George says that 17 years ago, he remodeled his ranch house into a farmhouse so he could use it in a film. Built an upper floor in the barn for the same reason—though it’s filled with hay, as a hayloft should be. Used his 1950 Chevy pickup and ’31 Ford for scenes in the movie; in fact, he used the whole farm as the set. He put the farm machinery to work and enlisted his family, friends and neighbors as actors and grips. His son Henry, who was 11 when he started filming, became the star.
Since 1996, Vermont’s favorite farmer has been Fred Tuttle, bless his dead soul—the hero of the John O’Brien movie Man With a Plan and a hilarious contender in the 1998 U.S. Senate race. He ran in the Republican primary against Massachusetts flatlander Jack McMullen. Tuttle won by 10 percentage points and then retired, after a threat from his wife Dottie.
Fred has met his match in George Woodard. This hillside farmer, usually dressed in greasestained jeans and a T-shirt, with haggard boots on his feet and a worn baseball hat covering his close-cropped hair, is gifted. Or maybe he simply strives to be the best in whatever he does: actor, musician, director, singer, set designer and builder, script writer, camera man and dairy farmer.
Yes indeed, George has finished a film. It’s a feature-length adventure film about a farm boy that takes place in a rural community in 1952. It’s called The Summer of Walter Hacks. Naturally, it’s filmed in black and white.
George has been working on his movie—writing, filming, editing and fine-tuning—for five years. He turned his sugarhouse into a machine-shop façade and built two film sets in his haybarn— the shop and diner interiors. He used his farm equipment and hayfields and the surrounding mountains as ready-made sets and props and backdrops.
What kind of film is it? It’s about kids growing up. It’s about farming and rural living. It’s an adventure film that is pure American. And above all, it’s a parable of a classic cowboy movie. The hero is a kid. The sidekick is an 11-year-old girl. The horse is a bicycle. The cowboy hat is a fedora with the sides rolled up. And the gun? A slingshot.
The seeds of the movie began in the 1950s, when George was eight and James Arness was Marshall Dillon, the hero in Gunsmoke, the longrunning television feature (it aired from 1955 to 1975). George never missed a show.
“I loved Gunsmoke. It was the highlight of the week,” he says. “On Saturday we watched Hee Haw, and then Gunsmoke came on. My brother, friends and I would play cowboys using sticks as Winchesters and Colts. We played in the woods and in cabins and used a pigpen for a jail. I got fleas that time. We’d argue about who was dead. ‘YOU’RE DEAD!’ ‘I’M NOT DEAD!’ ‘YOU ARE, TOO!’ ‘I AM NOT! LOOK AT ME. I’M FINE!’ ‘YOU’RE DEAD!’ ‘NO, YOU MISSED!’ We went on and on.
“The cowboy theme was big when I was growing up. Cowboys made such great stories and they were filmed outside and they were real, even though mythical. It was pure story and pure myth and there was always a hero. No one could do that part better than James Arness in Gunsmoke. He was completely honest and everyone in town knew it and they looked up to him. If he said get out of town, by God they did. No grey area. Unlike the present lead characters, Marshall Dillon had no flaws. He was the perfect western hero. Just the best.
“So I began to wonder if I could put something like this together on film, with a boy pretending to be a cowboy, watching the westerns of that era, and showing respect and love for the mythical figures of James Arness, John Wayne and James Stewart.
“Walter Hacks, who my son plays in the movie, also loves cowboy movies. Is it an allegory of me growing up? Maybe.” |
