Columbia Pictures has scheduled Pink Panther 2, starring Steve Martin, for release in February, 2009, and it looks as if some of the movie will be filmed in the Back Bay.

Columbia officials have been scouting various neighborhood locations but, as far as can be determined, have not made a decision on which building or buildings will be featured in the film.

“They came by on three or four different occasions,” said Steven Padulsky, general manager of the Algonquin Club on Commonwealth Avenue. He said the film company notified him that they were not going to be using his building, but didn’t tell him if they had chosen another.

The Fairmont Copley Plaza and the Museum of Fine Arts were rumored to be under consideration too.
“We’ve had some visits, but they haven’t rejected us outright,” said Suzanne Wenz, who is in charge of public relations for the Fairmont Copley Plaza.

She said she imagined the hotel, located on Copley Square, was considered because of its architecture and its unique interior spaces.

She said if the film company did want to use the hotel, the hotel management would seriously consider accepting if it did not interfere unduly with hotel operations.

“We’ve done shoots from time to time,” she said. “We do anything in that regard to minimize the impact on our guests.”

The MFA did not return a phone call about the matter.

Although Columbia Pictures also would not comment, the reason for their scouting the Back Bay is obvious. For one thing, Boston has become a favored movie site again, since 2006, when the legislature gave film companies tax credits and other benefits for filming in Massachusetts.

And since the 19th-century vision for the Back Bay had its origin in the grand boulevards of Baron Haussmann’s Paris, one can imagine that Hollywood would see it as an appropriate setting for action that is supposed to take place in Paris. Never mind that the Algonquin Club and the Fairmont Copley Plaza are examples of the Italian Renaissance Revival style, according to Boston Society of Architects’ A.I.A. Guide to Boston.

In any case, it’s interesting. “It’s exciting for the city, regardless of the site that is chosen,” said Wenz. “It’s fun to see the images that we love in the city on the movie screen.”

SIDEBAR

Boston
Two films are slated to begin filming in downtown Boston within the next few weeks, according to Mary Chiochios, director of operations at the Massachusetts Film Office.

Bachelor #2 with Dane Cook and Date Hudson and a remake of The Women, a 1930s film, are in “pre-production,” said Chiochios, which means they are close to shooting. The production teams have scouted for locations in the Back Bay, but the film office does not know exactly where they will be filming.

While these production companies will be entertaining and sometimes frustrating for neighbors, the most important contribution they make is to the Massachusetts economy, said Chiochios.

The Taj Hotel must go back to the Board of Appeal over the use of the adjacent Public Alley 437 and the crowded loading area the hotel uses under Carlton House next door.

That was the decision Superior Court Judge Margot Botsford issued last week after a hearing in which a Taj lawyer had argued to drop the case.

Botsford ordered that any orders the Board of Appeal made at previous times should be withdrawn, and that a new hearing should consider new testimony and evidence.

The decision included an antidote to the lengthy time it has taken for this matter to be considered. Botsford ordered that the Board of Appeal hearing must take place within six weeks from the date of the decision, August 8. The board is ordered to render its decision within 45 days after the hearing. The judge also retained the court’s jurisdiction over the case to ensure that it would be resolved.

So far it has been more than 20 years that the problem has been brewing and more than three and a half years since the Board of Appeal ordered ISD to enforce a zoning code that would have required the Ritz-Carlton, the Taj’s predecessor, to re-install a loading dock that it removed without the appropriate permits, according to opponents. The Taj Hotel inherited the problem in January when it took over ownership of the Ritz-Carlton. The Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay agreed not to oppose a transfer of the Ritz’s liquor license to the Taj ownership, based on the promise that this matter would be concluded in a manner acceptable to neighbors.

Re-installing the loading dock would help relieve the problem of trucks blocking the alley and backing up on Arlington Street, say frustrated nearby residents and business owners.

“It’s totally out of the question,” said Tony Pangaro of Charles Street South.

I’ll chain myself to a tree,” said Linda Cox, a co-founder of the Esplanade Association.

They reflected the virtually universal opinion of about 50 Back Bay and Beacon Hill residents who were part of the committees the Department of Conservation and Recreation had formed to give that agency advice on fixing the crumbling Storrow Drive tunnels.

