‘Empire Falls’ picks York estate for film

YORK – With Skowhegan serving as the fictional hard-luck mill town of Empire Falls in the upcoming HBO movie of the same name, it is only appropriate that an estate featured in the movie is set in well-to-do York.

The estate that was once the summer home of the descendants of tire magnate B.F. Goodrich will serve as the movie-set home of the wealthy Francine Whiting, the wife of the mill owner in the Richard Russo book, “Empire Falls.”

The house, built in 1905 and rebuilt after a fire in 1925, has 25 rooms, 12 bedrooms, a pool, tennis courts, many of its original furnishings and even working call buttons to alert servants to the needs of guests.

The estate is known locally as the River House and is one of several York County locations that will be used in the upcoming HBO adaptation of Russo’s novel.

“The film required the presence of a large, engaging, stately mansion in which lives one of the central characters in the script, played by Joanne Woodward,” said film location manager Lynn Kippax, who said the house is a perfect fit for the movie. “It had to look as if someone of influence, power and money lived there.”

The house was built in 1905 for the widow of B.F. Goodrich. It passed through two generations of daughters before it was given to Bowdoin College in 1974. It is now named the Breckinridge Public Affairs Center, after B.F. Goodrich’s daughter Isabella Goodrich Breckenridge, and serves as a conference center.

The movie – whose cast includes Helen Hunt, Joanne Woodward, Ed Harris and Paul Newman – is about struggling Empire Falls, a small mill town in fictional Dexter County, Maine, where residents hold out hope that a shuttered factory will one day reopen. Across the river from the mill sits the mill owner’s mansion, where the steely Francine Whiting controls much of what of what goes on in town.

In past few weeks, the River House has undergone a series of minor renovations to prepare it for the movie. New curtains adorn the Green Room, the main sitting room that was used to entertain guests. Window treatments have been applied to one of the bedrooms.