Valley Stream filmmaker Edward Burns returns home for 'The Family McMullen'

The light gray paint is now a yellow-green and two new wooden railings flank the front steps, but Edward Burns’ childhood home on Marlboro Road in Valley Stream otherwise looks much the same as it did in 1995, when the writer-director used it as the no-cost setting for his low-budget feature debut, “The Brothers McMullen.”

“I wrote a scene into every room in the house, starting with the laundry room in the basement, all the way up through to my old bedroom in the attic,” Burns, 57, says, standing in front of the modest four-bedroom home on a recent chilly Friday afternoon. Gesturing at a small, brick-lined space a few steps from the front door, he adds, “And like the brothers in that film, I spent my entire childhood and teen years, and later my 20s, sitting on that stoop.”

Thirty years later, Burns has finally released a sequel to his indie classic, “The Family McMullen,” which debuts on HBO Max on Dec. 5 . The comedy-drama reunites Burns with original cast members Connie Britton and Mike McGlone and, yes, the old house in Valley Stream. Burns’ commitment-phobic Barry McMullen is now a single dad whose 20-something kids, Patty (Halston Sage) and Tommy (Pico Alexander), have moved back home. Barry’s lovable sourpuss of a brother, Patrick (McGlone), is also sleeping in a spare room. Their brother Jack has died, leaving the widowed Molly (Britton) to sell the McMullen family home. As in the original film, romantic entanglements and surprises ensue.

“This was a proper film, you know,” Burns boasts later over lunch at a newish sushi spot near his old home. “The Family McMullen,” he notes, was shot on a $12.5 million budget — far more than the roughly $25,000 it cost to make “Brothers” — and comes with the imprimatur of Warner Bros. Discovery. “We're all really happy with it,” Burns says. “It's funny and it's charming and puts a smile on your face.”

Before he became one of the great Cinderella stories of independent cinema, Burns was one of three siblings being raised by a New York City police officer, Edward J. Burns,  and his film-buff wife, Molly, who worked as a secretary for the Federal Aviation Administration. Burns credits an English teacher in high school and a film class at SUNY Albany for setting him on a path to screenwriting. He took more film classes after transferring to Hunter College but dropped out to work as a production assistant at “Entertainment Tonight.”

It was the early 1990s, and Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival was becoming a showcase for a new generation of do-it-yourself filmmakers, from fellow Long Islander Hal Hartley (“The Unbelievable Truth”) to Quentin Tarantino (“Reservoir Dogs”). Burns wanted to join them. He wrote the screenplay for “Brothers,” raised $10,000 in seed money (from his father and a family friend), found actors willing to work for lunch instead of pay and shot the film in 12 days (spread over a few months). He and cameraman Dick Fisher secretly edited the footage at night in the offices of “Entertainment Tonight.”

When Redford appeared on "ET" to promote his 1994 film “Quiz Show,” Burns got into an elevator with the star and presented him with a VHS copy of “The Brothers McMullen.” It was accepted into Sundance, won the coveted Grand Jury Prize and became the first release from what's now known as Searchlight Pictures.

Those stories, recounted in Burns’ 2015 memoir, “Independent Ed,” have since become part of indie filmmaking lore. Alexander, Burns’ 34-year-old co-star in “The Family McMullen,” was practically a toddler when it all happened but says even he knows the legend of “Brothers.”

“I really looked up to him,” says Alexander, who previously starred in Burns’ 2018 comedy-drama “Summer Days, Summer Nights.” (They played father and son then, too.) Alexander says Burns helped inspire him to write and direct his own feature film debut, which he finished recently and describes as a two-hander shot mostly in a single house. “I don’t think I would have done it if it hadn’t been for being on ‘McMullen’ right beforehand,” he says. “Hearing all those stories and being like, ‘You know, just go for it.’ ”

Burns followed “The Brothers McMullen” with “She’s The One,” a 1996 rom-com that starred himself, McGlone, Jennifer Aniston (then rocketing to fame on NBC’s “Friends”) and newcomer Cameron Diaz. Reviews were mixed, but then came Burns’ strong performance as the upstart solider Pfc. Richard Reiben in Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (1998).

