he says, still looking stunned. “I was like, ‘Right, OK.’ I’d been rejected by a lot of companies. I called my mom and dad and said, ‘Wait’ll you hear this.’ ”

Levinson didn’t get aboard right away. But DiGiaimo and Johnson had worked on other Levinson movies (including “Rain Man,” “Diner” and “Tin Men”), so perhaps it was inevitable. If so, it’s the only inevitable thing in the story of McEvoy’s movie, which stars him, Brian F. O’Byrne and Billy Connolly, and opens today. It offers a balanced and bittersweet take on the situation in Northern Ireland, where recent developments had McEvoy concerned.

“It seemed kind of fragile this past week,” he says, mentioning several incidents of violence that had broken the ever-delicate peace. “And while it’s all well and good for me, sitting here in New York, and I don’t want to undermine DreamWorks and how they market it, but there’s a serious side to the movie I wouldn’t want people to take lightly.”

No one who worked on the movie took it lightly. “One guy, I’m not saying who he was, but he was involved with the Protestant paramilitary--they all read the script before we started shooting--and let’s say this one guy’s name is Mr. White, and I have a character called Mr. Black, and he thinks I’m making fun of him. Plus, they didn’t like the script either. So the night before we started shooting, the Northern Ireland film commission, or whatever it is, calls Barry and says, ‘We cannot guarantee your safety. Shoot at your own risk.’ I said, ‘We must be doing something right.’ ”

Nothing much happened, he says, but “that’s why I love America. That’s why I live here. I can say whatever I want to here--within reason. But I can’t imagine ever moving back to Northern Ireland, ‘cause living in New York for as long as I have, I have too big a mouth.”