Play channel magazine special edition issue 7 (1) by Keith Baker

Play Channel Magazine

Issue 7

Special Edition

Editor's Note This Issue is a sad but happy one. We have some great content from some awesome people but it is sad because we lost to excellent staff members. Stephanie Khio and Delise Danielle, both will be missed. They move on to bigger and briter futurs and we wihs them well in thier endeavors. Stephanie had a few words to say as she exited from her post as editor.

Though it saddens me to be leaving the Play Channel Team after a wonderful 4 months, I am incredibly thankful to have had this opportunity to work with such great people. I remember getting a phone call from CEO and Editor-in-Chief, Keith Baker, while sitting in an empty classroom at Roosevelt University, wondering where my career would lead me. I didn't realize that that was the first day of a great journey and that this opportunity would open so many doors for me. As Play Channel's Editor, I not only got to communicate with people of different fields and ages, but also learn from their stories and articles. Overall, I am leaving Play Channel with gratitude, and it is all thanks to Keith for giving me the liberty to make the magazine what I desired it to be. This magazine has grown so much from when I first started and I wish the current and future staff with the best of luck in their endeavors.

Stephanie Khio-Exiting Editor

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We have a ton of new content in this issue as well as some great people writing it. I want to thank all the new people for joining us and making this issue and future issues the best entertainment can give. Department contacts

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WHATS IN TH

38-45 Beauty spotlight Jamie Watts

HIS ISSUE

40-51

Brant Hadfield

Over the course of two meetings, Brant Hadfield proved to be a gracious host. Accomplished in both film and television, he is a man of many skills: A pilot who first soloed on his 16th birthday, licensed on his 17th; news photographer and editor; stints shooting a feature on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; shooting and editing The Great Race for Speed Channel for 3 years; shooting and editing news stories for a CBS affiliate in Peoria and the ABC affiliate in St. Louis. He frequently worked with skeletal crews or none at all, and got most of his training on the job, through a lot of personal research, and determination. Raised in Chesterfield, he graduated from Valparaiso University and began his film career shooting Porter County Cops in Indiana. He founded Motionpath Productions in 2006. His transition to film came from a suggestion from a friend that he should quit working for others. She suggested he buy a camera and do his own thing, for the sake of art, instead of using his talent for making others money. All that background ultimately led to The Battle of Island Mound. We began with his short film, The Last Legend. Neil McDonald: McDonald: How did The Last Legend develop? Brant Hadfield: Hadfield: I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t even own a camera until 2009, when my friend suggested I start doing my own projects. With that, I got a Letus 35mm adapter, which allowed for greater artistic expression through depth of field. I was doing some test shots at Kuhs Farm, north of Spanish Lake, which led me to want to develop a story around that footage. Principal shooting was that summer. That place literally has changed my life. A good friend of mine inherited the property, and wanted to share the property with people she knew. The light there is incredible. The sun sends light through these 100 year old windows in this barn, and the light in there bounces around off the patina of the old wood. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just no studio that can reproduce that.

BH: There’s an ethereal quality that I really like. Oddly, that scene was the only one where I used any artificial lighting, and that was to use a reflector to bounce the natural light back into the barn. Other than that, the whole film was natural light. NM: And the story is pretty engaging, too. A descendant of Jesse James, in recent years, comes to a remote farm searching for Jesse’s lost safe, where she meets the current tenants. They’re not exactly a welcoming pair. BG: It all evolved naturally from things we saw at the farm during the test shoot. There just happened to be a young woman with a friend doing some shots for a photography class, and I kind of just tagged along. And I directed the woman to walk along as if she was looking for something, and it was compelling seeing her expressions as she walked through the fields and through tree limbs. An old safe had been found out in the woods there some time before, and they dragged it out with a tractor. It looked like something Jesse James would have had, it looked that old. So I got this idea of an ethereal, mysterious theme of the end of the Old West tied to modern time. NM: That was Danielle Estopare, who played the young woman in the film? BH: Yes, and her friend was Peggy Sue McCloskey. I needed Peggy Sue for a kind of threatening character. We only had three weeks before the film festival, so I added a little “crazy” to her, which made it easier. It was kind of a Southern, rural scene, so we had her obsessed with Patsy Cline, she even had a Patsy Cline shrine, and it worked with that music reverberating in the barn. It really worked with Peggy Sue’s character accusing Danielle’s character of unsuccessfully impersonating Patsy Cline. NM: You also wanted Eric O’Neill’s character to appear somewhat threatening, and you captured his wary, suspicious look so well when Danielle pulled up into the driveway. BH: It looked real. I thought it was how someone would react when a stranger pulls into your driveway. You’ll stop working on your tractor or whatever and ask what this black BMW is doing in my driveway in Sikeston, MO, or wherever. I liked the shot with the tractor and the BMW, with them shaking hands in the middle, tying the two worlds together. NM: The story is largely a visual clash between past, present and future. It turns out Danielle’s character is narrating the story from years later, as the greatgranddaughter of Jesse James. I also liked the voice-over as she’s pacing off what turns out to be a memorized map that leads to the old buried safe.

