Film crews and Halifax writers love Long Beach

Too much happening to monkey around with fancy nonsense. We’ve got a rare multiple-item column today.

First on our list of things to get off our plate: Filming going on all over town, just like the Golden Age of Filming in Long Beach.

The town has scored another regular series with TNT’s picking up of a season of “Animal Kingdom,” based on the 2010 Australian film of the same name. Crews will be around the city’s oceanfront and Alamitos Bay regularly, shooting scenes for the drama set, ostensibly, in Oceanside, which Long Beach can handle if you throw a little dirt on it. Ellen Barkin stars as the matriarch of a crime family made up of her sons and grandson.

Showtime’s “Ray Donovan,” starring the now-famouser Liev Schreiber, of “Spotlight,” retued to Long Beach on Wednesday to film at a residence in Park Estates. The yellow-and-black direction signs for the production read, simply, “Ray,” so could you blame us for “acquiring” one for our son Ray?

Finally, the IFC mockumentary series “Documentary Now!” will be in town, filming an undisclosed episode at several undisclosed locations on Friday and Saturday. Glad we could help.

Filmers aren’t the only ones smitten with Long Beach’s charms lately. Expect an influx of Haligonians in the wake of a travel article in the Halifax, Nova Scotia, Chronicle Herald sent to us by Barbara Baes of Long Beach. The Jan. 30 article was written by the tag-team of travel bloggers, John and Sandra Nowlan.

There’s nothing surprising to us locals in the article. The two visitors enjoy a stay at the Queen Mary, visit the Aquarium of the Pacific and do some fine dining at Lola’s, Parkers’ Lighthouse, the Breakfast Bar and George’s Greek Cafe.

They also found the city to be pedestrian-friendly, even though they must have been at least initially, a bit frightened to venture out, because they noted, after praising the downtown “green spaces and imaginative building’s like the city’s convention centre,” that, apparently surprisingly to them, “And not a gun shop in sight.” Yeah. U.S. citizens are given an arsenal on their 10th birthday. We don’t use guns shops. Too many regulations.

Our favorite part is the visiting pair’s succinct verdict: “We liked Long Beach a lot more than we thought we would.”

Yeah, we get that a lot.

They didn’t mention having a parking problem, but reader Downtown Don Damauer had a problem with our recent rebuttal to a Lakewoodian about the dearth of free parking in our city. We defended Long Beach by pointing out several restaurant areas where parking is free, though we omitted a mention of downtown.

DDD chided us: “As you surely must know, there is free parking for two hours in the City Place parking structures which runs from Third and the Promenade all the way up to Sixth Street. A person could park there and be a half-block from many restaurants on Pine Avenue as well as the Promenade.”

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Dan is right; we were wrong.

We hope the Halifax visitors (and those sure to come) took advantage of the complimentary parking (nothing is free, except the occasional cat) when they visited George’s.

Contact Tim Grobaty at 562-714-2116, @grobaty on Twitter.

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