Taglines: Romance is her destination.
Next Stop Wonderland movie storyline. Two people, living in Boston and unlucky in love – a nurse, Erin, whose activist boyfriend, Sean, has just walked out on their relationship to help a Native American tribe fight off a land development deal, and a plumber, Alan, struggling to pay off family obligations while pursuing a career as a marine biologist – deal with personal and professional problems and stumble through relationships, continually crossing one another’s paths without ever truly meeting and realizing how perfect they are for one another.
Time and time again one almost catches the other’s eye, but circumstances intervene. Finally, after a series of ups and downs, both of their budding relationships with others crash and burn, just in time for a chance meeting on the MBTA train heading to Wonderland station, on the outskirts of Boston.
Next Stop Wonderland is a 1998 American romantic comedy film directed by Brad Anderson and written by Anderson and Lyn Vaus. Starring are Hope Davis, Alan Gelfant, Victor Argo, Jon Benjamin, Cara Buono, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jason Lewis, Sam Seder, Holland Taylor, Callie Thorne and Lyn Vaus.
The film, which cost $1 million to make, was an audience favorite at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998. A bidding war among studio distributors resulted in Miramax Films paying $6 million for the film’s North American distribution rights. However, the film grossed only $3.3 million during its theatrical release.
Next Stop Wonderland is the second film written and directed by Brad Anderson whose first film, The Darien Gap, competed at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. At Sundance ’97 Brad was voted one of the top new directors in the world to watch. Financed and produced by Robbins Entertainment president Mitchell Robbins, Wonderland is an independent feature that involved 42 locations, 65 actors, and hundreds of extras. Mitchell’s challenge working with Brad as a new director was to assemble the most capable production team and present Brad with the best technical and artistic options that could take him from the guerrilla stage of his first film to the greater vision of Wonderland.
Like Cassavetes or Woody Allen, Brad favors an improvisational approach. He likes to depart from the rigidity of shot lists and storyboards. Mitchell hired Michael Ross, a Martin Scorsese award recipient at NYU, as first A.D. Michael’s preproduction job was to accurately schedule the number of scenes per day. As they visited each location with Uta Briesewitz, our German cinematographer, a recent graduate of AFI, Brad would agree to first camera position.
Kim Caviness, yet another director who just received her masters at Boston University and recipient of the Sumner Redstone award for her thesis film which played at Cannes, was hired as our location manager. Although we were told that directors working together might cause problems, we feel the film benefitted from the fact that there were other filmmakers on our crew. In the end, they were all instrumental in the success of bringing Brad’s vision to the film.
As co-producer, my job was to oversee all aspects of the creative process and to interface with the press. Having good relations with journalists served us well. By the end of production, our press kit looked like a book. But being so high profile also had its downside…
One of the last scenes in the film, with Andre on the airplane, was filmed several months after the initial completion of the film. The scene was added because test audiences reacted badly to Erin standing-up Andre at the end of the film.
The intention of the scene was to show that Andre was not a nice guy (as he had been throughout the film) and remove any sympathy viewers had for him. The fact that this scene was filmed so much later also explains why Andre’s hair is significantly different in that scene than in the rest of the film.
The “airport station” stop shown in the film is actually the Wood Island station on the Blue MBTA line. The actual Airport station is one stop before. The title refers to a stop on the MBTA (Boston’s public transit system, a.k.a. “The T”). The stop is at the Wonderland Greyhound Park racetrack, which is the last stop on the Blue Line.
Appeared on Entertainment Weekly’s list of The 50 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen in the Jul 16, 2012 issue. The character of Erin is based on an actress Brad Anderson met while filming another project.
Next Stop Wonderland (1998)
Directed by: Brad Anderson
Starring: Hope Davis, Alan Gelfant, Victor Argo, Jon Benjamin, Cara Buono, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jason Lewis, Sam Seder, Holland Taylor, Callie Thorne, Lyn Vaus
Screenplay by: Brad Anderson, Lyn Vaus
Production Design by: Chad Detwiller
Cinematography by: Uta Briesewitz
Film Editing by: Brad Anderson
Set Decoration by: Karen E. Weber
Art Direction by: Sophie Carlhian, Humberto Cordero
Music by: Claudio Ragazzi
Distributed by: Miramax Films
Release Date: August 21, 1998
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