The Southern Documentary Project
TEACHING THE NEXT GENERATION OF STORYTELLERS
Last Friday night, The Embalming was screened at the 2nd annual Tupelo Halloween Film Festival where it was awarded Best Film, Cinematography, and Actor (Rhes Low). Frank Tuttle also won Runner-up for Best Screenplay. It’s a great event and it’s always so much fun to have your film shown to an audience. We’re starting production this week on the new Halloween Film Barry so stay tuned and Happy Halloween!
– Matthew
Last weekend, my halloween short film from 2013 The Embalming was played at the Atlanta Underground Film Festival where it took home the award for best Horror Short. For a full list of winners click here. The film was written by fellow Ole Miss staff (and Karen’s hubby) Frank Tuttle who is also an award winning author. Go here to see more of Frank’s work. If you’re in Tupelo tonight, you can catch The Embalming as well as other regional horror films at the Tupelo Halloween film festival at the Link Center at 7:30pm.
We had a wonderful screening of the Toughest Job: William Winter’s Mississippi in Jackson last Thursday night to kickoff the broadcast premiere on Mississippi Public Broadcasting. Kudos to MPB for creating beautiful banners to match the poster graphics for the film. There’s an additional broadcast tonight on MPB at 8pm and a free screening in Oxford at the Overby Center on campus at 6pm. Be sure to check out our newly designed website, toughestjobmovie.com for more details.
– Matthew
Greetings from Prague, Czech Republic. We’re currently in production on a new project, documenting the Ole Miss Opera and their performance of Hamlet in the Czech Republic in the Spring. I’ve gotten the opportunity to accompany University professor Julia Aubrey who is directing the opera to Prague as she visits several opera houses to select the venue. It’s truly a remarkable place. Cobblestone streets, castles popping up over the skyline, and gold accents on almost every building. You’d almost think you had found yourself in some gigantic medieval attraction at Disney World but with far better beer!
Today, we visited a beautiful opera house in the southern part of the city that will most likely be the location of the performance. It was a truly beautiful theatre with ornate decorative walls over 200 years old. It’s the kind of place that would make even the most seasoned performer gasp.
Tomorrow, we’re traveling a few hours into the country to a small village where we’ll interview the composer of the opera, an Ole Miss graduate from 1962 named Nancy Van DeVate who has established a truly world class career in Vienna as a composer. We’ve had the great fortune of having two wonderful representatives of the managing group who are assisting the University with the logistics of performing in the Czech Republic to serve as our unofficial tour guides. Needless to say, we have visited secret back rooms of wine stores used during the Communist regime to discuss forbidden topics and been treated to first hand accounts of the tense work performed around the country during the Velvet Revolution over goulash and potato dumplings. But, I digress. This is a magical place and a wonderful opportunity to document a very unique upcoming outreach event for the University.
– Matthew
Sneak a birds-eye preview of Rex’s latest film. Coming Soon.
Media and Documentary Projects and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture were pleased to have been able to help sponsor Janisse Ray’s Earth Day Lecture as the last event in the Environmental Studies Spring Film and Lecture Series. And we are happy to post the audio from that lecture here. Enjoy Janisse Ray as she is introduced by Ann Fisher-Wirth, director of the University of Mississippi Environmental Studies Minor.
Greetings from Seminole, Texas! Today was my third day of shooting for the documentary about Texas High School One Act Play competitions. It’s been a wonderful experience so far to meet these incredibly talented and passionate students involved in Seminole’s One-Act and see the tremendous amount of preparation that goes into competing at the unique theatrical event. This Thursday is the district meet, the first step toward their goal of advancing to the state competition in Austin. An interesting development has arisen in that the nearby rival school Andrews Texas is performing the exact same play as Seminole. It should make for a very interesting performance on Thursday.
Today was spent both at the theatre and also around Seminole, grabbing footage around town as well as experimenting with time-lapse shots to capture the truly unique images of the West Texas landscape. I had some great help today from dad driving me around town to different spots.
Tomorrow, I’ll be finishing my interviews with the students and directors as well as touring the construction site of the new performing arts center currently being built at the High School. Check back tomorrow for more updates.
– Matthew
16 hours west of Oxford is the small town of Seminole, TX. Home to farmers, oil rig workers, teachers, and preachers. I’ll be here all week documenting the high school theatre department as the students prepare for the district One-Act play competition. This state-wide event is one of the largest theatrical competitions in the world boasting some 200,000 student participants from across the state with winners from each district advancing to regionals, area, and finally the state competition in Austin.
