Troubled Waters
Insatiable film lover that I am, I’ve been catching up on hidden gems missed in my decades-long career of movie watching. I recently caught Macon County Line, the brainchild of Max Baer and one of the most successful indies ever made. Baer became a household name playing Jethro Bodine in the ‘60s hit sitcom, The Beverly Hillbillies, and when the show ran its course, he was so typecast he couldn’t find work. Baer fought back by writing a screenplay, casting himself in a supporting role, putting on his producer’s hat and beating Hollywood at its own game. Made for a little over $100,000, Macon County Line was a cult smash that eventually earned over $35 million in movie houses and rentals. I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. Admittedly, the...
Read MoreLasting Impressions
The über hot ticket in Washington, D.C. this summer is the Edgar Degas/Mary Cassatt exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. One surprising revelation is that both artists loathed being labeled “Impressionists” (they preferred “independents”), but no mention is made of the abruptness with which Degas threw himself into this radical style or that his decision was made thousands of miles from his native France. Degas’s mother, Celestine Musson, was a Louisiana Creole who died when he was thirteen, and in 1872, at age 38, he visited her brother Michel and his daughters, Estelle, Mathilde and Désirée in New Orleans. Seduced by the exotic city, he wrote glowing letters home about his enchantment. “Everything attracts me here…the white houses with columns of fluted wood...
Read MoreRequiem for a Queen
They said she sinned by ambition and was doomed from the outset, tethered to a world facing apocalypse. She listened to nothing save the siren song of destiny, a stone-and-iron fantasy that became the jewel in the crown of Louisiana plantation houses. No one had seen her likes before, nor would they see them again. She was Belle Grove, the fabulous queen of sugar king John Andrews, and she was born of a genteel rivalry to build bigger and better than anyone in the antebellum South. Her competitor, Nottaway (see Game of Thrones), was the work of John Hamden Randolph, another incredibly rich planter a short distance upriver. From sheer size alone, there was never any doubt that Belle Grove would take the sweepstakes as Andrews erected a palace to please a pharaoh....
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