[gentle music] - Steve, you are a Professor at the University of Memphis's Department of Communication and Film for almost 40 years, but "The Old Forest" is a project that you did very early in your career here at Memphis.

I understand that you found the story by Peter Taylor while you were in the midst of planning your move to Memphis, is that right?

- That's exactly right, yeah.

I was teaching at a small Catholic university in Connecticut when I took the position here.

And that summer I was up in Massachusetts around Cape Cod with some friends, and I went to the library one afternoon, the public library and found, got a copy of the best short stories of whatever year it was, '79 or whatever.

And there was this story by Peter Taylor about Memphis in 1937, and I read it and I remember thinking, where am I going to?

I'd been there, but the story painted a portrait of a city albeit many years earlier that, and the way people reacted to certain crisis situations, that struck me as so interesting because it was so different from the way people that I grew up with or were working with or just knew in general in the New York Area would ever react to the same kinds of situations.

And so it really grabbed me, and I also thought this could be a film.

Now, why I thought that, why I thought, oh, you're going to make your first complete fiction film.

You're going to make it as a period piece with does literally, I think it was over three dozen locations in the film, and they all have to be accurate, et cetera, and costumes and everything else.

But it just grabbed me.

And when I went down to Memphis, the fellow who had lured me down here was somebody I had known in graduate school named David Appleby.

And he was very enthusiastic when I gave him a story to read.

And he said, "No, we can do this, we can do this."

And since the film I had just made had been broadcast nationwide on PBS, and was considered very much a humanities kind of project.

And David had made a film about Memphis's relationship to the Mississippi River called "The Invisible River", and it had been funded by Tennessee Humanities Council, or Humanities Tennessee as it was known at the time.

So, we felt, okay, we don't have to rely on Arts Council money, we can try to get Humanities money, which was always better.

There was always more money in the Humanities than there was in the Arts.

And we had a track record, and they were very enthusiastic, very, very supportive.

And I mean, it was still a trial trying to get that money, but we did, and we were able to raise the money, which was, it was over $100,000, which was a lot of money then.

And the entire crew were either people that were making a living doing television in Memphis, or they were theater professionals or faculty and students thinking of, you know?

And it became clear to me that the theater students all understood that everything was all coming through this fulcrum and had to come together at exactly the right time, and you had to be there, and you had to look ahead at your schedule and stuff.

And they also understood that there would be a pecking order, which the film students didn't necessarily, it was like, well, this is only the second time I've put film through a camera, but I'm the director and I'm the producer.

Whereas the theater students were, okay, I get my orders from her and she's getting it from her who's getting it from him, you know, that there was a pecking order that you followed in order, not because it was a fascist dictatorship, in order to get things done, [laughing] you know?

So, there was that whole kind of mentality that meant that a lot of the crew had no film experience at all.

We were teaching them a lot of things, but they came from theater and they wound up having careers in filmmaking in this area and beyond.

I think my favorite career, he was a film student guy named Hall Prewitt, who was sort of helping out with art direction, getting props, which was a big job.

And he was well connected, he knew everybody in town, but when we started having to get this flotilla of 1937-era cars, he knew the people who had them, and he knew how to talk to them.

And he wrangled all these old cars for us.

And Hall wound up with a career as a car and, you know, a period car wrangler on dozens of films over the years after that, many in Memphis and Knoxville and Nashville, but other places too, and TV commercials, whatever.

So, I mean, it was such a specific thing.

I mean, we had people become gaffers, grips and the woman who designed our costumes was an MFA student in theater costume, and she just retired now as a career, thirty-odd-plus years at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival running the costume shop there.

So, it was a big variety of people that went on to do all sorts of different things.

And the associate producer and script supervisor was the producer of Local Color for WKNO and produced a lot of the Memphis Memoir, first group of Memphis Memoir series here.

And so she was the documentary filmmaker here for a number of years, Susie Howe.

- Oh, yeah.

- Yeah.

So, yeah.

So, we, it's been really interesting to see the diaspora of the crew after the film- - Sure.

- Was finished.

- I've heard about this production before I ever had a chance to see the movie, because back then, I mean, you did, film, shooting on film was not something that easily dabbled in.

So, I remember people involved in the theater and the arts community talk about, I met a lot of them when we presented "I Was a Zombie for the F.B.I.

", Marius Penczner's movie from '82.

And people would say, oh, yes, that and "The Old Forest" is what sticks out in their memory as a real film production that they participated in.

When you started this movie, had you ever worked on a dramatic picture of this length?

- The film that I had had on PBS previous to coming to Memphis was called "Searching for Wordin Avenue", and they dubbed it a documentary drama, and it was a film about the Hungarian immigrant community in general, but the one in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which is very, very large.

And it had several, it followed a fictional family in Hungary and then in southwestern Connecticut, and interspersed that with stories from actual immigrants and who were being interviewed and we filmed in locations, et cetera and so forth.

But we had to do things like dress the Bridgeport Train Station so it looked like it was 1916 and things like that.

And it was very difficult because the, all the scenes in Hungary that we shot, we did some, in rural Hungary, of course [laughing] that we shot in Connecticut.

