Book by local author being turned into film
http://www.brewtonstandard.com/articles/2010/01/06/lifestyles/doc4b44a51171bd5434854686.txt
By Kevin Pearcey
January 6, 2010
Greenville's historic Alabama Grill will be featured in "Son of the
South," a film about Brewton native Bob Zellner's experiences during
the civil rights movement in the early 60s.
The film is being directed by Spike Lee's longtime editor Barry
Alexander Brown. Lee, himself, is executive producer.
A production crew was in Greenville on Tuesday filming at the old
café on Commerce St.
"This scene that we're doing today is a flashback scene," said Brown.
"A flashback to a lunch counter sit-in that he (Zellner) was not part
of in 1960. This scene will inter cut with another scene, which is a
non-violent workshop scene."
Students from colleges across central Alabama Troy University and
Alabama State, for example have been cast as extras for the scene,
said Brown. The result will be an artistic example on film of the
non-violent forms of protest utilized by civil rights activists
during the turbulent era, he said.
The film crew used the Ritz Theatre next door as a staging area. A
rack of vintage, 60s era clothing lined the Ritz's auditorium. Extras
waited in the sitting area drinking coffee and eating doughnuts,
while make-up artists applied just the right shades and colors to the
actors and actresses.
In the finished film Brown said the scene at the grill would occupy
between 30 seconds and one minute of screen time. But crewmembers
spent hours prepping the scene and the cast for those crucial few seconds.
"Audiences today are so sophisticated," Brown said. "You have to be
as accurate as possible."
So how did the production end up in Greenville?
Brown, who grew up in Montgomery, contacted Tommy Fell, location
coordinator at the Alabama Film Office, about needing a specific type
of environment.
"I needed a lunch counter, which is very hard to find anywhere in
America," said Brown. "He (Fell) said 'I think I got something for
you.' And when he sent the pictures I said that's it."
Brown and Lee have been friends since the famed director's early
years, when Brown edited Lee's School Daze (1988). Brown then went on
to edit other Lee projects, like Do the Right Thing (1989), Malcolm X
(1992), He Got Game (1998), and Summer of Sam (1999), among others.
What makes this project unique, said Brown, is that it is a
feature-length theatrical film focusing on the civil rights movement,
specifically one individual's experiences during the period.
According to his biography, Zellner was the son of a Ku Klux Klan
member who then went on to serve as the first white field secretary
for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
"In May of 1961 he graduated from Huntingdon College and from that
spring through that summer he had this transformation," said Brown,
"from being completely on the outside of everything that was going on
during the civil rights movement to being pulled into the very center of it."
Zellner released his memoir, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White
Southerner in the Freedom Rights Movement, in 2008. It won the
prestigious Lillian Smith Book Award.
Brown said the production crew will be shooting the rest of the film
in the summer of 2010.
The film will be released in 2011, he said.
.
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