MANTECA — I don't get much snail mail here at the office these days. Email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pretty much took care of that years ago.
But an envelope will appear every once in a while — Forever stamped, postmarked and all — and its contents are usually pretty interesting or at least entertaining.
Such was the case Tuesday, courtesy of Barbara Parrill of Modesto. She forwarded a newspaper clipping she'd received from her daughter who lives in Colorado. The clipping involved most of the front page of the June edition of the monthly "Left Hand Valley Courier" in Niwot, a small town due north of Denver.
Why should anyone here care about what happens there, you wonder? A bit of intrigue, indeed.
A photo of men covering the sign atop the Niwot Tribune building with one that read "Manteca Furniture" accompanied a story about a movie, titled "Dear Eleanor," part of which was filmed in Niwot in mid-May.
In fact, the story explained, a crew transformed much of Niwot into Manteca — yes, the same Manteca just up Highway 99 from Modesto — for the film directed by Kevin Connolly and starring Jessica Alba and Luke Wilson. It's scheduled for release in 2014.
Understandably, the newspaper piece focused almost completely on Niwot's undercover role in the film. It didn't explain why Manteca figures so prominently in the story line.
Hence, a bit of sleuthing:
A visit to the International Movie Data Base website offered a clue. "Dear Eleanor" was co-written by Amy Garcia and Cecilia Contreras. Googling their names led to a list of winners of the 2007 Nicholl Fellowships, presented annually to the nation's best up-and-coming young script writers by the Academy Awards folks. Winning for their screenplay, "Amelia Earhart and the Bologna Rainbow Highway," were "Amy Garcia, Manteca, California and Cecilia Contreras, Pleasanton, California."
The first female writing tandem to earn a Nicholl, they also won a Page Award for screenwriting. But what do those Hollywood folks know about movies? That same year, Garcia and Contreras entered "Dear Eleanor" in the Delta Film Festival in Manteca and came up empty.
"We laugh about that," Contreras said.
Garcia's family moved from Colorado to Manteca in the 1990s. Contreras had moved there about the same time when her college professor father joined the staff at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton. The women met through a mutual acquaintance who knew both loved movies and drama.
They quickly became best friends and formed a screenwriting partnership. "Dear Eleanor" was their first of 10 scripts together thus far, and their first to become a film.
"We lived with those characters longer and know them better than anything else," said Contreras, who, along with Garcia, went to Colorado for the filming. "It's like God breathing life into something."
"Dear Eleanor" is the story of two young women who, in October 1962, leave their hometown of Manteca and travel across the country to meet Eleanor Roosevelt.
"We wanted it to be set in Manteca," Garcia said. "They always say, 'Write what you know.' It's a great place to tell this story. It's a place that we know, that is interesting."
The film has a road trip plot, like "Thelma & Louise" sans the violence (and a young Brad Pitt — sorry, ladies).
"Nobody's committing suicide (in their movie)," Garcia said.
The pungent odor of the Spreckels sugar beet plant, along with water slides at Oakwood Lake, once defined the city. Both are long gone. Unfortunately, the city missed out on an opportunity to showcase its old downtown.
"That could have been fantastic," Garcia said. "But it's so expensive to film in California. They don't give the tax incentives."
So the producers, including former Sonora resident Caleb Applegate, opted to shoot out of state. They found several small towns in Colorado to their liking, including Niwot.
"It looked exactly like a back (movie) lot," Garcia said. "We only needed the downtown."
"The Main Street they used probably does look a lot like Manteca looked in 1962," Contreras said. "It's so small. Manteca probably had a lot of corners that looked like that."
Just about every sign that bears the name Niwot got a temporary Manteca makeover, as captured in photos by former Californian and now Coloradoan Stacy Moore. In fact, her studio is the former Niwot Tribune building featured in the newspaper article.
"We had to tell people it's not (pronounced) Man-tekka," Contreras said. "It's Mantee-ca."
No doubt, anyone who knows Manteca at all and sees the film will know it's not the real Manteca. Does it really matter? George Lucas wrote "American Graffiti" about cruising in Modesto, but filmed it in Petaluma.
"Hopefully, people will like the film and it will create some sort of buzz for Manteca," Contreras said.
It's already created one in the city's alter ego, Niwot.
All of which brings us back to the surprises snail mail still brings on occasion.
The envelope, please … .
Jeff Jardine's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays in Local News. He can be reached at jjardine@modbee.com, @jeffjardine57 on Twitter or at (209) 578-2383.
To see other photos of the Niwot-to-Manteca transformation, visit www.proimagesoftware.com/stacymoorephotography and enter movie in the event code field.