 The Whales of August tells the story of two sisters who return every year to an old cottage off the coast of Maine to watch the whales. The film takes place during the course of one day when the sisters reflect on their own lives and their future. The movie was shot on Cliff Island and this year there are several events to mark the 25th anniversary of the film's premiere. Brian Knoblock talked with Roger Barely, who worked on the film. Roger, 2012 is the 25th anniversary of the debut of The Whales of August in New York City. It was shot on Cliff Island, a place that's very close to your heart. Talk about that experience on the film when it was made there. You worked on the film itself. I did, Brian. I was innocently sitting in my office in the middle of July, a tiny little office when a whole bunch of people had never met before, and I rushed in on a sultry gray July afternoon and said, we want to make a major motion picture and we need a place for the production, to handle the production support infrastructure. And so I happened to head an organization that owns a ball field, and it was right next to the place where the movie would be filmed. I knew nothing about this. I asked them to describe the movie in brief, and I immediately got very excited. The Whales of August had five stars, and Betty Davis, who has a well-known Portland history, Lillian Gish, Vincent Price, and Southern and Harry Carey Jr., and they would be living on Cliff Island for between three and four months, and immediately I became excited. And so the wheels started to turn. We went through a number of meetings of our nonprofit, which owns this ball field, and so were we worried about people from New York City or Hollywood coming in and bringing high-powered vehicles and drugs and alcohol and all these things that our island likes to think don't exist. So within the next couple of weeks we had a bunch of emergency meetings and it involved a number of other nonprofits on the island because they wanted to show the dailies, the daily rushes of the shots in our community hall. They wanted to be able to do everything in a way that would allow them to get this filming completed by mid-November. And there were a lot of events now coming up, the week of August 10th, a lot of events coming up on Cliff Island and something important as well. The producer, Mike Kaplan, who lives in Idaho, came out to Cliff Island last year and said, hey, it's 25 years since we did this movie. Let's have some fun around this. And he had some other issues on his agenda that he would like to profit by. But the core of this is to have showings of the movie and visitations of the house, tours of the house, and to hear people who were on site in 1986 talk about what the experience was like. And so that's what's happening. So there's one event at the Portland Museum of Art on Friday night. There'll be a showing of the movie and we hope that there will be a reception at the same time. And there may be some, all four of the five stars are deceased. One is in California and has declined the invitation to come join us. But two of the bit players in the movie who subsequently became pretty well known will be here. And then on Cliff Island, the events also start on Friday evening and we'll go through Sunday afternoon. So it's going to be a wonderful re-gathering of our community and the people who were a part of it then and who want to learn about it now. We have a picture here of the whole production cast here of the movie. What was it like having all those outsiders invade that quiet little island for the summer? Invade is the right word, Brian, but we felt we were willing to be invaded but it was still going to be an invasion. There are 50 people in this picture including the stars and all the people who worked on it. But some wonderful things happen. The island kind of quietes down a whole lot after Labor Day. Well, the filming went on to mid-November so it was like summer extending and almost a Thanksgiving and there's a lot of activity, a lot of liveliness. It was just a delight to be able to have this going on to have a focus and to not be sad that summer was over at Labor Day. We used to have a junk car problem on Cliff Island and to some extent we still have a little bit of one, but the movie folks brought about 20 golf carts to the island and we now, most of us who need vehicles, motorized vehicles, use golf carts. So a lot of good stuff happened, a lot of fun, a lot of improvements, a lot of money was left on Cliff Island. So people want more information about the upcoming events and the movie showing, where can they go? They can go to the Portland Museum of Art website or to the Cliff Island website and information on both the mainland and the island issues will be there, available. Great, thanks very much. You're welcome Brian, thank you.