The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys filming locations: the film's Savannah is a different state, and the school is now a retirement home
Peter Care's adaptation of Chris Fuhrman's novel is set in Savannah and was shot nowhere near it. Here's the city that did the standing in, the buildings that carried the film, and what has become of the school since the cameras left.
Chris Fuhrman's novel is Savannah, Georgia, down to the parish. The film is a couple of states north and very careful never to say so.
Fuhrman was born in Savannah in 1960 and set his only book in the city's early 1970s, at Blessed Sacrament parish school. He died of cancer in 1991, aged 31, while working on the final revision; the University of Georgia Press published it in 1994. When Peter Care adapted it a decade later, the production did not follow the book home. Principal photography ran from May to July 2000 across North and South Carolina, with the bulk of it in the upper part of the Charleston peninsula.
Charleston, playing nowhere in particular
The decision to unmoor the film from Savannah was deliberate rather than budgetary alone. Care and his team went for what they described as a more universal look, kept the city unnamed on screen, and told the cast to drop heavy Southern accents. What you are watching is a generic American Catholic town assembled out of one specific South Carolina neighbourhood.
- Upper peninsular Charleston — the residential streets, the bike routes and most of the exteriors.
- 200 Coming Street, Charleston — the old Immaculate Conception Catholic School, standing in for St Agatha's.
- North Carolina — additional unit work during the same summer shoot.
Immaculate Conception is the location worth knowing about. The building that supplied every corridor, classroom and confrontation with Jodie Foster's Sister Assumpta is no longer a school at all: it has been converted into Radcliffe Manor, an affordable housing development for older residents. The altar boys' school is a retirement home.
Charleston does the work; Savannah gets the credit in the source material and nothing else.
What was shot and what was drawn
Roughly a fifth of the film's imaginative weight sits outside live action entirely. The comic-book fantasy sequences — Francis and Tim's superhero alter egos, and Sister Assumpta redrawn as the villain Nunzilla — were animated by Todd McFarlane, the Spawn creator, whose studio handled them in a style deliberately at odds with the naturalism of the Charleston material.
Emile Hirsch plays Francis Doyle, Kieran Culkin plays Tim Sullivan, Jena Malone plays Margie Flynn, and Vincent D'Onofrio plays Father Casey. Foster, who also produced through Egg Pictures, took the smaller role.
The numbers, for context
The film premiered at Sundance on 18 January 2002 and went out generally on 14 June that year. Against a $12 million budget it took around $2 million theatrically. THINKFilm, which picked up North American rights for $1 million, made its money back with a limited release grossing $1.8 million — one of the few parts of the ledger that worked.
Care won Best New Filmmaker from the Boston Society of Film Critics in 2002, and the film took the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature in 2003.
Critics were warmer than audiences: 76% on Rotten Tomatoes, 69 on Metacritic. Stephen Holden in the New York Times called it "bracingly truthful". Roger Ebert gave it two and a half stars out of four and thought the screenplay stopped short of its own payoff.
For the record: the novel's Savannah parish, Blessed Sacrament, is a real church on Victory Drive. It has never appeared in the film that made the book famous.