off what turns out to be a memorized map that leads to the old buried safe. BH: To get that effect, I actually built a box around the safe, then put dirt and grass on it, and could put the camera below grade looking up. I knew that if I actually buried it I’d never get it out. That thing weighed about 600 pounds NM: Did you use that same farm for your film Showdown? That was another very visual short film. BH: Yes. For that one I wanted to experiment with something a little more ethereal and mysterious. Those two films are very different. The Last Legend is a little more linear, less abstract. One of the reviews of Showdown said it was the kind of pretentious filmmaking you don’t see very often anymore in short film (laughs). I just wanted to experiment with different colors and moods, especially using the actors’ facial expressions to move the story. NM: Your casting of Brock Roberts and Dave Forstner was really good for that. And you actually found someone who could speak German. BH: I wouldn’t have done it without someone who was a native speaker. Dave was actually Austrian, but he did it in his best German accent. I imagine there were numerous Austrians on the German side of WWII. When you can provide that authenticity, it bolsters the credibility of the whole project. NM: Brock has a really good look in the role of the American soldier. The switch from black and white to sepia was an effective choice as well. BH: It does start as a newsreel, obviously in black and white. From the newsreel it goes to color, in an in-between realm. When he crosses a threshold into the next realm, it turns to sepia. Brock’s performance was terrific. He had the facial expressions and tone I really wanted. He really got it. NM: It was reminiscent of old anthology series such as The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. BH: It played in the Best-Of in 2011, at the Webster Theater, and I heard someone behind me say it was like The Twilight Zone. NM: The Battle of Island Mound won Best Costumes, Best Production Design/Artistic Direction, and Best Cinematography at the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase in July, plus an invitation to the St. Louis International Film Festival. Not a bad haul. How did that project develop?