Seminole has qualified for state the last several years but has never won. I hope to document the story of these small-town kids with big-time dreams as they hope to make a name for themselves as actors.
Check back everyday this week as I talk about the day’s footage. Today’s theme was driving. 
-Matthew
Cartha DeLoach, the former deputy director of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover passed away yesterday in his home in South Carolina at the age of 92. I had the privilege of interviewing him last year for our documentary on the integration of Ole Miss. He was incredibly kind and warm to us that day and shared wonderful memories of this storied career including his lead investigation into the search for the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr. He also placed the call to President Lyndon Johnson in in 1964 to tell him that the bodies of civil rights workers Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman had been found in Mississippi.
In 2011, he served as consultant for Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar”. It was such a pleasure to meet him and be able to include his words in the movie. I posted this additional interview we shot with University Legal Studies Professor Carl Jensen a few weeks ago but in case you missed it:
Cartha DeLoach Interview from UM Media Documentary Projects on Vimeo.
This past week, students from Pepperdine University spent their Spring Break visiting universities in the South as part of their leadership class talking to students, faculty, and staff about social action and justice. I had the privilege of meeting with the group for about an hour talking about my latest documentary Rebels: James Meredith & the Integration of Ole Miss. They were a great bunch of students and it was a pleasure sharing with them where the University was and where it is today.
We were at the Tad Pad last night filming footage for an upcoming music video of the Ole Miss student duo King Kobraz. Their earlier song about Ole Miss Football standout Donte Moncrief coined the popular chant: Feed Moncrief! This time around, the King Kobras set their sights on Ole Miss basketball. The line of students waiting to get in to nab their seats for the Kentucky game and be apart of the video was crazy. We filmed a few shots before the game and were able to shoot two takes of the song during halftime in front of a sold out audience. Although the Rebels lost the game, it was a fun night for the students and great opportunity for the popular band. For more information on the spot check out olemisssports.com.
Back in June, I travelled down to the home of retired F.B.I. deputy director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach to interview him for our documentary film Rebels: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss. While we were there, Center for Intelligence and Security Studies Director and retired F.B.I. agent Carl Jensen sat down with Mr. DeLoach as he looked back on his storied career in the bureau and the events that shaped the country during the 60’s and 70’s.
For more information on CISS click here.
Last evening, I spent some time at the Powerhouse Theatre giving a filmmaking workshop to an energetic group of middle school acting students. We talked about some of the types of shots you do when making a movie and how lighting can improve the quality and feel of your image. Here’s a test we did in the class to show the difference between filming with available light and lighting the actor.
Even though the new cinema cameras have truly incredible low light shooting capabilities, the trade-offs for not lighting at all are muddy, grainy images, and very unflattering shadows and highlights. Sometimes this shooting style can be appropriate for the story, however when possible, I like to use lights to give my images a cleaner look that’s easier to expose to.
Overall, it was a fun night and a great chance to share some of my passion for filmmaking with Oxford’s talented kids. For more inforamation on upcoming events and classes at the Powerhouse click here.
-Matthew
Today was the final day of filming at Oxford Elementary as we interviewed over 40 third graders about the film they watched yesterday and what they would ask Bonnie Consolo, the woman born with no arms, if they met her. It was tight quarters but I wanted to use our new silk scrim to diffuse the key light. In addition, I used our 1×1 LED light with a Tungsten gel as the back light, crammed just outside the frame. Since it was such a small room, I decided to use our Canon 5D to try an optimize the depth of field as much as possible and make the background fall off. This of course meant recording seperate audio which is a little bit of a pain in post but should make for a stronger image.
Overall, it was a lot of fun to listen to the kids talk about their drawings and what it would be like to live with that kind of disability. We finished the day’s shoot with Dr. Payne introducing the segment outside the building. It was a long day but hopefully the short will be a funny and educational piece. Check back soon for the finished film.
-Matthew
We were filming today at Oxford Middle School for the first of two days of taping. As a small part of an extensive look at the history of special education in America, two classes of Oxford Middle School third graders were shown the award winning 1975 film A Day in the Life of Bonnie Consolo. The documentary tells the story of a suburban housewife and mother who goes about her day like any one else. She gets her kids ready for school. She packs their lunches. She cleans the house and drives to the store to pick up a few groceries that she cooks later that evening. Everything is precisely the same except for the fact that Bonnie Consolo was born with no arms. Her incredible story of perseverance in spite of her handicap still teaches lessons today. It was truly remarkable to see the children’s faces in the class today as they witnessed Bonnie do all the mundane tasks that we take for granted all with her legs and toes.
