28
entertainment
Lights, Camera, Clay Pruitt, Brandon Chase Goldsmith, Jennifer Burchett
ACTION words Dwain Hebda IMAGEs Jennifer Burchett
AS AN ARTIST ,
Brandon Chase
Goldsmith sees things other people don’t see. As a documentary film maker, he finds many of those things in the places and people right under the noses of the rest of us. Take his adopted hometown of Fort Smith, a place many Arkansans regard only for its frontier and military pedigree. Brandon appreciates this side of the community’s story as much as the next person, but he’ll see that and raise you a rich heritage in the arts, too. In fact, he says, you can’t talk about one without talking about the other. “Fort Smith has this history of the arts in the downtown area,” he says. “During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the steam ferries and the trains brought the opera houses and the theatres to town. “Later, when we had the Fort Chaffee military base, downtown Fort Smith was littered with movie theaters. If you see any old building with an ‘L’ on it, that’s an old movie theater. And you can see, they are everywhere downtown. When the military base closed, it killed all of the theaters.” Brandon talks about such things with the gravitas of a scholar and the zeal of a tent preacher. It’s a unique gift, this ability to simultaneously educate and inspire his audience, that makes him a compelling film maker. And it’s the fife with which he has led a community band of similarly DOSOUTHMAGAZINE
