Fairhaven High School Will ‘Star’ in New Paul Giamatti Movie ‘The Holdovers’

Hollywood is coming to Fairhaven. Superintendent of Schools Tara Kohler made the announcement on Michael and Maddie this morning.

Paul Giamatti, who's appeared in Academy Award winning films like Saving Private Ryan and 12 Years a Slave, will be spending some significant time in our little seaside town.

Giamatti is set to play a grumpy high school teacher at a New England boarding school in a movie called The Holdovers. Kohler agreed that in a sense, the school will be his co-star, as it will be prominently featured throughout almost the entirety of the film.

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It won't have much competition from the human stars, though, as the movie's plot is around two people who get stuck in the school during a huge snowstorm. Ironically, news of the movie filming at the school broke just hours before a historically big snowstorm arrived on the SouthCoast.

Presumably, Giamatti's teacher character is one of those people. Perhaps a student character is the other?

The film, which is set in the 1970s, will utilize Fairhaven High School's legendary Room 7. The room, built in 1905 as the senior class homeroom, can seat 96 students and looks exactly the same today as it did 115 years ago.

Scenes will also be shot in the breathtakingly beautiful Mabel Hoyle Knipe Auditorium (pictured below), which is rumored to be haunted.

Room 108M – which, coincidentally, is the room where I taught my communications class at Fairhaven High School years ago – will also be used. Some off-campus scenes will also be filmed at the Wamsutta Club in New Bedford.

The superintendent is negotiating for the opportunity to allow the high school's media students to observe the 130 crew members working during the filming.

Kohler said filming will take place at the school during the February vacation coming up in just a few weeks. One has to wonder if the filmmakers will take advantage of this weekend's massive winter storm to take some exterior shots of the building and of Fairhaven.

The movie will be Christmas-themed and is expected to be released this December.