Filming in Petros, Tennessee
Rocket Ride
Hollywood brings opportunities and a bit of glamour to East Tennessee.
By Mike Gibson
APRIL 27, 1998: It's the heart of a frigid mid-March afternoon. Coarse
hills lined with rows of barren trees rise like sullen giants on the
horizon to meet a slate-grey sky. Set hard and grim against the ridges, a
125-foot wrought-iron tower, an imposing contraption of rusty girders,
pulleys, and wheels inexorably cycles a chain of huge buckets in and out
of a sheet metal silo perhaps two-thirds as high.
Milling about the structure are dozens of black-faced miners in hard-hats,
grimy denim, and heavy grey coats—small-town working men, all obstinate
jawlines, thick Appalachian faces, and sturdy grits 'n' gravy paunches.
Sweating from the oppressive heat and turbid black smoke of the tipple,
they shiver as soon as they step out of the mine head and greet the
piercing wind. Only a few yards from the tower, a tall, arcing sign
announces, in hard steel font, "Olga Coal Company - Coalwood WV".
And in fact, the only clue that this place isn't really Coalwood, West
Va., circa 1957—that it's really Petros, Tenn., in 1998—is...well, there
are lots of clues actually. Like the men in headsets and movie jackets
scampering around like so many restless fire ants. Like the dozen or so
huge truck trailers scattered carelessly about the lot, their gates gaping
open to reveal everything from stacks of plywood to cartons of canned
drinks. Like the festival-sized array of stinky porta-potties lining State
Route 116 at the crew camp less than an eighth of a mile from the set.
But the period sets are truly stunning, the attendant bustle and clutter
aside. In refacing tiny Petros to look like a mid-century West Virginia
mining community, Universal Pictures hopes to capture the essence of
former NASA rocket scientist Homer Hickam's childhood home. His rise from
the dead-end prospects of a coal mining town to national prominence in the
scientific community is the subject of The Rocket Boys, a major Hollywood
feature film being shot in and around Knoxville this spring.
Boasting a cast of well-regarded actors (including quirky, talented cutie
Laura Dern, who takes the decidedly un-quirky role of the nurturing
schoolteacher) and director Joe Johnston of The Rocketeer and
Honey I Shrunk the Kids fame, the production ranks among the largest
films ever shot in the state.
Right now, however, the bewildering inconstancy of East Tennessee
springtime weather is wreaking havoc with the production schedule. It's
almost freezing, and the caustic wind has even the heavily-dressed crew
members shuffling numb feet and casting forlorn glances at the well-heated
extras' tent.
This afternoon's shoot is devoted almost entirely to a single
two-and-a-half minute scene; the precocious young Homer (played by
17-year-old actor Jake Gyllenhaal) has just seen one of his homemade
miniature rockets fly astray and scorch through the middle of the
worksite, nearly razing off a dozen heads in the process. The accident
earns him a very public dressing-down from his father (played by Chris
Cooper, the protagonist in John Sayles' critically-acclaimed Lone Star
last year), who is the mine foreman and who vehemently disapproves of his
son's absurd hobby.
Cooper has most of the lines in the scene, and he's a model of thespian
intensity as the cameras roll for take after take, his voice crescendoing
violently mid-way through each repetition of the tirade, cracking with
sudden anger and festering contempt as he calls his errant moviedom son "a
menace—and a damn thief." But with each successive shot, it seems that the
wind grows a little fiercer, the temperature a degree colder, the sky a
shade more overcast. With a series of close-ups yet to be filmed, a few
tiny, sparse, but very cold water droplets begin to fall out of the leaden
sky.
"Is it always like this around here?" asks co-producer Charles Gordon,
assessing the capricious elements with an incredulous chuckle. "It's hot.
It's cold. It's hot. It's cold. It's cloudy, then you get a burst of 90
degree sunshine."
Gordon shakes his head. It's Wednesday; the early part of the week was
mild and sunny, while the weekend saw the town lightly frosted by a
frenetic snow-flurry, a storm that left most surrounding counties
untouched.
"I thought we were coming to East Tennessee in the spring; this is more
like the Arctic," he says, tightly clutching two small hand-heaters at
waist level and shivering palpably through a heavy black Waterworld parka.
"In California, if it gets this cold, they shut everything down."
The Third Coast?