The actors had to learn Hungarian except for the key male actor was a Hungarian that we cast in New York.

So, it was very difficult on them, and he was a big help with getting the accents right and everything.

And then we used subtitles.

But so the film interspersed dramatic recreations with other kinds of footage that you would call documentary.

I would say the dramatic recreations probably constituted 25-35% of the finished film.

So, I had had some experience with that, and we had shot on film, we shot the whole thing on film.

And... David Appleby and I went to graduate school with this guy who just loved to hand hold the camera all the time.

And his name was Larry McConkey.

And he eventually became perhaps the most heralded Steadicam Operator in the world, you know, that shot in "Goodfellas" when he takes he and, and when he takes his girlfriend down across the street into the Copacabana, and they go through the kitchen and they come back out and the table comes over for them, all one take, that was Larry, you know?

And so he was, which he did a few years after that.

So, and he was the only crew member that we brought in from the outside.

And so, and that was only because the person we had agreed to make this with Tennessee talent.

We had a very good videographer in Memphis and at the university, and he was going to, but he was also working for Ardent, and he was going to shoot it for us.

And, but we were going to shoot on film, and we had our final meeting with John Fry at Ardent, and John said, "You have to use our brand new."

They had some new video format as there was a new one every three weeks as I remember that they had invested a lot of money in, and, you know, this has to be a showcase for that.

And Appleby and I just said, no, we can't do that.

And so because of that, we were able to then talk to our funders and asked for a dispensation.

So, Larry came in as a pinch hitter and shot on film, and Larry lived in my living room for four or five weeks while we made the film.

And that's how we wound up using him.

And there are, you know, the opening scene, you can see this Steadicam snaking through the woods, and that's all, you know, and we tried to use Larry as much as we, use that as much as we could, knowing that it's always a pain in the ass, it's always gonna slow things down.

So, you know, we would, or let's save them for the moments we really want to use them.

- I was wondering while you were making this movie that is so much about Memphis and you a relative newcomer to the city, what did you learn about Memphis while you were working on this film?

- One of the things that I learned about Memphis while I was making the film, and I'd have to say making the film like any film, and, you know, began a year before we started shooting, finding the locations, which was so important 'cause of the budget we were working on.

I mean, we were able to turn the TV studio, which we have, which is much like this one during the, since we started shooting the day after classes ended in December, and it was no longer needed for a month.

This, it was like the end of "Citizen Kane".

We had every prop in the world stored in the TV studio, and each day we'd go, we'd pull it out, where we were going to shoot to dress the locations, but we knew we had to find the locations that we weren't gonna be building sets of any major import.

Although I'll tell you in a minute about the set we did build.

Doing that just meant I had to meet so many people and convey to them what we were trying to do and what Peter's story was about and how it related to these various humanities themes.

And in doing so, it just became, I just learned a lot about Memphis.

Every place I went was, some of it was like really great and some of it was so scary I wouldn't even tell you the story right now.

You know, dealing with some of the [laughing] we dealt with some very wealthy people, which was not my forte nor anybody else's in the crew, and led to some interesting confrontations, but other wealthy people and people were just normal human beings and were very nice and very supportive.

You know, one of the things I learned early on, some of these houses that we shot in and with these went, oh, this is great, we don't even have to bring in any props.

You have such beautiful, you know, and I realized, wait a second, there's gonna be a bunch of 20-year olds in here and, you know, and we could break something, so everybody's gonna be running around doing this and that.

So, a lot of the times we would get props that were, you know, faux thousand-dollar vases, faux $1,500 that, and we would carefully remove their real stuff and replace it with something else.

I do remember it was so great having a co-producer and assistant director who was also a filmmaker and knew every inch, he wrote the script with me.

Appleby knew every inch about everything.

One of the first locations was Nat Ramsey's house.

And the woman who's been no longer with us, bless her heart, she was something else.

She was not somebody you wanted to get mad.

And I was so nervous shooting in there.

It got to the point, I realized to myself, I think you're paying less attention to the actor's performances than you are to, oh, good, we didn't break anything.

And I turned David Appleby and I said, "David, we got two more setups, "you know where they are right here and over here, we doing this."

I said, "You direct them.

"I'm gonna sit here and I'll give you some notes if you need 'em."

And David just took over directed them [laughing] which was convenient for us because there were other times when there would be a crisis at a location that we were supposed to shoot the next day, it was incumbent upon me to go to that crisis, which meant, okay, well, David [laughing] direct the scene and he would, you know?

And everything cut together very seamlessly.

So, it was very lucky to have that.

One story I would like to tell you, if I may- - Sure.

- We had all these 1937-era cars, and they were old cars, you know?

And one day we were driving to the location at, you know, like seven o'clock in the morning, and there was a trouble with one of the cars.

The car that Nat tries with Caroline when they're questioning the city girls about Le Ann's whereabouts.

And the car often wouldn't start.

It was hard to get it started.

So, we were talking about it, we said, okay, and this is what we did for the scene when the car pulls up in front of one of the girls' houses, it was basically, you know, the grips outside camera range shoving the car into a frame [laughing] so it just looks like it's coming to a stop.

