Lights, Camera, Carthage!

In 1998, shortly after I wrote a story about a strange murder in the town of Carthage, celebrated Texas filmmaker Richard Linklater told me he wanted to turn the darkly humorous tale into a movie. This month it finally hits the big screen, starring Matthew McConaughey, Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine, and dozens of East Texans. But what happened in between is a story unto itself.

by Skip Hollandsworth

May 2012

On Sunday morning, October 17, 2010, Kay Baby Epperson packed three large suitcases full of clothes and a smaller one containing her best makeup. The seventy-year-old retired hairdresser then asked her husband, Gary, to carry her luggage to her Lincoln Continental, which was parked in the carport next to their home in the small East Texas town of Rusk.

“Goodbye, honey,” Kay Baby said as she climbed behind the wheel. “I’m off to do my movie.”

She was dressed in her favorite red blouse with sparkly red rhinestones, a pair of pressed blue jeans, and boots. She wore diamond rings on six of her fingers, and a piece of crystal from a bathroom chandelier at Elvis’s Graceland mansion hung from her neck.

Gary, a lanky man who wore a rebel flag gimme cap, looked suspiciously at his wife. “Now, Kay Baby, you sure you’re not going to Las Vegas?” he asked. “To gamble away all our money?”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Kay Baby said, giving herself a quick once-over in the rearview mirror and fluffing up her blond hair, which she had been bleaching for forty years. She lit a Kent cigarette and leaned her head out the window. “And Gary, please feed the cats while I’m gone.”

Kay Baby was headed to Bastrop, thirty miles east of Austin, where filming was about to begin for Bernie, a movie based on the peculiar story of Bernie Tiede. A beloved former assistant director of a funeral home in the East Texas town of Carthage, the 39-year-old was arrested in 1997 for the murder of 81-year-old Marjorie Nugent, the sour-tempered widow of a rich local oilman. Bernie had become Mrs. Nugent’s ever-present companion and the sole heir to her estate, but he freely admitted to police that he had shot her four times in the back and stuffed her in a deep freeze in her home, where she had remained for nine months before police discovered her. He explained that he felt he had to shoot Mrs. Nugent because she had become “very hateful and very possessive.”

Almost from the moment he had heard about the case, Richard Linklater had wanted to make a movie about the story. Finally, after years of delays, he had secured funding and persuaded three of Hollywood’s biggest names to star in the film: Jack Black to play Bernie, Shirley MacLaine to take on the role of Mrs. Nugent, and Matthew McConaughey to portray Danny Buck Davidson, the criminal district attorney who prosecuted the case. Linklater also hired a number of small-town East Texans, only a couple of whom had any acting experience, to play the townspeople of Carthage. In addition to Kay Baby, he had picked real-life housewives, oil field workers, a waitress at a cafe, a part-time country music singer, and a pest exterminator. And he told all of them to be in Bastrop by October 17, where his production team—technicians, caterers, stylists, wardrobe artists, and crew members—was already gathered, preparing to re-create the series of events that led to Mrs. Nugent’s murder.

Kay Baby was so excited she was already practicing her lines in her rearview mirror as she pulled out of her driveway, making sure her facial expressions were just right. About five minutes outside of Rusk, however, she crested a hill and slammed her Lincoln into a car driven by, she later told me, “an illegal Spanish boy with no insurance talking on his cellphone.”

When paramedics arrived, she was dazed, her breathing labored, her hands clutching her chest in pain. But she refused to go to the hospital. She called Gary, who called his sister, who said she had no errands to run that day and would be happy to drive Kay Baby to Bastrop.

“Honey, this is my moment, and at my age, I don’t get too many moments,” Kay Baby told me after she arrived at Bastrop’s Hampton Inn, where all the East Texans were staying. She lit a Kent and waved it in the air. “Do you really think I’d miss this? As far as I’m concerned, Bernie could be the next Gone With the Wind.”

