Two of the actors working in the new film, Miracle at St. Anna, currently being produced in this area, were in Barga recently.
D.B Sweeney who will be playing the character “Colonel Driscoll” and Walton Goggins who will instead be “Nokes” in Spike Lee’s story about the Buffalo Soldiers. Walton was a regular at Aristo’s for most of the week with the script for the film open on the table as he learnt his lines. Both actors were also guests at the Teatro dei Differenti for the opening of the Autumn theatre season with La signorina Giulia by August Strindberg with Vanessa Gravina and Edoardo Siravo.
Miracle at St. Anna is a film to be released in 2009 set in World War II directed by Spike Lee and written by James McBride. The film is set in autumn 1944 in Tuscany, and in contemporary New York City and Rome. The film follows four African-American Buffalo soldiers of the 92nd Infantry Division who get trapped in a a small Tuscan village on the Gothic Line during the Italian Campaign of World War II. The film deals with the massacre of Sant’Anna di Stazzema perpetrated by the Nazis in retaliation to Italian partisan activity. There is also a reference to a sculpted head from Ponte Santa Trinita in Florence that acts as a plot device.The film is based on a novel by James McBride and is scripted by the author.
The exterior scenes will be filmed in the city of Barga (on the Serchio river), and in the villages of Colognora and Sant’Anna di Stazzema. The production will then move to Rome, New York City and Nassau, Bahamas.
Walton Sanders Goggins, Jr. (born November 10, 1971) is an American actor. He is a regular on the FX Networks series, The Shield, portraying “Detective Shane Vendrell”. Goggins was producer of the 2001 short film The Accountant, which won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. source Wikipedia
Voted by Time one of the 100 best TV shows of all time – The Shield. Although this police drama was inspired by a cop-corruption scandal of the 1990s, when it debuted in 2002 it had a distinctly post-9/11 theme: what moral compromises are we willing to accept in the name of safety? It centers on Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis), an extremely effective, extremely shady cop heading an LAPD unit that takes down murderers and pushers, usually trampling the Bill of Rights and pocketing dirty money for themselves in the process. The Shield depicts a dirty, red-in-tooth-and-claw L.A. where no one, from cop to politician, white, black or brown, is entirely selfless. No show does a better job of making you feel your TV screen needs a good Windexing when an episode is over.
- Detective Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins) was Vic Mackey’s best friend and partner before the strike team was formed. His racist, reckless attitude and questionable decisions often got him into trouble, after which Vic typically bailed him out. He has a wife, Mara, as well as a young son, Jackson. Shane requested a transfer from the strike team after he confessed to Vic that he killed fellow Strike Team member Curtis Lemansky. Vic threatened to kill Shane if he saw him again. He later canceled his request to transfer to his old spot in vice due to the fact that Vic was going to be forced into retirement.
D.B Sweeney guest starred on such television series as The Edge of Night and Spenser: For Hire before entering films, where he scored with the critics for his portrayal of an idealistic, gung-ho Vietnam enlistee in Francis Ford Coppola’s Gardens of Stone (1987). While he has accrued several assignments (including the starring role of a hockey player in The Cutting Edge (1992)), Sweeney is perhaps best remembered for his even-keel portrayal of the tragic Shoeless Joe Jackson in Eight Men Out (1988). (If he looked like a natural on the ballfield, it was because Sweeney had once played minor league baseball with the Kenosha Twins, hanging up his spikes after a knee injury.)Sweeney also starred in films such as Memphis Belle (1990), Blue Desert (1991), Fire in the Sky (1993), and Hardball (2001). In addition to his film roles, he continues to work on television. He played Dish Boggett in the miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989) and in 1996 starred in the short-lived Fox series Strange Luck in which he played an amnesiac freelance photographer with strange powers that resulted from being the sole survivor of an airplane disaster. He later co-starred in another short-lived series, the science fiction offering Harsh Realm. Sweeney still appears in theatrical productions he is also the voice-over artist for Fox Sports Net’s Beyond the Glory and guest-starred on Jericho playing “Goetz”, a mercenary employee of security company Ravenwood. source wikipedia
He was also awarded the best supporting actor and best director at the 2007 Long Beach Action of film Festival for his work on the film Two Tickets to Paradise (site here)