Unexpected cold fronts were about the only thing that hindered Tennessee's
effort to become a significant player in the film industry last year. 1997
saw a record 14 major motion pictures bring lights and cameras to the
Volunteer state, including the upcoming Dreamworks SKG release In Dreams
(a Neil Jordan film with Annette Bening and Aidan Quinn), the Tommy Lee
Jones/Wesley Snipes vehicle U.S. Marshals, and Francis Ford Coppola's take
on John Grisham's The Rainmaker. Even last year's D.C.-based Oscar-nominee
Wag the Dog featured a handful of scenes shot in Nashville.
All told, the Tennessee Film, Entertainment, and Music Commission
estimates that feature films brought $16.5 million in revenue to the state
last year. And 1998 is off to an even quicker start with The Rocket Boys,
the largest non-Memphis production shot entirely in Tennessee since 1984
when Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek navigated The River over in Rogersville.
Studio moguls and economic analysts believe this latest production will
drop a hefty $6 million locally before shooting wraps sometime in May.
"This is one more example of how active our film community is here,"
gushes Ann Pope, executive director of the film commission, adding that
Tennessee is in the top 10 nationally in total film/video/cable
productions. "We're a very film-friendly state."
Well, maybe. But whether or not The Rocket Boys and other recent
productions really do bode the rise of a new "Third Coast," the film
already boasts plenty of other significant—albeit less
quantifiable—accomplishments.
To dozens of local practicing and would-be actors, it provided either an
impressive résumé credential or the experience of a lifetime, a once-only
chance to bask in the opulent glow of Hollywood lights. To
single-stoplight hamlets like Petros and Oliver Springs—and jaded big-town
Knoxville, as well—it brought unparalleled spectacle: massive sets,
extensive period recreations, and a sort of gypsy carnival atmosphere that
belied the one-more-time monotony of the filming itself. (On a day when
the production took over Gay Street for an evening shoot, one onlooker
remarked, "I haven't seen so much going on downtown in years; it was like
being in a real city today.")
And to the West Coast folks who trekked down to a sleepy Southern city to
shoot a sweet family film about a coal miner's son who trumps fate, it
gave a telling glimpse into what East Tennessee has (or maybe doesn't
have) to offer should they ever get the notion to come back—things like
old-fashioned Southern hospitality and great scenery. And, of course, some
pretty goofy weather.
Why Here?
Set designer Barry Robison, one of the first members of the production
team hired by producers Gordon and Larry Franco, is arguably the man most
responsible for bringing The Rocket Boys to Knoxville, although he
gives props to the film commission's Pope and David Glasgow— "the most
incredible film commissioners in 50 states"—averring that "they really did
their homework."
After fruitless trips to Virginia and North Georgia ("they didn't feel
right") and the real town of Coalwood in West Virginia (which was "too
remote"), he visited Knoxville at Pope's behest. What he found was
near-perfect amalgam of urban vitality and rural charm, from rustic
Petros—the "perfect site for our staging of Coalwood"—to Knoxville's
quaintly aging center city, used for later scenes set in Indianapolis,
where Homer's functional model rockets earn a berth in a national science
fair.
"It's important when you shoot film that you be able to shoot as much as
possible within a certain area, without too many long-distance moves,"
explains the 45-year-old native San Franciscan, in precisely measured
tones seemingly tailor-made for NPR interviews. "The Knoxville area had
everything. It was fantastic visually, and it had a great downtown."
Robison eventually swayed Johnston and the producers. "They had just seen
West Virginia and had been very depressed by the remoteness of it," he
remembers. "I drove them down here thinking, 'Oh my god, I hope they like
it.'"
They did. And in December, the production team began the daunting work of
planning and fashioning period sets in more than a half-dozen locations in
Knox and surrounding counties. In Petros, the crew rebuilt, bolt-by-bolt,
an old mining tower disassembled from a dormant Knoxville excavation. They
also dumped tons of crumbled asphalt in the vicinity of the newly-erected
tower and refaced with weathered brick and tin paneling a cluster of old
Petros buildings (a couple more were built outright) to recreate the Olga
Coal Company's base of operations, complete with machine shop, wash house,
first aid station, and post office. "A logistical nightmare," observes
publicist Dave Fulton, a veteran of the notoriously problematic
Waterworld shoot.
The team also brought an old 1911 steam locomotive up from the Tennessee
Valley Railroad Museum in Chattanooga; they rented a handful of buildings
in Oliver Springs and Harriman—many of which house active businesses—and
recast them, with new storefronts and signs, as the hub of downtown
Coalwood; they removed the asbestos and lead paint from the old Brownlow
school in Knoxville and repaired faulty wiring in the marquis lights of
the Tennessee Theatre.
