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My Rendezvous with Gene Hackmanby Beth Boswell Jacks
About this time six years ago I was sweeping my kitchen floor when the phone rang. I figured the caller who was interrupting my domestic chores was probably a pestering telemarketer, but instead I heard the voice of my friend Cathy asking if I wanted to do something interesting the next week . . . like, be a movie star.
Well, "movie star" has always had a ring to it. Visions of little Breck Shampoo pictures I once carefully cut from magazines back in my childhood danced in my head -- Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck, Ann Miller, June Allyson. Glamorous women. I could manage such a thing.
"Sure," I said. I was prepared to answer quickly because I knew the Castlerock movie folks were coming to town to shoot John Grisham's "The Chamber." And I knew, actress-wannabe that I am, only a brief time would pass before the casting people begged me to join Gene Hackman, Faye Dunnaway and Chris O'Donnell in this film.
Turned out Cathy was joshing. She was phoning from the school superintendent's office, where the movie "getters" had called looking for a tutor for the children on the set. Would I possibly settle, she asked, for "Tutor-On-The-Set" rather than "Movie Star?"
Reluctantly, I agreed, knowing that sometimes one has to get a foot in the door in order, eventually, to tippy-toe into the spotlight.
So, Cathy proceeded with instructions. I was to report to a location out from Itta Bena, Mississippi, at 7 a.m. on Tuesday morning. Itta Bena? "Yep," she told me. That was where the location headquarters -- the meal tents, the dressing rooms, the administrative trailers -- would be. We'd meet there and then pile into buses to drive to the shoot waaaay out in the boonies. Out in the boonies from Itta Bena? This was going to be interesting, all right.
There was no sleeping the night before. This was my chance. My big break. Cinema Cinderella was heading for the ball . . . so to speak.
Next morning I was raring to go. I left the house around 6 and headed for Itta Bena. Arriving in this tiny Delta town, I had no trouble finding the location. There were more tents and trailers sitting in the cotton gin parking lot than Itta Beans had ever seen in their lives, I wager. More than I'd ever seen, for sure -- but you know how Hollywood overdoes everything.
We got on the yellow school bus and rode for miles. And miles. And have I mentioned the temperature was hovering around 30 degrees? It was. There was no heat on that icebox of a bus, and I was shaking anyway from nerves and excitement. Gene Hackman was waiting for me.
We finally reached the house where filming was to take place. Scheduled to be shot was the opening scene of the movie where Hackman storms out the front door with a shotgun and blasts a guy. Pretty standard fare as movies go. But this meant Hackman spent a lot of time inside the house. With me. And with fifty other people -- the skinny wardrobe mistress, the German hairdresser, a dozen runny-nosed children and their mothers, several adult extras, and a bunch of production assistants pulling cords around.
As the Tutor-On-The-Set, I was to baby-sit the children inside the house. Wrapped in blankets, we all huddled in front of the one space heater. I had been smart enough to wear hubby G-Man's wool hunting cap, a pair of insulated gloves, and several layers of sweaters and jackets. Topped with a couple of blankets, I looked mysteriously chic, so I wasn?t surprised when, peeping from my woolen folds, I spied Gene Hackman looking at me from across the room.
He never approached me. Too shy, I guess. But at the time I harbored the fantasy that this great actor relished reshooting the scene over and over so he could get back into that house where I was holding court in front of the space heater.
I realize now he was probably studying my hunkered-up self, trying to decide if that shivering knot of wool hogging the heater was human . . . or a pile of fuzzy blankets with a long nose.
I never found out. After a gazillion takes, Hackman shot the guy and left. So I left too. I was freezing slap to death and wasn't that set on being a movie star anyway. I resigned my tutor position the next day.
That was quite enough excitement for 1996. I marked it down.
Beth Boswell Jacks is the editor of USADEEPSOUTH. She writes a newspaper column titled Snippets and is the author of a book about sports and race relations in the Mississippi Delta [Grit, Guts, and Baseball]. Jacks is a regular contributor to children's magazines and small journals.
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Read about Beth's SNIPPETS books -- two collections of her columns.
Contact: bethjacks@hotmail.com
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FROM: Tom Givens
When I was living and working out of Memphis, John Bobb, our Hearing Office Manager, lived in Holly Springs. He got in thick with the people producing the movie "Heart of Dixie" starring Ally Sheedy and Treat Williams. It was filmed in Holly Springs and Oxford. He arranged for anyone in our office to be extras, and our pay would go to charity. So we showed up on a Saturday at the crack of dawn for our day in the cinema. It took them all day to do two takes; there was a political speech, parade, and demonstration, all of which wound up on the cutting room floor. I gained a new respect for movie actors. That's hard work.
FROM: Steve
I just read about your 'moving' movie experience as tutor for a day as well as Bob Civin's article on his return trip(s) to Mississippi and now I have my customary hankerin' for some real southern-fried chicken. And here I sit, a good ten or twelve thousand miles away.
Ah well. Here's hoping you and yours at USA Deep South continue to produce more of your southern-fried experiences.
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