Moviemakers Come to Florence and Make an Odd Decision

A Florence school band marches past the real Rialto theatre in a parade scene from "Our Souls at Night."
Evidently the fictional Holt school district cannot afford uniforms.

The movie trailers, lights and reflectors, and the crew members with handheld radios have now left little Florence, Colorado, which for a couple of weeks became the fictional town of Holt, Colorado, the setting of Kent Haruf's novel Our Souls at Night, soon to be a Netflix movie starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford. (Some scenes were filmed in Cañon City and the West Side of Colorado Springs.)

For that time, it was big news.  A local blogger wrote about a resident meeting Redford in the alley behind her home and how Florence's business district full of antiques-and-collectibles shops made life easier for set dressers.

Florence, being the antiques capital of Colorado, has dozens of stores full of things at good prices for the movie sets and props. Some of the crew members, most of them from other states, were also doing browsing and shopping for their own homes.

Until I witnessed it up close, I never realized how Florence is the perfect town for a crew to come in and purchase so many things for the movie, all on foot and within a few block radius. And since Florence is a small town, most shop workers know what is in their own stores as well as neighboring stores and can help crew members find the item that will set the mood for a scene.

The day I saw Mr. Redford from afar many times, working hard, I texted a friend and said,"Another boring day at work, watching Robert Redford so many times that I've lost count."

Businesses around town sported fake signage: an insurance agency became the Holt National Bank — fitting, since its building started life as a bank a century or more ago — while a Main Street pizza restaurant became the Holt Drug Store. The empty lobby of a historic hotel was reconfigured into a cafe.

The "Rialto" move theatre created for the movie.

One movie-set decision did seem odd to me. Florence's Main Street includes the Rialto Theatre, built in 1923, which has been undergoing a slow, painstaking restoration, paid for mostly by community members. The original marquee and entry are in place. A perfect set, right?

Instead, they turned a former bar (now a gallery) into a smaller, bleaker, fake Rialto. Maybe someone just fell in love with those moderne glass bricks.