Juliette Binoche, Brittany Robertson, Steve Carell and Norbert Leo Butz in front of Riven Rock, the secluded Jamestown house in Dan in Real Life.

Touchstone Pictures

One of the residual perks of all the moviemaking going on in Rhode Island these days is that even after the filmmakers decamp for Hollywood, you can have a hands-on experience with the places you’ve seen on screen.

So now you can bowl at the very place Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche bowled in Dan in Real Life.

You can visit the site of the bookstore where Dan and Marie, the characters they play, first met.

You can hang out at the bakery where Dan pulled his daughter away from her new boyfriend at the start of the film.

You can even stay in the secluded Jamestown house where the whole Burns clan gathered in the movie.

The eight-bedroom house, called Riven Rock, is available for rent from June through September, according to Liz Brazil, the Realtor who showed the house to the moviemakers more than once, helped make the deal with Disney and now is the exclusive agent for it.

She wouldn’t quote prices, nor even say exactly where the house, built in 1911, is located, except that it is on a secluded road and looks out over the West Passage of Narragansett Bay. One of the reasons the filmmakers liked the house, besides its rustic lived-in look, is that it was off the beaten path, away from the prying eyes of folks who might want to catch a glimpse of moviemaking in action. The filmmakers also looked at other houses — from Misquamicut to Little Compton — “but finally the mood of the house won over the director.”

To talk to a family member about Riven Rock involved a phone call from Brazil to an in-law in New York City, who called the next day to lay down restrictions on what information would be provided.That was followed, hours later, by a call from Bill Salmons, a family member who wouldn’t say more about his whereabouts than that he was calling from Massachusetts. (The family would not allow The Journal photographers access to the two-acre estate, but images are available on the Realtor’s Web site: lizbrazil.com.)

Salmons, the “managing partner” of the family corporation that owns Riven Rock, said it has been in the family since his grandparents purchased it in 1955. It isn’t insulated, which is why it’s only rented in summer, but the filmmakers wanted it for November and December when it’s normally vacant. The location scout, and soon after the filmmakers, began arriving to look at it in July 2006. “They made two or three visits,” said Salmons, adding that at first “we were quite apprehensive” about turning it over to a movie crew.

Their concerns revolved around the fact that the house was “very fragile” and “more than just a house, but the embodiment of our family.” The 52-year-old Salmons said that he and his 12 cousins had “all grown up there. We rent it to outsiders, typically in July and the family uses it in August. We all take a week.”

They didn’t want the place upended by a filmmaking crew, which often changes things to get the look they want for a movie. But Salmons said director/co-writer Peter Hedges “was a real charmer” who was “true to his word” about treating Riven Rock kindly. Hedges and two producers even came to Riven Rock to dine with the family during negotiations “to hear how we used the house and what our memories of it were.” Hedges, he said, even asked some of the younger nieces “where they would go to make out,” a site that was later used in the film.

The movie crew did make changes, some of which the family liked and kept. The filmmakers put awnings on the front of the house, which the family has since moved to the water side. The family kept a door that was added to a passageway which had been closed for many years, matching two doors already in the room. They added steps to one side of the porch that now opened it up.

Family members also “came down occasionally” to see the progress on the movie and to see if anything about the house was upset.

There were no such worries at Bill Munger’s Conanicut Marine Services Inc. Munger rented them the dockmaster’s office for the Jamestown ferry, which runs only in summer, carrying passengers to Rose Island and Newport. The ferry name was changed in the movie to the Nassimoluc Ferry and the name of Conanicut Island to Nassimoluc as well. Munger said the filmmakers changed the name “to keep it their own.” The ferry office, normally closed in the cold months, was transformed into a bookshop, thanks to the addition of hundreds of books rented from a Watch Hill bookstore that coincidentally was looking for a new home at the time.

Munger said the film crew’s production design team “was messing around here for two months” before filming began. “They took down several interior partitions and put up book racks.” To Munger’s amazement, they didn’t put books willy-nilly on the shelves, but took the time to place them by their proper category — fiction, non-fiction, etc. — even though the titles would not be able to be read on screen. Considering all the time spent fixing up the place, Munger said the actual filming lasted “only a couple of days.”

It was the same story at the Alley Katz bowling lanes in Westerly, where owner Wood Foss said the movie crew arrived about 10 weeks before filming the scene between Carell and Binoche. “It started off as a trickle until they came in for one week when we closed the place. Then the actors showed up for one long day that started at 6 a.m. right through to 3 the next morning.”

He recalled that it all started when three people, who later turned out to be location scouts, walked through his door one day and began “snooping around.” Eventually he found out what they were doing and that “they liked our character and liked our size.” The place was built in 1959 and Foss has owned it since 1985.

They didn’t especially like his façade, however, and so retrofitted the Windjammer Bar in Misquamicut to serve as the Alley Katz entrance. As for the real Alley Katz, “they made a lot of changes. Fundamentally, the interior stayed the same, but they added tons of lighting,”’ so much that Foss said they cut his connection line to National Grid and used their own generators. They also “put in decorative lighting, a sign that flashes and a mirror ball. We kept it all.”

Another prominent location is the Seven Stars Bakery on Hope Street in Providence, which was transformed overnight by the movie crew into a popular after-school teen hangout called Yumms. In Dan in Real Life, the scene takes place in New Jersey. But like Nassimoluc Island, the bowling alley entrance that’s really a bar, the bookstore that’s really a dockmaster’s office, even the James Eldridge Elementary School in East Greenwich that plays a New Jersey high school in the film, what you see on screen isn’t always what you get in real life.

mjanuson@projo.com