After the film, the students were asked to draw a picture of what stood out the most to them during the movie and the results were hilarious and poignantly honest. Tomorrow, we will be back at the school taping interviews with the students on what they thought of Bonnie and what it would be like to live with that kind of disability.
This History of Special Education project is written and produced by Dr. James Payne of the Ole Miss School of Education with production support by Media and Documentary Projects. Check back tomorrow for more info about the project as well as some images of the drawings the students colored.
-Matthew
MDP Senior Producer Joe York was recently interviewed on MPB for the Mississippi Arts Hour by our old friend and former student Mary Margaret Miller White. Thanks to Mary Margaret and all our friends at the Mississippi Arts Commission.
Click on the link below to hear the interview.
It’s been a while since I’ve updated the blog so I thought I’d share a little of what became of our documentary feature Rebels: James Meredith & the Integration of Ole Miss. After a truly olympian marathon editing process, the film premiered to a packed house at the Gertrude C. Ford Center for the Performing Arts on Sunday, September 30th. Heavy rains forced the planned memorial service and history walk into the Ford Center before the screening which, I believe, turned out to be a good thing for us in terms of linking the film showing to the overall program of events that evening. Regardless of the reason, the huge auditorium was full of students, graduates, faculty, staff, and leaders from all over the state. We were able to procure a wonderful HD projector and screen to showcase the film in the highest quality possible which I give Executive Producer Andy Harper full credit for coming up with that a few days before the premiere on my whiny whim. I couldn’t have been more thrilled with the screening and the reaction we recieved from everyone was very positive.
On the same night, the film was broadcasted on television screens across Mississippi on MPB and helped commemorate the 50th anniversary of the integration in the way I had always hoped we would be able to.
Since that night, we have begun the process of exploring future outlets for the film including classrooms, festivals and additional public television screenings. We hope to have the film seen by as many people as possible which will hopefully include free web access to the film in the near future. In the meantime, to help promote the film’s website www.1962rebels.com, I am currently producing two short profiles on a few of the characters in the film whose stories truly showcase what it means to be a rebel but were unfortunately not included in the feature film due to pacing and time constraints. The first will look at 1962 Daily Mississippian Editor Sidna Brower whose bold editorials spoke out against the violence and urged acceptance by the student body. Her controversial position earned her a censure by the student body government. The next profile will tell the story of the Rev. Duncan Gray who was the Episcopal Priest of Oxford in 1962 who courageously stood up to the mob that fateful September night and attempted to stop the violence. Look for these short films in early 2013.
In addition, you can check out the IMDb page of Rebels at www.imdb.com/title/tt2464426/ . There’s not much there but it’s still fun to look at.
It’s been a great journey bringing this story to the screen. One that began honestly when I moved to Mississippi almost eight years ago and first learned of this incredible story. My hope is that the film does justice in some way to the events that transpired here 50 years ago and provides at good jumping off point for students to begin to learn about not only the history of this state, but of this country as well.
-Matthew
Hot off the presses and just in time for Halloween, please enjoy my new short film “Trick or Treat” starring Greg Earnest, Meaghin Burke, Micah Ginn, and the amazing Maddie Cavett! A huge thanks to the cast and crew including Laura Cavett, Matt Minshew, and Greg Gray for donating their time and talents for this film. A few viewing suggestions: Watch with the lights out, make sure you have plenty of candy, and don’t answer the door…whatever you do…Happy Halloween!
Last weekend, we shot this year’s addition to the annual OMTV Halloween short film series. This year’s film is called “Trick or Treat” and tells the continuing story of Todd and Margo. On their way to a Halloween party, they meet a mysterious girl.
We shot the film at the Center for the Study of Southern Studies on campus. It was a hectic all-night shoot but we were able to get everything we needed for a quick edit and premiere on Halloween night. Greg Grey, our longtime production collaborator was on hand to serve as gaffer and sound recorder. He did an amazing job shaping the lighting. Our student worker Matt Minshew worked all over the place as Assistant Camera, Assistant Director, Dolly Grip, and even Greensman! Laura Cavett was on hand to do her magic in Art Design. The cast included Meaghin Burke and Greg Earnest from last years community film, “The Show Must Go On”.
