Franklin, NC
Film
Mister, this town ain’t big enough for your extended metaphor: A review of the movie “Appaloosa”
“Ah, vanity. Of the handful of gin-u-wine American truths, Ed Harris’ latest film exemplifies two. Both are rooted in old-school machismo, and both make Appaloosa a rough ride.“
Bill buries his lead: A review of the movie “Religulous”
“Some of us like Bill Maher. The rest of us think he’s kind of a jerk. No matter how you feel about the host of “Real Time” and “Politically Incorrect”, chances are you feel that particular way because Maher is always, unabashedly himself. He makes no apologies for his own insufferability-or any one else’s for that matter.”
Mountain movies
Last modified on 2008-08-25 20:01:18 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
SYLVA-Once, when movie-making was more of a production than it is now (and when I was more easily impressed), it was with amazement and eagerness that friends and family would get ourselves to the theater if a place we knew was put to use during filming.
When Burt Reynolds and crew haunted Jackson County in the early seventies, during the filming of Deliverance, even those of us in the first grade picked up on the excitement. Much later, when we were actually allowed to watch the movie, and even later than that, when Reynolds told a Tonight Show audience that the Parkway Restaurant in Sylva (now O’Malley’s) was the “worst restaurant he’d ever been in” (as I recall, he’d rented the private dining room, but the owners wouldn’t let him set up a bar), the plot was just sweetened.
In the late seventies, a good film, Being There, starring Peter Sellers, was filmed at Biltmore, and a year or two afterwards Biltmore played host again, this time to an unfortunate Tim Conway and Don Knotts vehicle called Private Eyes.
By the late eighties and early nineties, a succession of pop hits, including Bull Durham, Dirty Dancing and Last of the Mohicans had been filmed hereabouts. Two local boys, Nick Searcy and Sean Bridges, were working their way through Western’s drama department and on toward the silver screen, and movies had become much easier to make.
It’s still just as hard to make substantive ones, though, so that’s why it’s satisfying to see Western make the effort to bring the 2008-09 Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers to Cullowhee.
More on that tour here.
More on mountain movie making from DigitalHeritage.org here.
Meet the new head of Western’s stage and screen department here.