‘Last Call’ How Stone Harbor Played a Part in a Blue-Collar Movie
Greg Lingo (right) and actor Jamie Kennedy. (Hudson Reporter photo)
A few years back, Stone Harbor summer resident Greg Lingo sat down with a couple of friends from the old neighborhood and started swapping stories about growing up in Upper Darby. Those tales would inspire the movie “Last Call,” which Lingo describes as “a love letter back to a blue-collar neighborhood and how special it is.”
“Last Call” wasn’t filmed in Stone Harbor, but it was created there by Lingo, who worked on the script on the Stone Harbor beach while on vacation with his family.
“We love the shore,” says Lingo, a successful builder and developer who co-wrote the screenplay and served as executive producer. “In a lot of ways, the shore was the inspiration for [the film] because it’s where I wrote it. Every summer I would keep plugging away on it, refining it.”
When casting began in 2019, Lingo was getting calls from the producers on the West Coast as he was driving down the shore on weekends in June:
“Hey, we’ve got good news: Taryn Manning, who is in ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ has agreed to be in the film.”
“We have even better news: Bruce Dern has agreed to be in the movie.”
Then Jeremy Piven came on board as Mick, the central character, and Upper Darby native Jamie Kennedy as Mick’s childhood friend, Whitey. Lingo actually worked with Kennedy at the Upper Darby School District during the summers when they were kids. “He was just hilarious,” recalls Lingo.
“I’ve been excited to hear how audiences have appreciated it,” Lingo says. “It’s a movie that’s not going to be critically acclaimed, but it should be enjoyable. It should be an hour and 40 minutes and you feel like, ‘All right, that was fun.’ ”
Lingo shares one of his favorite reactions from a friend: “There’s a guy we grew up with and he was saying to me, ‘You know, it’s really amazing to think that Jamie Kennedy, who we all grew up with, went to Los Angeles and then he ends up starring in a movie … about me.’ What I loved about it is that someone could see the movie and say, ‘It’s about me.’ It’s about everyone that we grew up with. Each story in the film did come from a real-life event for the most part, but it’s just a story.
“We were able to assemble a great cast around what is a goofy story. I would say it’s a crude comedy, but I think it has to be crude because we’re depicting a neighborhood that the protagonist wanted desperately to get out of for his entire life,” says Lingo. “It wasn’t until he got out and came back that he reflected on all the positives – the positives being friends and family, people who spoke the truth to you, and just good, honest, hardworking people who would always be there for you, and that was something he was lacking from his time outside of the neighborhood. You can’t replace the friendships that you make as a kid.”
Before Mick experiences this revelation, he intends to leave everyone behind and never return to the town where he grew up, however, that element of the movie isn’t based on Lingo’s life story.
“I really do always try to remember where I came from,” he says.
And to give back: He and his wife Valerie have set up scholarships at Upper Darby High School. They established an SAT prep program and a mentoring program at the school as well.
Lingo describes the focus of the mentoring program as “Preparedness for the next stage of life. Not everybody has to go to college; not everybody should go to college, but you have to have a game plan. So, we try to work on a game plan, whether that game plan is community college, technical school, the armed services, straight into the job force. We try to be there for them when they have questions. So, we have internships for kids and try to help them develop themselves.”
Lingo is also on the board of St. Cyril of Alexandria Catholic School, an Independence Mission School in Delaware County’s East Lansdowne, and coached softball for Radnor Wayne Little League.
The fate of Mick’s family’s bar is central to “Last Call” and Lingo chose to close the movie with a collection of photos spotlighting actual neighborhood bars.
“Growing up, we certainly didn’t have shore houses,” Lingo says. “We dreamed about that week at the shore that we could spend, but the bar became the refuge for our parents and it was important. We were in and out of them as kids and our friends’ parents owned them. A lot of those mom-and-pop businesses are really struggling, so at the end I wanted a little bit of a testament to some of the local bars that impacted me or my friends.”
In addition to watering holes in Upper Darby and Drexel Hill, they include Johnny’s Big Red Grille in Ithaca, N.Y., a favorite of Lingo’s when he attended Cornell University; and Christopher’s and Teresa’s Next Door in Lingo’s current hometown of Wayne. As for bars at the Jersey Shore, Lingo recalls meeting his wife at the Springfield Inn in Sea Isle. That’s pretty important!
Is there another movie in Lingo’s future? Could be.
“I’ve been messing around with a new script, little different genre, and I’m probably half a year out from being able to get the script closer to being done,” he says. “This wasn’t going to be a one-and-done thing for me; I really enjoy it. You might see me on the beach writing the next one.”