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BH: I got a request for a proposal out of the blue in my email from MO State Parks, asking if I’d be interested in doing a documentary about the First Kansas Colored Infantry. It was the first ever battle fought by African-American Union soldiers in the Civil War. I didn’t know anything about it at the time. I’d always thought the first was fought by the 54th as depicted in the movie Glory. But it wasn’t. Those were the first federal troops, but the first time African Americans fought for the Union was here in Missouri by this Kansas regiment. It struck me as rather a big deal, so I enlisted the help of a producer, who really didn’t think I had much of a chance of getting the project. But he said there’d be no harm in submitting a bid, so I finally decided to do so on the very last day before the deadline for the bid. In my proposal I said I’d focus on compelling stories of the people, or preferably focus on one soldier, rather than a group of them. That soldier would be George Washington, an escaped slave who joined the Army in Kansas. Narrowing the focus on one character always is more powerful. Documentaries tend to have a lot if interviews, pictures, photographs, and blue and red lines on a map. Interesting, but unless you’re a student of the Civil War, that might put you to sleep. I wanted this to be more like a real film. So I put the bid in on a Friday, not expecting I’d get it, and on Monday I got a call saying I’d won the bid. I hadn’t really considered the impact of getting a $25,000.00 budget and having to pay professionals. It was going to cost well beyond that. A producer friend told me, “Congratulations, and my condolences.” NM: You ran into some weather and costume problems as well. BH: It’s complicated to do a war film, especially a period piece, which relies heavily on the authenticity of the costumes. Uniforms, rifles, bayonets, all these things have to work. And for them to work you need people who can use them. They have to know how to use a 160-year-old rifle. They were exact replicas. For the soldiers, they were a bunch of high school students from Springfield. Coming up with enough people who would commit for $80.00 a head for two weekends. The first weekend was to be the battle weekend, and the second was to be at the Toothman farm, “Fort Africa.” We had to reverse that because of gratuitous rain, a monsoon actually. We had to get everyone to Prairie State Park, in the middle of nowhere, 20 miles from the Kansas border. The closest hotel is 45 minutes away, so we had to sleep those kids in the visitor’s center. We had to train them, get them into the uniforms. And I got a call 5 minutes before I headed out to the shoot, from Stormy Cox (who organized the Bushwhackers and helped with the Union cast) that we didn’t have enough hats. Luckily he had a buddy who had hats and an extra 4 uniforms, 1500 bucks. And the Fed-Ex deadline is about 10 minutes. I’m already stressed. I’m playing producer, director, cinematographer, scriptwriter. So I asked for 2 uniforms, bring the cost down to $1100.00, I mean, it’s all Monopoly money at this point. So those kids had to learn to load black powder into 1860-vintage rifles, they had to learn how to march. We had planned

they had to learn how to march. We had planned to do all that and the battle scenes that first weekend. If it hadn’t been for that monsoon, I don’t know what we would have done. So we shot the farm/Fort Africa scenes first, which allowed us to get the cast ready for the battle scenes. NM: Wasn’t the fire of the battle scene pretty significant? NM: Yeah, the fire was a huge part of the battle. We used Prairie State Park as the location, which resembled the original site of the battle, which now is primarily private farm land. Prairie State Park is the only place in the state that still has native prairie grasses, and they routinely have to burn it to keep it under control. The State had fire personnel on hand as well. After all that rain the first weekend, you couldn’t light a match out there. Even with the week’s delay, we still couldn’t get the flames that the State and I would have liked, 20 foot tall flames. But we did get some fire, fortunately. I only had one day, with all 15 of the Bushwhackers and all 15 to 18 Union soldiers. Second day I had all the soldiers and kept 3 Bushwhackers. But only one early November day with everyone, which isn’t much light. But we were able to get some beautiful sunsets. NM: You were able to shoot the whole thing over two weekends? BH: Everything but the scenes with old George and the slave exposition. And actually it was three shoot days, not four. I only used one or two takes to get what I needed. Some of the Bushwhackers had done 20 to 30 movies, and one of them told me that in some of those films they would have taken all day, maybe two days, to accomplish what I did in twenty minutes. I would have loved to have that kind of time. It was about the most stressful thing I’d ever done. NM: What a great training ground, to find what you can accomplish with severe limitations. BH: I’m really, really grateful for the people who put a huge amount of energy and passion into the project. It took all of us to pull it off, and it’s all about the subject matter. NM: Tell us a little about George Washington, the man and main subject of the film. BH: George was given as a wedding present at about two or three years old. He grew up as a slave on a hemp farm in northwest Missouri, and it wasn’t until he was about fifteen that he realized he was a slave, not simply a farm hand. Kansas was a free state, doing what it could to undermine Missouri’s economy, and was encouraging slaves to run away to Kansas. By then, George was being locked up, shackled by his owner, Jesse Williams. When he was about 22 years old, George

