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CommentsReal World: Branson
Three filmmakers are doing a feature-length film in Branson. Will they document the town, or deconstruct it? (Extended online version)
Early this summer, I received an unusual note from Nicole Chilton. She is the co-owner of Moxie Cinema and as such is extremely plugged in to the local film scene.
“Two talented friends are spending the summer in Branson working on a documentary,” Chilton wrote, “and based on their subject matter and something I thought I remember reading about your family, I thought they might be a good fit? The film is about two sides of Branson: the stereotypical show-loving USA and God-loving folk, and then those who live in Branson but don’t necessarily fit that mold.”
Branson is a big place (7,499 residents and 8 million visitors), and there are many suggesters, like the Chamber of Commerce, who give suggestions to people who want to make films, or any kind of media, about Branson. So I was surprised and puzzled that someone asked me for a suggestion. I wrote back to Nicole and suggested the filmmakers talk to my younger brothers, Russell and Steve Holman.
Both brothers are part of that very rare Branson species: Branson natives who grew up in Branson and who still live there between the ages of 20 and 30. The filmmakers decided to interview Russell, a little to my surprise. Russell manages to be the flower of five generations of Taney Countians without seeming very Branson-ish to the untrained eye. He’s 29 and is interested in a number of things, among them art, music from the glam/punk eras, the Hebrew language and spoofing things.
The Major Players
After talking to Russell about it, I decided to find out more about this as-yet-unnamed documentary and its makers. It turns out there are actually three of them: David Wilson, AJ Schnack and Nate Truesdell. While they hope to get their films in front of urban audiences on the coasts and/or in Europe (fancy!), they’re Midwestern guys themselves.
Wilson, 33, is from a prominent family in Columbia. His mom is former state representative Vicky Riback Wilson, Democrat of the 25th district. He has been making movies since before he graduated from Hampshire College in Massachusetts in 1996. His accomplishments include helping to create Columbia’s Ragtag Cinema in the late ’90s. In 2004, he also helped found the True/False Film Festival, a festival that attracts a horde of 18,000 film fans who descend on central Columbia from all over the country to watch screenings of independent documentaries.
AJ Schnack, 39, is from Edwardsville, Illinois. Edwardsville is a hop and a skip from the mighty Mississip’, not far from St. Louis. Schnack now lives in Los Angeles, but he graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism with a broadcast-journalism degree in 1990. He has some experience with this region, having covered the infamous SMSU/Normal Heart/AIDS play/house firebombing fiasco in the late ’80s for KOMU television. More recently, and far more famously, Schnack did a documentary called Kurt Cobain About a Son. He and the other two have also been at work on a documentary about the Democratic National Convention in Denver this past August.
Nate Truesdell, 29, is a freelance documentary filmmaker from Columbia with a degree in computer science from Mizzou. He told a Columbia newspaper in March that he’s been involved with about 10 films, including work screened at True/False and on Current TV. He works with Boxcar Films, a video-production company in Columbia that has about eight people on staff.
So What’s the Story?
A few days later, I met the filmmakers for lunch at Wilson’s choice of venue: the spiffy new Bleu Olive Mediterranean restaurant in downtown Branson’s shiny Chappy Mall. I asked them what they were up to with their film, in several different ways.
As David and AJ put it, the two of them had begun talking about a Branson film after coming to Springfield last November for a screening of Kurt Cobain About a Son. “We’re fascinated by Midwestern small-town culture, and Branson is the biggest small town in the world,” David says. David had done two films previously on small towns in Missouri, AJ explained, and that was a reason to work with him. “David’s short films had a sense of not judging or making fun of small towns,” he explains, “and there was something nice about that.”
I asked if they were going to do a Vernon, Florida job on Branson. Vernon, Florida is a 1982 documentary by Errol Morris that is well-known among documentary filmmakers. It’s about a tiny Florida panhandle town with a reputation. It features a series of interviews with Vernon, Florida residents who were simply eccentric. These included a belching turkey-hunter, an old man who traps opossums in an outdoor cage made from scrap metal, as well as an evangelical preacher who gives an entire sermon on the important meaning of the word therefore. Naturally, more conventional Vernon, Florida residents were outraged and offended to see this on the silver screen. Even 26 years later, the town is identified with the film.
“That’s an interesting example,” Wilson says. “I didn’t feel like that was a mocking film.”
“But Vernon, Florida did,” I reply. In truth, Wilson and I are both right. If you watch Vernon, Florida (it’s on Netflix!) you’ll see something pretty innocuous. But a documentary’s audience views a documentary very differently than the documentary’s subject.
