Explore Long Island

Actress Naomi Watts was on Shelter Island Thursday filming her latest flick, "Funny Games," a remake of the 1997 movie about two psychotic young men holding a family captive in a lakeside cabin.

Just past the place fishermen call Promised Land, where the island narrows to a slender sandbar - a tight-rope walk between Amagansett and Montauk - lies Napeague, low on the horizon, its name a see-saw of syllables that the old-timers pronounce one way, newcomers another. It's a tenuous stretch subject to currents of wind and water from harbor, sound and ocean. The sky opens, phone poles recede and scrub brush edges in.

OK, so nobody heads to the Hamptons for the history. But visitors who add museum-hopping to the usual whirl of sunning, shopping, dishing, noshing and star-gazing are guaranteed to encounter more celebrities (though granted, some may have been dead a century or two).

Each year more than 100,000 tourists from far and near scale the 137 tower steps at Montauk Point Lighthouse -- the equivalent of a spiraling 10-story trudge.

Infinitely farther from the Hamptons in temperament than in driving time, low-key Montauk has the easygoing aura of end-of-the-road resorts from Key West, Fla., to Homer, Alaska. One of the few indications it's even aware of its just-folks allure is the droll sign that's graced the window of Shagwong Restaurant about as long as anyone remembers: "Piano player wanted. Must have knowledge of opening clams.”

One more celebrity and Sag Harbor might have to stop calling itself the "un-Hampton."