shackled by his owner, Jesse Williams. When he was about 22 years old, George ran in the middle of the night. He said in later years that if he hadn’t been shackled, he may never have run because it was so dangerous, bounty hunters everywhere. He ran across the frozen Missouri River in January 1862, he and several other slaves. They were taken in by abolitionists, he got a job at the docks, and he started hearing about the formation of the First Kansas Colored. His motivation was not necessarily to fight for freedom, though it may have played a part, but to legitimize his freedom. He had no official papers, and there was the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it legal to bring back runaway slaves. So he volunteered. In the fort, there was relative safety, because the bounty hunters weren’t going to raid a fort. But there is a story about a slave owner who, under the pretense of wanting to check out the fort, got to tour the fort. One of the soldiers recognized him as his former master, and told his lieutenant that he probably was looking for him. They confronted him, and the guy admitted that he was the soldier’s master, so the lieutenant had the soldier, to prove who was boss now, march him around for a couple of hours. Then told him to never come back. Those are the kinds of stories I want to weave into a feature version of the film. NM: So how did George’s story get told? BH: He told it to his daughter, Mary. Mary was Jimmy Johnson’s grandma. George died in 1931. Jimmy dedicated his life to researching his great grandfather George and the First Kansas Colored. He was one of 5 or 6 people whose contact info was given to me through the State. Incidentally, the great-great-grandson of Lieutenant Gardener, who was the commander of George’s company, actually plays Lieutenant Gardener in the film. Lieutenant Gardener gave the command to form ranks, turn around when they were being chased by 120 Bushwhackers on horseback, a truly pivotal moment in history. The Union found that Black soldiers were able to take commands and fight bravely. Previously, that had been only a theoretical and laughed-at notion. Prejudice was almost as rampant in the North as the South, with subtle differences. One of the officers, Captain Ethan Earle, in his memoir, told of a meeting with another officer, who almost threw him out of his office when he told him he was putting this company together. He was told, if the war is going so badly that you’re putting uniforms on Black people, then it isn’t worth fighting for. After the war, that same officer, who had now fought alongside Black soldiers, told Captain Earle that indeed, he was right. That’s pretty powerful. NM: It’s amazing that it took until half way through the Second World War to reintegrate the Army. BH: We’re still trying to integrate. We are where we are because of history. I realized through my research that you can’t look at any race issues that we have today in isolation. We are here because of what happened then. We are not separated from it.

NM: The unrest in Ferguson is a good example of that. BH: That’s what is so interesting about this story. There are a lot of contemporary stories and issues that still relate. It’s also a classic story of the tables turning. George the slave turned soldier, lived through several other battles, some really bad ones. George left the Army as a First Sergeant and became a really wellrespected member of the community. He bought some property in an area that was plagued with malaria, but as the story goes, Black people seemed to have a resistance to it. So they formed this colony, and there he farmed and prospered, built a big house, and raised a family. He was very patriotic. He and the other Black soldiers in the First Kansas were finally granted their full pensions around 1890, and he was very proud of that. He hosted 4th of July parties that were attended by African-Americans and whites. According to Jimmy, George was quite a ladies’ man. Around 1905, sometime after his wife had died, he was courting a lady, and took her by horse and wagon in to town to a kind of 5 and dime lunch counter. They were refused service, and he was upset enough that he organized a boycott. That cost the store enough that they changed their policy. NM: Quite the activist. BH: According to Jimmy, he even owned a car. So in the film, in the opening, you hear the sound of a horse and wagon, and then you hear the putt-putt of an old car. Again, there’s that theme of connecting the past to the present. I want people to understand we’re just not that far removed from that.

