Adventureland|Kennywood Games Midway — The Summer Job That Won't End

The row of games at Kennywood runs along a curve of asphalt between the old carousel and the coaster fence, and for six weeks in late 2007 that curve was the entire world of a twenty-two-year-old with a comparative literature degree and no plan. Greg Mottola shot most of Adventureland right here, in West Mifflin, ten miles up the Monongahela from downtown Pittsburgh. Jesse Eisenberg's James works Games — the rigged basketball hoop, the wooden horse race, the giant plush panda that management has quietly decided nobody wins.

The production picked Kennywood over the real Adventureland on Long Island for a blunt reason: the Long Island park had been renovated. This one hadn't. Opened in 1898 as a trolley park, Kennywood never entirely modernized its way out of its own past, and the crew only had to dull the paint and swap signage to get 1987. The harder problem was weather. The story is set in July; filming ran through Pittsburgh's snow, so extras were stationed outside windows to block the white behind the actors' heads.

What survives is the geometry and the sound. Come on a summer evening and you get the barkers' looped patter, the hiss of ride compressors, music leaking from three directions at once. Walk it in the last hour before closing, when the crowds thin and the operators start counting their float. That is the shift James works.

Photos: Kennywood, Wikimedia Commons (freely licensed); historic Kennywood Park view, Detroit Publishing Company, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (public domain).