Micah Ginn delivered the performance of his career as Mr. Pumpkin Head and making her screen debut was the amazing Maddie Cavett as the creepy kid who gets the movie going.
Check back on Halloween night for the finished film!
– Matthew
James Meredith, the first African American enrolled at the University of Mississippi was in Oxford yesterday signing copies of his new memoir, A Mission from God. We documented his visit for our upcoming documentary and snagged a couple of books while we were at it!
Student worker Matt Minshew spent the morning at Special Collections in the library taking images from a newly donated collection of newspaper articles from 1962 regarding the integration of Ole Miss. These articles will provide a great framework for the timeline of events we’ll chronicle in the upcoming documentary, Rebels. Check back soon for more details.
Although we’re still in production, I wanted to share the title of Media and Documentary Projects new documentary, REBELS: James Meredith & The Integration of Ole Miss. Directed by Matthew Graves.
The hour long film tells the story of the events leading up to James Meredith’s historic integration of the University of Mississippi and the violence that rocked the campus on the night of September 30, 1962. With stories from students, faculty, staff, residents, U.S. Marshals, FBI Agents, and James Meredith himself, we examine one of great turning points in the history of civil rights in this country. REBELS will screen free to the public on the 50th anniversary of the integration, Sunday, September 30th at 8pm in the Gertrude C. Ford Center for the Performing Arts at Ole Miss. In addition, the film will be televised on Mississippi Public Broadcasting Thursday, September 26th at 8pm. For more information, visit 1962rebels.com.
Today I drove to Forest, MS to interview 1970 University of Mississippi Law School graduate Constance Slaughter Harvey. Constance was the first female African-American law student at Ole Miss and shared with me her experiences as a student and the passion she has to make real change in Mississippi which was the driving force behind her decision to attend the the University 45 years ago. She will be featured in our upcoming documentary on the legacy of 50 years of integration at Ole Miss. Check back soon for more details on this project as well as the companion documentary we’re producing on 1962 and the integration of the campus.
We continue to gather stories from people involved in the 1962 integration of the University. This week, I traveled to Hilton Head, South Carolina to speak with retired FBI Assistant to the Director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach. He was the No. 3 man for the FBI during his career in the mid 40s through early 70s. He helped re-establish the Jackson, MS field office after the murders of the three civil rights workers and the assassination of Medgar Evars. In addition, “The Hammer” as he was known, was the bureau’s liason to the White House informing Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. At 92 years young, Mr. DeLoach shared a wonderful insight into the tumultuous moments that helped shape our country. His interview will be a great addition to the project. Check back soon for more updates.
-Matthew
We’re currently producing a feature length documentary on the integration of Ole Miss for the 50th year anniversary this September. We received some snippets from 8mm footage that was shot on campus and was able to magnify and digitize the image using our lightbox. It feels like discovering some piece of hidden history looking at each frame! We’ll be collecting interviews all summer so please let us know if you have any stories from 1962 you’d like to share. Check back soon for more updates!
– Matthew
Here is our new short film “exit”. A science fiction film about a man who recieves a mysterious package on his doorstep. The title is all lower case because that makes it cool!
Special thanks to Eric Feldman, Johnny Mcphail, Matt Minshew, Melissa Graves and everyone here at Media and Documentary Projects for all their support. Enjoy!
Enjoy the latest installment in the Mississippi Stories series from MDP’s Rex Jones. Here Rex features Rev. Samuel “Billy” Kyles, a Shelby, MS native and pastor of the Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis. Rev. Kyles tells his story of being on the Lorraine Motel balcony with Martin Luther King, Jr. when Dr. King was assassinated.
Next week, we’ll premiere a new short film “Exit” directed by Matthew Graves. It’s a short science fiction film about a man who receives a mysterious package on his door step. Check back next Friday for the finished film.
Rex Jones has finished the second of his Mississippi Stories. This time Rex paints a portrait of Lee McCarty of McCarty’s Pottery in Merigold, Mississippi. Keep checking back for future installments in this series that will cover the state over the next year.
Rex is off to a great start with his new series on Mississippi Stories with one already “in the can.” Over the next year Rex will be taking our beloved “Rango” all across the state (and occasionally onto Beale Street, if necessary) looking for stories of interesting people and events so check back here for his updates and the finished films.
Pictured below are his two latest interviews with The Reverend Samuel “Billy” Kyles and Lyman Aldrich.
