Film
The Sundance Kid
UT professor Paul Stekler's documentary about George Wallace could bring him recognition now, recognition tomorrow, recognition forever.
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Stekler sees Wallace and his views about race relations as a metaphor for contemporary politics. "We live in a country that's still very far from working out its problems over race after two hundred-plus years," he says, "where Wallace's politics are pretty easily seen in the rhetoric of today's presidential politics."
Although two of Wallace's daughters did not participate, Peggy Wallace Kennedy, who appears in the film with her older brother, George, Jr., says she and her husband, Mark, had no qualms about the documentary. "We just kind of opened up to Paul," says Kennedy, who lives in Montgomery, Alabama. "I trusted him, and I think he considers us friends." Kennedy and her husband had planned to travel to Utah for the festival, but her fiftieth birthday celebration intervened. "I actually took the schedule to the beach with me," she says with an embarrassed laugh. "It may sound juvenile, but every day at that particular time when the film played, I was praying that everything was going well for them."
Stekler had always been fascinated by Wallace's career, but it wasn't until 1985 that a chance encounter with a PBS researcher during the promotion of his first film, Hands That Pick Cotton, introduced him to the Wallace family's collection of raw archival footage. Stekler was immediately captivated by Wallace's dynamic on-screen presence. He and McCabe started pre-production on Settin' the Woods on Fire in 1994, and last March they took a rough cut to Boston to show PBS executives and make their case for a three-hour documentary that would be broadcast on one night as a special presentation. After a tense meeting, the executives agreed. Months later, however, they reversed their decision and announced that they would air the documentary in two parts. "A three-hour block about George Wallace would have been more of a challenge for an audience," explains Samels, who says the decision was influenced by how other three-hour programs had fared with audiences over the years.
At first Stekler and McCabe were angry about the decision, but at Sundance, Stekler was philosophical. Because they consented to split the film in two, he said, PBS let them have two extra months to edit. Everyone agreed that Part 1 should end in 1968, just after the death of Wallace's first wife, Lurleen, who campaigned for and won the governorship of Alabama so that her husband — who by law could not succeed himself — could retain political control of the state. At the same time, Wallace was embarking on his first campaign for the presidency. Samels thinks that dividing the film at this point is the key to sustaining an audience's interest, which is crucial in this age of channel surfing. "We had both an emotional ending to night one and a political cliff-hanger to propel us into night two," he says.
A thornier issue was the documentary's voice-over narration. Though many viewers associate the authoritative voice of David McCullough with The American Experience, both Stekler and McCabe wanted something different. After hearing Lyle Lovett read at a tribute to Horton Foote, Stekler decided the singer's voice had the right Southern cadence to balance Wallace's fiery rhetoric. "I'm a fan of his as an actor, and I was really touched by just how perceptive he was in taking a look at the film," Stekler says of their initial meeting in Austin last December. Lovett recorded some of the narration, and Stekler sent the tape to Boston.
What happened next embarrassed the filmmakers, made the gossip column in the Austin American-Statesman, and reinforced for Stekler the importance of having control over all aspects of a production. PBS executives balked at using Lovett as a narrator and threatened to rerecord the narration with someone of their own choosing. With only a month to go before the film's screening at Sundance, Stekler flew to New York over the Christmas holidays to record actor Randy Quaid, whom he and McCabe had initially considered for the job. It is a testament to the filmmakers' reputation that they could find another narrator on such short notice.
Stekler had called Lovett earlier in December to break the news about PBS's decision. Although he received a gracious call from Lovett congratulating him on the Sundance award and reassuring him that the unfortunate episode was "water under the bridge," he still anguishes over it. "We hit a road block at the eleventh hour," Stekler says with a sigh. "I could not convince the folks in Boston. God knows what the reason was, but we were exhausted, we had to finish, and I couldn't figure out a way to convince them."
Samels defends the decision, contending that the documentary's soundtrack — which features raw, electric rock music by composer Mason Daring and guitarist Duke Levine — "really requires a certain type of voice to cut through those wailing guitars and drums and the sound effects of crowds, bullets, and screams. We knew that Lovett would have brought a lot to it," Samels says. "It's one of those calls that you hope you don't have to make."
Weeks after returning from Sundance, a weary Stekler is holding office hours in a former motel that is now a university building. Affectionately known as the Doc Motel, it currently houses the documentary filmmakers on the RTF faculty and was originally selected as the site of the proposed documentary center. But its lease expires in two years, so in addition to hitting up private donors for the center's seed money, Stekler probably will have to find a new location as well.
As he fields calls from graduate students requesting recommendations and advice about their own projects, Stekler reflects on his whirlwind trip to Park City. One of the last screenings of Wallace was attended by his former girlfriend Cassie, who now lives in Salt Lake City with her own family. He talks about having glimpsed a different path that his life could have taken as he looked out at Cassie sitting in the audience, a life that might have included a wife and kids but not necessarily filmmaking.
Meanwhile, Stekler waits to learn whether Wallace will help him build the Texas Center for Documentary. He is cautiously optimistic about its future and, by extension, his own. "One of the allures of Austin," he says, "is that everything seems possible here."
Alison Macor wrote about Madeleine Stowe in the June 1999 issue of Texas Monthly.
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