Richard K. Sullivan, the new DCR commissioner, said that laying down temporary lanes extending 40 feet into the Esplanade would provide a bypass for cars while tunnel reconstruction was going on and would save three to five million dollars and perhaps spare neighbors from listening to night work. That was after he said that the Esplanade is the “crown jewel of the state’s park system.”

The group was having none of it.

“We had been assured that the bypass scheme was off the table,” said Cox. “Cars have won over and over again on the Esplanade, and it’s time for parkland to be considered.”

But the temporary road proposal wasn’t the only disappointment of the night for the group, which has been working for almost a year to understand how Storrow Drive and the Esplanade might be improved as part of fixing the 50-year-old tunnel’s problems.

Sullivan said his department would recommend that Storrow Drive’s configuration remain as it is.

Several heavy hitters urged Sullivan to keep other options on the table. Their main point was that Option A, repairing the tunnel and keeping it the way it is, has been under consideration since 1992, and much is known about the costs, timing and effects of this plan.

“The other options have a lineage of only several weeks,” Bob O’Brien of the Downtown North Association pointed out. Both Fred Salvucci, father of the Big Dig, and Tony Pangaro of Millennium Partners seconded O’Brien’s complaint about the short shrift other likely plans were getting.

“It is physically and intellectually important to bring the other options to the stage Option A has benefited from,” said O’Brien.

Alexander Valentine of Commonwealth Avenue expressed the sense of defeat many in the room appeared to be feeling. “I’m not happy with your assessments,” he said to Sullivan. “There are themes people have been asking for, and it’s not just the highway.”

Valentine mentioned pedestrians, trees and a better parkland.

“What we want is our parkway back,” he said. “Leaving the status quo isn’t good enough.”

Sullivan did have one more piece of information for the group that almost got lost in the fury: Storrow Drive’s reconstruction will begin before the Longfellow Bridge’s, he said.

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Who can we trust?

We can’t trust anyone anymore.

We can’t trust the FBI. Who would have suspected that its agents would blatantly frame four Boston men, not just to protect their “sources,” such as they were, but to advance their own careers? The bureau is paying millions in restitution to these hapless chaps, thanks to Judge Gertner, but it’s actually our tax money they are using.

We can’t trust the Justice Department after they fired their Republican appointees who didn’t prosecute Democrats enough. Then, according to an interesting article in a recent New Yorker magazine, they didn’t sufficiently investigate a murder of one of their own in Seattle, possibly because he supported gun control. With its torture-promoting attitudes, the US Justice Department is day by day seeming more like the Ministry of Justice building in a place like Argentina, where you know it wasn’t justice that was done.

We can’t trust the CIA or any of our intelligence agencies. Not only did they get Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction all wrong, they can’t find Osama bin Laden.

We can’t trust the defense department. Any nitwit would have known that you better have a pretty good plan when you decide to decimate a country ruled by a dictator who has kept tribal animosities from flaring solely by his brutality. We had such a good example when the Soviet Union broke up into bitter, warring little pieces.

We can’t trust Minnesota anymore. In the past two years, the state’s Republican governor twice vetoed legislation to raise the state’s gas tax to pay for road repairs and the like. (Apparently, he has now seen the light.) If a populist state with a record of good government, despite Jesse Ventura, couldn’t keep its bridges in good repair, how can we?

We can’t trust the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. After running the best roads in the state for many years, they lost their heads in the Big Dig.

We can’t even trust the Democrats in Congress. The Senate Democrats once again believed the same guys who told them about Saddam’s weapons, and they caved in to Bush’s bleating about how we must continue being afraid and gave him license to listen in to all the calls you receive from overseas. So many people dislike him in other countries that he’s liable to label anyone a terrorist.

We can’t trust FEMA, the church, the airlines, General Motors, insurance companies or the big national banks anymore. You all know why.

Despite all the institutions we can no longer rely on, we’re doing pretty well in this neighborhood. Ninety-nine percent of us have a fine place to live, enough food, and some extra money and time for some fun in our lives. We have free entertainment when we go out to watch the street life or walk along the Esplanade. We have generally good relations with our neighbors. No matter what religion, race, national origin or sexual orientation, people are generally accepted without a thought. No one is throwing acid in the girls’ faces on Newbury Street, as has been happening in Pakistan, because they are showing too much skin.

The world may be screwed up, but it doesn’t affect us — yet.