“That’s absolutely not our intent,” Wilson says. He explains the difference between being the teller of a joke, however self-deprecating, and being the butt of a joke. “We’re not—we’re 100-percent not—here to make fun or poke fun or mock. We’ve had a generous warm welcoming, we wouldn’t dream of abusing that.”
“There’s a certain absurdity to just what Branson is,” Schnack says, citing the number of tourists. “Beyond the surface interpretation, it’s more complicated and interesting beneath that. In L.A. or New York, people have a very surface idea of what Branson is. We’re trying to get to a deeper level of how a town like this decides what kind of place it wants to be. We’re not trying to raise a cocked eyebrow. It’s really more about places and senses of place.”
Wilson and Schnack say they’re making efforts to interview not just show people, but people from all walks of Branson life, including but not limited to pastors, retail workers, fishing guides, seasonal lifeguards from Khazakhstan, politicians as well as the cast, crew and staff of the Magnificent 7 Show. In a town as small as Branson, everything’s linked.
If all goes well, the film will be released in a year or two. They say they have interest from European television. They hope to debut the film in a major festival. They may release it on DVD. Schnack pointed out that the documentary market is in constant flux. When Sicko and An Inconvenient Truth came out, docs were high up there, but you never know what the future holds.
Whatever happens, they expect the main audience for the film will be urban people who are “very curious about middle America.”
“I think we’re both proud, and a little bit protective, of this part of the world,” says Schnack.
WEB EXCLUSIVE CONTENT
I tagged along with the guys as they interviewed Mayor Raeanne Presley that afternoon. Schnack cites Branson’s mayor, Raeanne Presley as a show world/regular Branson overlapper. They set up their camera—a very high-end almost-professional digital gadget—in a glassy, light-filled corridor outside the mayor’s office in Branson’s city hall. (Branson’s city hall is ’80s modern, while Springfield’s is castle-like.) Mayor Presley was dressed smartly in a black blouse, white pants and black heels, unlike the filmmakers, who were all in jeans, polos and sneakers, with the exception of Wilson, who wore a Western shirt with very shiny white diamond snap buttons.
Presley was upbeat and impish when I met her. She small-talked about having been one of my grandmother’s students back in her school days. Pretty soon, her own daughter would be heading off to college in Nashville. Before she was fitted with a microphone, Presley told me it was a mystery as to what filmmakers found fascinating about her. She said that when the guys follow her around Branson with a camera, it’s sometimes a bit awkward to inform everyone in the room that they’re on microphone. “What would the world want to know about Branson?” she asks. “I probably lack the vision for that. I do get the sense that they like Branson. Kind of the whole documentary world is interesting to me. Should they get their funding secured, they’ll be here for over a year for this one two-hour film.”
The photo shoot itself was a little anticlimactic. Truesdell hauled equipment and looked very serious. Wilson perched by the camera like a graceful gazelle. The mayor stood about 15 feet away—socially awkward distance for conversation, but perfect distance for shooting—and she went into polished, public, on-the-record mode.
Schnack asked most of the questions, in a friendly, puckish way. He dwelt on the Summer Car Cruise that was coming up in the first weekend of August. The event has taken place 11 years in Branson and draws thousands of classic-car fans each year. The highlight of the event is a midnight car cruise along the Highway 76 strip and Shepherd of the Hills Expressway. Parking lots along the route fill with revelers; some of the revelers drink, and some of the drunken revelers get into fights, a phenomenon that’s earned the jokey moniker “North Arkansas Mardi Gras.” Meanwhile, alcohol sales ordinances have been an issue in Branson this year. The mayor steered the conversation from the will-there-be-lots-of-drunks subtext to the we’ve-got-it-under-control subtext. Typical press-politician dance. Happily, Presley made actual jokes. “Don’t stand by the young men and make comments about the other one’s girlfriend,” she quipped. “That’s how it usually starts.” You could see why Branson elected her. Compared to a lot of elected officials on the local level, she’s very real-person-like and not very politician-ish.
Later, when I asked the guys about why they were covering then car cruise, they said at this point they were so busy sussing out Branson’s nooks and crannies that no certain plotline for the documentary had emerged. Catching everything was important. “This could be the whole movie,” says Truesdell. As it turned out, rain roared in from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. the night of the midnight cruise—the time when most of the fisticuffs could be expected, if there were going to be any. It “literally put a damper” on any trouble, Wilson later told me over the phone. He said he and Schnack would be shooting the Democratic National Convention in Denver, and then back to Branson.
