For those wondering where Will Hunting traded insults with Harvard elitists, Sam Malone knew everybody’s name or the MacManus brothers massacred mafia members, Boston’s Movie Tours may show a whole new side of Beantown.
A growing trend in cities such as Los Angeles, New York City and Philadelphia, movie tour guides take customers on bus and foot tours highlighting locations of the most popular movie scenes shot in the area for $30 a ticket.
Beginning in Faneuil Hall at The Rack — a pool hall, restaurant and popular celebrity hangout — Boston Movie Tours takes customers through the North End, Charleston, the South End, East Boston, Back Bay and the Commons. The tour buses include five small screens above the seats playing a custom DVD to show passengers the scenes being addressed as they pass by.
Jeff and Rachel Coveney, the founders and operators of Boston Movie Tours, said they keep the passengers entertained during the three-hour tour. Jeff Coveney uses the loudspeaker to ask film trivia, personal-experience questions, perform a stand-up routine and offer a history lesson.
Rachel Coveney hands out various treats such as apples in honor of one of the famous Good Will Hunting line, “You like dem apples?” She also awards “movie bucks” to keep tally of a tour-long trivia game.
“[We] came up with the idea for a Boston movie tour after taking one in Hawaii while on our honeymoon five years ago,” Rachel Coveney said.
They started the walking version of the tour, a 90-minute walk through Beacon Hill, last July and the bus tour this summer.
The bus periodically pulls over to allow passengers to explore the movie locations first-hand, including the Cheers pub and the bench where Robin Williams and Matt Damon have a heart-to-heart in Good Will Hunting.
Recently they added several locations from the newly released The Departed. Jack Nicholson’s penthouse and the roof where Martin Sheen met Leonardo DiCaprio are both stops on the tour.
Jeff Coveney said movies filmed in Boston generally fall into three categories: Crime and mafia, including The Departed and Mystic River; legal films, including A Civil Action and The Verdict; and comedy including Legally Blonde and What’s the Worst that Could Happen?.
According to Jeff Coveney, the last major action movie that took place in Boston was Blown Away, a 1994 Tommy Lee Jones film that accidentally blew out 8,000 windows in East Boston — the reason there have not been any action movies filmed in Boston since.