Says local independent producer Jeff Talman, hired as an assistant
location manager for the film, the logistical impact of the project can be
gauged through any number of small but telling measures: hundreds of hours
of security purchased from area police forces, more than $10,000 spent on
propane gas, nearly 100 cars rented, more than $1,000 expended just for
signs giving directions to the sets. "The scope of the thing really knocks
you out," says Talman. "It's like trickle-down theory at work."
The Big Break
In terms of human resources, Fulton says the movie employed more than
2,000 local extras and actors, as well as drawing around 60 percent of its
200-man crew from the ranks of area technicians and laborers. For most of
the extras, that meant attending one of two February casting calls, one in
Oliver Springs and one in Knoxville.
Jason Dean, a 26-year-old restaurant manager (at Charlie Pepper's on
Cumberland Avenue) and aspiring local actor, recalls the freezing
temperatures that he and nearly 1,000 other hopefuls endured (some for
nearly three hours) waiting outside Oliver Springs High School in a line
that snaked for some 500 yards.
"Lots of people were there just for fun—lots of business men who took the
day off for the heck of it," says Dean, whose clean-cut All-American looks
earned him his first acting job, in a national public service
announcement, while he was still a senior at Central High School. "Lots of
high school kids. Then there were those few of us there looking to be
discovered."
After submitting a photo and sitting for a brief interview, Dean found
himself among the chosen; he landed a spot as a featured extra, playing a
newspaper reporter covering the Indianapolis science fair, a role that was
originally intended to be a speaking part. Dean's lines hit the
cutting-room floor before he even arrived for his first day of shooting.
Nonetheless, he expects that his character will be prominent—if silent—in
more than one scene.
Dean was disappointed by the elimination of his speaking part; his
paycheck doubtless eased some of the pain. Extras like Justin Whitsett, an
18-year-old senior at Oak Ridge High School, earned $500 to $600 for a
day's work—sometimes more depending on their classification and whether
they remained on set longer than eight hours.
"There were lots of extras from the high school, some of them gone a whole
week, getting paid for mostly standing around," says Whitsett, whose own
part, as a Coalwood teen known simply as the Kid, called for a short line
("Hey Rocket Boy, Mars is that way.") "One of my buddies said, 'I feel
like I'm taking advantage of them.' I said, 'That's what you're supposed
to do; you're an actor.'"
For his single day of filming in Oliver Springs, Whitsett was given a
private dressing room, small but well-furnished with a couch, television,
and sound system. "I was taking pictures the whole time and trying to hide
it so people wouldn't think I was a dork," laughs Whitsett, who landed his
role through the local Talent Trek agency.
"I was treated like one of the other stars; no one knew I was not brought
in for this movie from L.A., and I sure wasn't going to let on," says
Donald Thorne, a school teacher at Halls Middle and a veteran of several
local acting troupes. Also a Talent Trek client, the 43-year-old part-time
thespian was cast as Coalwood's senior law enforcement official (a state
trooper), a plumb assignment that afforded him four scenes, with speaking
parts in each, including a shot at Brownlow where his character arrests
Homer and three friends on the suspicion that one of their rocket launches
may have triggered a forest fire.
(The trooper's accusation spurs a heated exchange with school teacher
Dern, the boys' staunchest defender. Thorne describes Dern, the movie's
chief source of starpower, as "a cute little small blonde woman; very
nice. She was very giving and willing to help you in a scene.")
Hollywood meets Petros
For Dave Fulton, leaving his Los Angeles home for a shoot in the rural
South was less a matter of culture shock than routine; his last movie, the
recent Kevin Costner epic The Postman, was staged in a remote
village in Washington two hours from Spokane, a town of 200 accessible by
a single one-lane road. "You end up shooting in lots of strange places,"
says Fulton, a paunchy, affably sardonic sort in his early 40s.
"When you have any kind of culture clash on a set, it's more often from
the locals," he continues. A former journalist and editor of Cashbox
magazine, Fulton is a freelance publicist; he travels to perhaps three
motion picture sets a year, hired by major studios like Universal to
navigate the often-perilous straits of media relations—one of many strange
cogs in the odd machine that is a major motion picture production.
"People are always surprised at the scope of things," he says. "They think
filmmaking is just a matter of pointing a camera at an actor. When they
find out there's a lot more time and trouble involved, you occasionally
have differences of opinion."
So says Harriman business man and property owner Frank Williams, who
leased his downtown Harriman building space, home to his own Odds and Ends
Manufacturing—a fold-out hat company—as well as a karate school and a
child's clothing store (which had to close for the week), to the
production. He's less than enthusiastic in appraising the makeover,
complete with new paint and signage, the Rocket Boys crew performed in
recasting the storefronts as a lawyer's quarters, a bail bondsman's
office, and a restaurant. "They painted one of the buildings a putrid
chartreuse," he says sourly.