But I just sort of shook my head, I said, "Man, that '37 Ford has just given us a lot of problems."

And I guess David took that personally since he's in charge of logistics as the first assistant director, he just slipped on the brakes and he turned to me, he said, "What do you want?

The car is like four decades old, you know?"

[Steve laughing] And I thought, yeah, that's a good point, I guess.

[Steve laughing] So, yeah, things like that popped up all the time.

But it is a, the cars, you know, as I said, Hall Prewitt wound up making a career out of being a picture car wrangler.

- One of the films that, this reminds me of, I think a '76 film that was presented on American Playhouse, "Bernice Bobs Her Hair", and I think it's partly because of the length, a 60-minute-- - Yeah.

- Presentation based on a short story.

It's also the period thoroughness.

But when you were making it, did you have an idea of where you thought it would fit as a product?

- Yeah, I mean, our... our goal, if you will, our image of what we were trying to achieve was something that could be on Masterpiece Theater.

Because I know most of the Masterpiece Theater pieces from the '70s were English, but they were all these literary adaptations, and they had started to bleed over into basically public television in the United States.

And there was a series man named Lindsey Law was the executive producer called American Playhouse, which was clearly an emulation of Masterpiece Theater.

And what they really, occasionally they do an original, but basically it was independent filmmakers doing adaptations of literary works, American literary works.

And "Bernice Bobs Her Hair", one of the first things Joan Micklin Silver ever did as a director was one of those films.

And it was a way, if you could do that, it's like, okay, I can show, I can do this.

And there was this style, a Masterpiece Theater style, which focused mostly, I think, on a kind of classical filmmaking, which meant you had to do things, you sort of had to emulate studio filmmaking without the budget and without falling into the trap of turning into some sort of silly Hollywood movie imitation.

And that series did that pretty well.

The films varied a great deal, but it was just a great opportunity for a lot of people who had been doing other things and wanting to direct that hadn't directed yet, or had been directing commercials or whatever to get to do something serious.

And there were the non, the sort of 16-millimeter film festivals at the time that I was frequenting, I'd meet a lot of those filmmakers and see their films.

And so that was in my mind that this was the path to take.

I mean, Masterpiece Theater has come to have an almost pejorative term among filmmakers, but for us it was definitely, no, we're not trying to make a film that's going to look like it belongs in a theater, something that belongs on a good television with good color rendition.

And that was our goal.

And this sort of fit the bill perfectly in that sense, except that it had too many locations and too many speaking roles.

I mean, it was a foolish film to attempt from that standpoint, especially the fact that we were all relatively inexperienced.

But, and you know, we did, we shot during semester break from mid-December to whatever it was, January 10th, but we still had, we had to have a spring shoot, and we gathered 80% of our crew, then, you know, several newcomers and shot for another 10 days or so in the spring.

- And the film, it did have a life on A&E through the '80s and '90s.

- Big life on A&E.

I had, my goal was American Playhouse.

Lindsey Law, because I had some credits, et cetera and so forth, Lindsay Law agreed to see me and looked at the film and he was, he said he was very impressed.

He was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And he was going to, he had a script he was going to send to me to see if I was interested, but interested in the sense that if you like it, go out and raise the money and make it kind of thing.

And, but they were filled for the year, and if I wanted to wait another year, he'd had no promises.

But, and I didn't wanna wait another year.

And we had taken it to the Arts & Entertainment Network and they were very enthusiastic and actually offered us money.

And because the film is 60-minutes long, we thought we would have to cut it for public television.

I think it's 58:40 or something is a public television-hour.

But the Arts & Entertainment Network showed commercials and a lot of them, so they took it and they turned it into a 90-minute feature film presentation.

And they didn't dare cut one frame from our film, so I could never complain, oh, they butchered the film.

Yes, there are a lot of commercials in it, but the entire film was there to be seen.

So, it was kind of, and they showed it well over a dozen times, always in primetime.

They had little previews that they would show before other shows.

So, I can't complain at all.

They did a good job with the film.

- It was an interesting time for filmmakers and cable television because they were just sort of expanding what they were doing, was when Arts & Entertainment still focused on Arts & Entertainment.

- Yeah, Arts & Entertainment was a much more prestigious name then than it is now.

I think it still exists, but it's sort of lost among those different stations.

- And similarly that "I Was a Zombie for the F.B.I."

had its life on the USA Cable Channel or "Night Flight".

So, it's sort of interesting that during that period, something that was reaching a national audience was looking for content and working with independent filmmakers in a way that they don't quite in the same way now.

- Yeah, and of course, this film, the funding was so much for, you know, in Arts Commission, Humanities Commission, et cetera, and other community foundations, and yet the biggest outlet for it was a commercial outlet.

So, that was kind of, you know, at the moment, a kind of heartening development, like, oh, maybe these two worlds can coexist.

I don't know how true that is anymore.

[Steve laughing] - Well, Steve, I appreciate you making time to talk with me today, and I appreciate that we're gonna be able to share "The Old Forest" on WKNO with a new audience and people who remember it.

- Thanks very much.

[gentle music] [acoustic guitar chords]