One day after the news broke in August 1997 about Bernie’s arrest, I threw my reporter’s notebook into my car and dashed off to Carthage. It seemed impossible to me that any of this had actually happened. Bernie stood to inherit millions from Mrs. Nugent, but he went ahead and shot her anyway. Then, instead of getting rid of Mrs. Nugent’s body, the mortician placed her in her own deep freeze because, he later said, he eventually wanted to give her a proper burial. And what was most mind-boggling was that no one, not even Mrs. Nugent’s relatives, noticed that she had dropped out of sight. During those nine months, Bernie became a kind of Robin Hood, using her money to give to people in need throughout Carthage.

I could not imagine the story getting any stranger, until I visited Daddy Sam’s BBQ and Catfish (“You Kill It, I’ll Cook It”), one of Carthage’s most popular restaurants. There, I watched a group of people walk right up to the bulldog-faced Danny Buck and beg him to drop charges against Bernie—or at least give the poor man probation. “Ol’ Bernie’s a back shooter!” he told me between bites of slaw. “But people here just want the whole thing to go away.”

In fact, everywhere I went, I listened to residents describe Bernie as the kindest, most generous person they had ever known. I drove over to the county jail, where some of Bernie’s supporters had written “Free Bernie” with shoe polish on the windows of their cars and driven back and forth in front of the building to let him know they cared. When I went to the funeral home where Bernie had worked, just a block away from the jail, his boss went on and on about the beautiful funerals Bernie staged, sending off everyone in Carthage, including the town’s drunks, in high style.

Then, a few days after my article, “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas,” was published in the January 1998 issue of TEXAS MONTHLY, my phone rang. The voice on the other end identified himself as Rick Linklater. He told me he wanted to make a movie about Bernie and he wanted me to help him write the screenplay.

For several seconds, I had no idea what to say. I knew all about Linklater, of course. At that time, he was being hailed, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, as “the filmmaking voice of a generation.” Three low-budget films he had written and directed in the nineties—Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and Before Sunrise—were regarded by critics as minor masterpieces, and Hollywood studios were clamoring for him, hoping he would work his magic on their projects.

I, on the other hand, had never written a screenplay. Nor could I imagine why Linklater would be remotely interested in making a movie about a quirky murder set in East Texas. “Is this a prank call?” I asked.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “Come on, let’s get together one day when you’re free and talk about it.”

And so I found myself driving from my quiet North Dallas home to his trendy downtown Austin loft for our first meeting. When he opened the front door, he was barefoot, dressed only in cutoff shorts and a gray Shonen Knife T-shirt with a teddy bear’s head on the front (Shonen Knife, I would learn after an Internet search, is a female Japanese punk band). The 37-year-old had a short goatee, and his brown hair was mostly unbrushed, falling over his eyes and hanging below his ears. He looked maybe half his age. “Hey, man, come on in,” he said, giving me a congenial grin.

I looked around his loft, the walls of which were full of movie posters for foreign films I’d never heard of and couldn’t quite pronounce: Buñuel’s Los olvidados, Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso, Godard’s Masculin féminin, Bresson’s Lancelot du lac, and so on. Then Linklater picked up a Nerf football. “So, let’s talk about Bernie,” he said as he walked to one end of the loft, about fifty feet away. He turned around and fired a perfect spiral right at me. I was so discombobulated that the football zipped right through my hands, hit a chair, and bounced off one of the posters.

Linklater, I was about to learn, is a peculiar combination of art-house auteur and all-American boy. Born in Houston and raised in Huntsville, he was a star athlete in high school. As the shortstop on his baseball team, his batting average topped .400, and as the quarterback on the football team, he once set a record for the longest touchdown run in school history. After graduation, he attended Sam Houston State University to play baseball, but he was forced to leave the team during his sophomore year after developing an arrhythmia. Eventually, he dropped out of college, moved to Houston, and went to work on an offshore oil rig, seemingly destined for a life of blue-collar obscurity.

But as far back as elementary school, Linklater told me, he would retreat into his bedroom to read, write short stories, listen to music, and stare out his window—“just imagining another world altogether, some kind of fantasy world,” he said. When he was working on the rig, he spent his days off watching hundreds of movies, everything from action flicks to French new wave cinema. He also read voraciously: novels, poetry, essays, and film criticism. Then, in 1983, he used part of his earnings to buy a Super 8 camera and editing equipment, and he moved to Austin to make movies.

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