“We're getting a lot of incoming calls and interest in you in being an actor,” Burns recalls his agents telling him. “We think you should move out to L.A. and kind of give it a shot.”

What followed was a dream come true, though perhaps not Burns’. Britton, who has remained friends with Burns since shooting “Brothers,” recalls picking Burns up from the airport in Los Angeles during this period and taking him out to dinner to discuss the many roles he was being considered for. But she says Burns also confessed that he’d rather be making his own movies.

“And then he’s like, ‘I got this really great script and there's a part in it. You'd be awesome for it,’” Britton recalls. “And he handed me the script for ‘Jerry Maguire.’ ” (Neither were cast in the film.)

Burns appeared in a succession of movies with heavyweight co-stars: as Robert De Niro’s buddy in the cop thriller “15 Minutes,” top billed ahead of Dustin Hoffman in the crime drama “Confidence” and opposite Angelina Jolie in the rom-com “Life or Something Like It.” The result: “All three movies bomb,” Burns says emphatically. He kept acting, but the 2009 cyberthriller “Echelon Conspiracy,” shot in Bulgaria, was the proverbial straw, he says.

“That was the one where I was like, ‘I'm done,’” Burns recalls. By then he had married the supermodel Christy Turlington and was raising two young children. “I sat down with my wife and said, 'Look, I don't think I want do this anymore,' ” Burns says. “I’ll write and direct, and I'll make these small movies in New York for as long as I can.” Burns says he parted ways with his agent and manager and now makes films with his longtime production partner Aaron Lubin.

Burns adds: “I’m a thousand times happier.”

To date, Burns has written and directed more than a dozen films, most of them shot on low budgets or even shoestrings (“Newlyweds,” from 2011, was made for $9,000). For television, he launched a couple of short-lived sitcoms, “That’s Life” and “The Fighting Fitzgeralds” (both with his brother Brian , now best known as an executive producer of CBS’ “Blue Bloods”). He also created TNT's period cop-drama “Public Morals” and the 2021 Epix series "Bridge and Tunnel," about working-class college graduates from Long Island. His previous film, “Millers in Marriage,” came out this year; his next, “Finnegan’s Foursome,” about a family golf vacation in Ireland, is scheduled to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, he says.

Burns never considered making a sequel to “Brothers” until he saw the 2013 drama “Before Midnight,” part of Richard Linklater’s acclaimed trilogy starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. The first film, “Before Sunrise,” had been at Sundance along with “Brothers,” Burns realized, “and he’s already done two sequels to that film. Maybe I should think about doing the sequel to ‘McMullen.’ ”

Story material came from seeing acquaintances go through divorces, and hearing about grown kids moving back in with their parents, according to Burns. To get Britton, now a major star known for both her television series (“Friday Night Lights,” “The White Lotus”) and film work (“Bombshell,” “Promising Young Woman”), Burns says he felt her role needed to be larger than just a McMullen’s wife; hence the decision to make her a widow. The cast also includes Tracee Ellis Ross (“black-ish”), Juliana Canfield (“Succession”) and Brian d’Arcy James (“13 Reasons Why”). Burns returned to “Brothers” composer Seamus Egan for the score.

Burns shot much of the film over a quick 23 days last spring in Brooklyn’s Windsor Terrace neighborhood — like Valley Stream, a longtime Irish American enclave. And he was happy to be able to film again in the old house that his parents had sold in 1998, he says. Much of the interior had remained unchanged, hence a joke from Britton’s Molly: “What, you don’t think the faux brick has aged well?”

Burns says he was talking with his father recently about the home, which was purchased for $18,000 in the very early 1970s, served as the launching pad for his career and inspired the name of his 30-year production company, Marlboro Road Gang. The whole idea, Burns said, “is just kind of mind-blowing for all of us.”