Mark Ruffalo movie filmed in Hamilton neighborhood opens today: What to know

Dark Waters, a movie filmed in a few Hamilton locations including the Highland Park neighborhood, is being released in some parts of the country today, but the wait will be a few days longer for Greater Cincinnati, and about two weeks longer for Hamilton.

The film, which features Mark Ruffalo portraying Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky corporate defense attorney Robert Bilott, will be shown starting Tuesday at Mariemont Theatre. It will be Dec. 5 before the film appears on screens at AMC Showplace Hamilton 8, Cinema de Lux Springdale 18 and other nearby locations. It first will show Dec. 6 at AMC West Chester 18.

Several residents of Park Avenue, near the Highland Park home where part of the film was shot, said they thought it was fun to live on a street where Hollywood briefly visited in January, although one woman said it was an inconvenience for people living on the street.

Hailey Green, 19, said she’s “too busy” to go watch the film, which she said caused inconvenience for people wishing to park at their homes during filming. Residents were also asked to turn off their heat during near-freezing weather so smoke wouldn’t come out of their chimneys.

Snow had been cleared from some nearby yards, apparently so it wouldn’t look like winter during the shooting.

“It was pretty cool, but they just weren’t thoughtful to other people,” Green said. “They completely closed off these streets, so the people who don’t have parking spaces except for in front of their house had to park blocks away.”

Emily Osterbrock said she’s not much of a film person, but she will find it intriguing to watch Dark Waters, perhaps after it is available on the Red Box rental service. She and her husband didn’t move onto the street until July, but she found it interesting that a selling point of the house was that it was located on the block where the film had been shot.

Dark Waters, which also features Anne Hathaway as Bilott’s wife, Sarah, and Tim Robbins, Bill Pullman and Mare Winningham, tells the story about Bilott, who works for the firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, reluctantly visiting the West Virginia town where his grandmother lived to speak with a farmer who was complaining about many of his cattle dying, apparently from chemical poisoning.

Bilott, after researching the issue, sued giant chemical company DuPont over perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a chemical used in creating non-stick pots and pans, near the farmer’s property that jeopardized the water of about 70,000 people.

During filming in Hamilton and Cincinnati, the project was known as Dry Run. It since has been renamed Dark Waters.

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