Salon Gets Cinema Close-Up In Upcoming Film
/By A. Dollinger & D. Schrafel
info@longislandergroup.com
Owner Tasso Megaris stands outside of the Jon Megaris Salon Wednesday as a film crew transforms the Main Street salon ahead of filming for the Tina Fey/Amy Poehler comedy, “Sisters.”
A Huntington village hair salon has earned its spot in NBC Universal film “Sisters,” starring “Saturday Night Live” alumni Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.
Filming for “Sisters,” known in an earlier incarnation as “The Nest,” is set to take place today, Jan. 22, at 245 Main St. - the address of Jon Megaris and Son Hair & Beauty Salon.
The production company has been granted a permit from the town to use the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial building parking lot from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Jan. 22 to accommodate approximately 120 cast and crew members, six campers, five equipment trucks and trailers, three 24-foot box trucks, one bux, five 15-passenger vans, two cargo vans, three catering trucks, porta potties, a prop dump truck, two 80-foot lifts, 15 picture cars and one 60-foot lift, town spokesman A.J. Carter said. The company also has permission to park on the west side of Stewart Avenue.
Filming “helps bring visibility to Huntington,” Carter said.
“As a community that encourages culture… We work with the film companies to make these things happen,” he said, echoing what he said were Town Supervisor Frank Petrone’s statements earlier this week. “It also brings business to the town… hopefully some use of local merchants, local restaurants.”
For Tasso Megaris, owner of Jon Megaris Hair Salon, the filming is “really exciting… a proud feeling.”
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime kind of situation,” Megaris said.
The production crew spent part of Wednesday decorating the exterior to look like Florida – palm trees, etc. – and the interior of the salon, closed for Wednesday and Thursday, to look different.
“The inside, they completely redecorated and redid,” Megaris said.
The name of the salon will be changed for the film, as well, according to Megaris.
Jon Megaris is not the only Huntington salon the crew looked at. According to a Jan. 8 Facebook post by Haven Hair Spa, Haven was another option being considered.
The cast and crew visited a Dix Hills neighborhood in July for several days of filming and returned this week for one more day of Dix Hills shooting. One house there is the fictional home of Fey and Poehler’s characters; the other is the fictional home of male lead Ike Barinholtz.
Summer heat has become winter cold, but the cold has not stopped the production crew from turning Huntington into a Floridian version of quiet suburbia. Palm trees stand on Main Street today for the village’s big-screen appearance.