NM: And this all comes through Jimmy Johnson, George’s great-grandson? BH: That’s why it was so important to work with Jimmy on the project. When I was able to reach him he was really enthusiastic. He was really intelligent, really well-spoken, an accomplished public speaker. I was going to have him, at the beginning of the film, at the actual battle site, with his voice-over underneath. I thought that image would be really powerful, to hear his voice. But unfortunately his health really declined quickly. I did shoot the interview with him in October. I don’t know if he knew about his cancer, but when he finally did seek treatment it was way too late. And he died a week before the film premiered in Kansas City. He was from Kansas City, so it was particularly tragic when he was such a huge part of the story. But he did get to see a rough cut, and it had to be gratifying for him to know the story was getting told. He and I had developed a friendship, based on the story, and a real passion, and it is so sad that he wasn’t able to be a part of the premier the State had. He would not have only been rewarded by all that, but to be able to tell the story, from his own mouth. Imagine the Q and A after screenings, with him there. It’s a huge loss. I am just incredibly thankful that I got to do this project while he was still alive. NM: You seem pretty emotional about that. Were you close? BH: We didn’t get to socialize; there really wasn’t the time to do that. But we did share a common bond and passion for the story and a desire to get it out there. I think it meant a lot to him to find someone who felt the same way about it. I mean, the effort it took to get this all together was such a long slog. The guy who sort of discovered it, a researcher named Chris Taber, compiled a lot of research about it. But it was mostly unknown, hardly anyone knew anything about it. And Jimmy spent years in research. He was a teacher, had a doctorate in archaeology. He did a dig at George’s slave farm, and became acquainted with, I believe, the great-grandson of Jesse Miller, George’s master. From what I’ve read, and what I was told, he greeted Jimmy with some racially based unpleasantness. But through the process of Jimmy’s research, they became close. And I was told that descendants of Jesse Miller were in attendance at Jimmy’s funeral. It’s like amongst the violence and the hatred, there’s redemption. It is possible for people to change. That’s what it says to me, and that’s pretty powerful. NM: You were fortunate, too, in getting Clyde Ruffin to play Old George, and Moses Weathers to play Young George. BH: Clyde is the Drama Chair at the University of Missouri. Here’s something else. I had never seen a picture of George, and I had no idea if the guys we

else. I had never seen a picture of George, and I had no idea if the guys we chose would have any similarity. I sent a photo of Moses to Jimmy, and Jimmy said he had to do a double-take, because he looks almost exactly like young George. If you look at the facial structure and the features in the photo used in the film, the resemblance is uncanny. And Clyde isn’t too far off either as Old George. When we went to do a first read, Clyde just read a couple of lines, and I knew we had our guy. Finding the right talent for that kind of dialogue is tough, and finding someone like him who could pull it off? He’s just a natural, two or three takes at the most. We both considered reshooting his parts, me because of lighting and time issues, he because he felt he could have done even better. But I decided that at some point you have to go with what you have, and move on to the next thing. For me, that’s a feature version of the film. NM: Best of luck getting that feature going. BH: There’s something I see at every screening. There’s a common emotional response. There’s a real enthusiasm, a heartfelt response, and it’s a story that needs to be told. I think it’s a better story than Glory. NM: It really does look like the middle third, or middle quarter, of an even bigger film. BH: It really is just like just a slice out of a bigger movie. It’s so compelling. Can you imagine, showing a wedding party on this plantation in Virginia, and the doors open, with the cameras tracking behind a little three year old boy, and “Oh, this is your wedding present.” I’ve already registered a treatment, a real basic story idea, with the Writers Guild of America, back in September last year. The idea for the story is mine, but it’s an historical event. I mean, anyone could make a movie about this, but the way to tell it is mine. NM: So what is the future of The Battle of Island Mound? BH: It’s going to the St. Louis Best Of Showcase at St. Louis International Film Festival in late November. It’s also going to be shown at the new visual arts center near Grand Center in September. It’s supposed to be a spectacular venue, something that will almost be unique to St. Louis. There’s a 77-foot screen and they also have a 50-foot screen going in. It will play at the Louisville International Festival of Film, and it was accepted to screen at The Harlem International Film Festival in New York in September. It was invited to be part of the Hollywood Shorts monthly screenings in four cities. And I’m going to go for Sundance, under the wire. You’re never sure who you might run into at even the most obscure film festival, so I’m hoping to make some connections with this. Get it in front of

Get it in front of somebody who knows somebody, somebody. I’d really love to meet someone who ca to help with the feature-version screenplay. I don’ The State is going to sell the DVD to the public and the high school kids who saw a screening made a p “If I’ve never heard about this, what else don’t I kno been taught?” I just need to get the film out there,

or somebody who is an write at a very high level â&#x20AC;&#x2122;t feel qualified to do that. d get it into schools. One of poignant remark. She said, ow, what else havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t we , get people to see it.

Jamie Smiley Watts

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