"When they come in, they consume you; they take right over," he says in a
pinched backwoodsy drawl. "They're nice as they could be and they pay for
what they do. But if it was coming again I'd say 'no.' I wouldn't want the
mess again."
Which points at the dirty little secret of movie-making: that the shooting
itself is often inconvenient, tedious, and largely bereft of the glamour
and excitement usually associated with the business. "It disrupts some
things when we come into these towns and shoot," admits Gordon. "People
think that when a movie comes in, it'll be a great thing. Then you watch
for eight hours, and nothing much is happening, and you still can't get to
your house. That's when people start thinking, 'Oh my god! This goes on
for another month.'"
It's 6 p.m. on Gay Street. A nearly quarter-mile stretch of Knoxville's
version of Main Street is cordoned off, accessible only to foot traffic.
Another veritable ant colony of movie folk is swarming downtown, taping
bulky aggregates of wires to streets, hanging cartoony period signs
("Indianapolis Business District", "Cocktail Lounge"), orchestrating a
fleet of '50s-era automobiles as they putter down Gay and park along
either side of the avenue—hulking dinosaurs from the Steel Age of cars,
all wall-of-chrome bumpers, palatial trunks, and pool-sized hoods.
Upon exiting his well-preserved navy blue mid-'50s Chevy, one wintry old
salt looks back on the sparkling giant with paternal affection. "Got out
of the war and bought it for $1,400," he tells curious onlookers. He and
dozens of other vintage car owners were solicited via fliers and newspaper
ads in early spring.
"I thought Lord-God Almighty; I'll never pay this thing off—worried myself
sick about it," he continues. Then he sighs, smiles and adds, "Now here
she is—400,000 miles."
This latest transformation—from downtown Knox, 1998, to downtown
Indianapolis in 1957—is a curious one. The older buildings of Knoxville's
central business district seemed largely well-suited to the task of
subbing for those of a city from another era, but the anachronisms are
still glaring—Dogwood Arts murals lingering behind '50's street signs,
aged buildings with gleaming modern storefronts.
By 9 p.m., however, with most of the street cast in shadow and the tiny
stretch in front of the Tennessee Theatre (which has been renamed Ennesse,
via strategic marquee manipulation) bathed in the celestial glow of a
half-dozen spotlights, there's enough Hollywood magic in the air of this
warm April night that the alchemy seems complete.
With a sizable crowd of onlookers pooled in the grass behind the bus stop
next to First American, the crew runs through a handful of shots, short
street scenes—awestruck Homer wandering the busy sidewalks of downtown
Indy.
The action soon lapses into tedious repetition, ultimately less absorbing
than watching the metamorphosis itself. But something about the
evening—the mild weather, the beguiling '50s flourishes, the dazzling
suffusion of light in the midst of the looming darkness—holds everyone
rapt for the better part of the six-hour shoot.
Asked if The Rocket Boys holds any sort of promise for the state's (and
the city's) future in showbiz, Gordon is encouraging. "It's a viable area.
Attracting movies mostly comes down to what the material calls for, and
this is an area with a lot of different looks to it. And Hollywood is a
small town. People hear you shot in Knoxville and ask 'How was it?' The
more you make, the better you are.
"My only complaint has been the weather; it boned us time and time again,"
he says. "We really hit it perfect tonight, though. This is beautiful." He
pauses and looks skyward, smiling, drinking in the sweetness of the still
night air. The sky is cloudless, lovely, tiny flecks of starlight on a
blanket of warm indigo.
By 9 a.m. the following morning, nearly all traces of filming have been
removed from downtown—the signs, the cars, the thick streetside
entanglements of cable. Even the missing letters on the theatre marquee
are back in their rightful place. And all not a moment too soon, as the
entire city is now enveloped in the dreary gray throes of a kinghell
dousing, a long, hard rain that promises not to let up for days to come.
This article is reproduced from:
http://weeklywire.com/ww/04-27-98/knox_feat.html
We are not sure about the history of this article. Mike Gibson
appears to have worked as a reporter for Metro Pulse in Knoxville.
This article, however, was found on Weekly Wire which is a web site that's
no longer updated in Tucson, Arizona. We enjoyed reading the
article; since there seemed to be a good possibility that this article
might one day vanish into cyberspace, we thought it best to copy it here.