SARATOGA LIVINGThe City. The Culture. The Life.

Hollywood is once again using the Capital Region as the backdrop for a feature film.

As the Post Star reported back in September, the movie Spy Intervention was scouting locations in the Glens Falls and Lake George areas—and some of its young stars have been busy on Instagram, sharing their thoughts on filming in upstate locations.

One is model-actress Poppy Delevingne—elder sister of Cara, who herself starred in last summer’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets—who shared a selfie and some thought about her experience filming in Lake George on Instagram. “It’s snowy/sunshiny in Lake George,” she wrote yesterday, along with the picture.

The film is so brand-spanking-new that it doesn’t even have a full IMDB page. Spy Intervention also stars Drew Van Acker (Pretty Little Liars), who himself posted a short video of Lake George; Lane Garrison (Prison Break), and Blake Anderson (Workaholics).

It is set to hit theaters some time next year.

It’s not every day that a Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author finds his way to the Capital Region. On Nov. 10, Chris Hedges, a notable—and decidedly controversial—journalist, author, activist, educator, and ordained minister spoke to a packed house at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, N.Y.

The evening started with Hedges taking part in a pre-talk fundraiser and gourmet dinner to support the building of radio transmitters in Albany and Schenectady. The goal of the initiative is to expand the reach of the Sanctuary’s radio station, WOOC 105.3 FM, and create a new grassroots radio network.

Hedges took the stage and spoke, uninterrupted, for just shy of 90 minutes to an audience that listened attentively as he analyzed where we are now, politically, how we got here, and what can be done about it. He then took questions from the audience and didn’t stop until every one had been answered.

Only then did he sit down to sign books and talk to audience members who had lined up to meet him—including Saratoga Living.

A minister’s son, Hedges grew up in Schoharie but didn’t get to enjoy the pleasures of the region like the race course or the Spa State Park, he told us. His only experience in Saratoga Springs was when he visited the backstretch workers at the track to do research for a New York Times article published in 2000.

Hedges has also long been involved in teaching college-level courses to maximum security prisoners in New Jersey. He got his start through a friend, who was the head of the history department at the College of New Jersey, who’d been buying books and teaching classes that offered no college credits to the prisoner-students. His friend had had a hard time recruiting professors; and Hedges had some time between turning in a manuscript to his publisher and going out on a press tour, so he used it to start teaching in the program. It became a regular thing, and eventually, New Jersey launched a college credit program for prisoners, and he switched to teaching bachelor’s-level students through Rutgers University.

“They’re amazing students; dedicated, work hard, a kind of elite within the prison; they turn their cells into libraries,” Hedges told SL.

We also mentioned that it was the centennial of women getting the right to vote in New York State and wondered if he had any insight into the subject. Hedges responded: “We’ve got to go back and look at their courage, their militancy, their organization. Suffragettes are one of the great movements in American history.”

Lastly, SL asked Hedges what movements Americans could take inspiration from in the coming years. “The labor movement, the abolitionist movement, [and] the civil rights movement; that’s where we gotta go,” he said.

Izetta Jewel’s the most famous woman you’ve never heard of. She was an actress, activist, and suffragist; founded a political party and had dinner with Mussolini. And she lived to 95, splitting her time between Schenectady, where she lived for a decade; and Washington, D.C., where she hosted congressmen and senators for breakfast every Sunday at her home.

Co-curators Ann Rockwood and Joe Piazzo of Schenectady’s Museum of Innovation and Science have put together a fascinating exhibit on Jewel’s life, which runs through November.

The exhibit itself is designed to resemble an old-fashioned scrapbook, using clippings and other artifacts sourced from Jewel’s family and Radcliffe College, the owners of Jewel’s collection.

The exhibit is split up into “pages” that cover different parts of Jewel’s life. For example, one covers her acting career (The Queen’s Messenger, Vicki); while another focuses in on her women’s rights work (she co-founded the National Women’s Party and fought hard for suffrage). Other pages cover her political career (she was the first woman nominated as a candidate for president at the 1920 Democratic Convention); broadcasting (she performed in the first radio/TV drama on WGY; and of course, her time in Schenectady, where she served as Commissioner of Public Welfare during the Great Depression.

At the exhibit’s opening on Nov. 6, Schenectady Mayor Gary McCarthy issued a proclamation on the 100th anniversary of women getting the right to vote in New York State, naming Nov. 24 “Izetta Jewel Day.”

The Museum of Innovation and Science is located at 15 Nott Terrace Heights in Schenectady, N.Y. For more information on the exhibit, call (518) 382-7890 or visit the museum’s website.