Bedford Town Board OKs Filming of Crime Documentary

Marc Smerling, who three years ago gave moviegoers a fictional look at a celebrated, Westchester-related true-crime case, is taking up that tale anew in a fact-based telling.

This time, however, as he trains a documentarian’s lens on the story’s central figure, millionaire real estate heir Robert Durst has already become a key source of information, Smerling says.

Although the 2010 feature film, All Good Things, implicates a despicable, Durst-like character in not only his wife’s disappearance but also grisly murders in Texas and California, the real-life Bobby Durst was said to like Hollywood's take.

“After the movie came out, he contacted me,” Smerling told the Bedford town board last week as he sought permission to film locally. 

The writer/producer said he interviewed the onetime fugitive over a four or five-day period. Ever since, he said, “I’ve been sort of financing a documentary about the experience of meeting this guy and re-creating certain things in his life. It’s been sort of a three-year passion.”

While popular imagination and not a few law-enforcement agencies have tried to link Durst to a series of heinous crimes, so far he’s done only a few years behind bars on related but comparatively minor charges.

Hit the Ground Running Films LLC, Smerling’s Manhattan-based production company, will hit the ground in Bedford Hills next month for a Saturday night’s shooting at the hamlet’s venerable Metro-North station.

In exchange for a $5,000 permitting fee, Smerling’s retinue—about 30 people, lights, cameras and 15 vehicles, including a cherry-picker—will set up shop April 13 in the station parking lot around 5 in the afternoon.

By 7, the filmmaker expects to be shooting in the parking lot. Later, Smerling will move to the platform, for shots of a woman waiting for a train. To obtain a 30-year-old train required for the '80s scene, Metro-North has to bring in New Haven Line equipment for a brief star turn on the Harlem Line. With the vintage gear, Smerling will realize what a commuter can only dream: a passenger train that “arrives” whenever he says so.

The century-old station will stand-in for 1982’s Katonah station. Durst insists his wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst, boarded a city-bound train there before vanishing.

Police investigators and others familiar with the Dursts’ rocky relationship at that time have suggested a more-sinister scenario, such as the one depicted in All Good Things. Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst star as the Manhattan couple with a South Salem country place.

Before 6 a.m. that Sunday, Roscher said, Hit the Ground will be on its way out of town.