In the novel The Moviegoer, the character Binx Bolling describes a phenomenon he calls “certification”:
Nowadays, when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him to live. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.
What if a place in one’s hometown is depicted in a scene that is ultimately deleted from the final cut of a movie? Is the place still certified?
There are a ton of old tv commercials on YouTube, but they’re generally not locally specific. I’d like to start assembling vintage Atlanta tv commercials in a series for this blog. Vintage is an arbitrary term, but let’s just say anything produced before 1990. I certainly need help locating these commercials. If there’s an old Atlanta tv spot on YouTube (or some other video sharing site), please post the URL in the comments section and I’ll embed it on the site. If you have a copy of a commercial on disc, tape, or film and need some help digitizing and uploading it to the web, I’d be willing to assist.
The first video in this series is a commercial for the old Plaza Drugs on Ponce de Leon Avenue (in the first post of this blog, George Mitchell discussed Plaza Drugs). From the clothing and the look of the film stock, I’m guessing this commercial was produced in the late 60s or early 70s.
Four years ago I produced a short video with Jack Berry, who helps run a topographical mapping company. Jack was hired to make a map of a ten acre tract of land in west Cobb County, and I followed him as he obtained four GPS points around the county. As he explains in the video, his map compilers combine the GPS points he gathers with an aerial photograph to produce the detailed topographic map. This segment reveals the rapid pace of development in Cobb County in the past two decades.
In September 2000 the Hanson brothers asked me to come to Athens to help shoot a segment for their documentaryThe Earth Will Swallow You about the rock band Widespread Panic. I was happy to do so because the shoot featured Vic Chesnutt, who has collaborated with members of Panic for a couple of records under the name brute. I brought my 16mm camera and shot some little fragments of the guys playing and hanging out. I didn’t think the Hansons would use much of what I shot because it was raw and they had the action covered with a bunch of DV cams, but my footage ended up comprising a big chunk of the Vic Chesnutt segment.
For what it’s worth, there’s a really great documentary called Speed Racer that documents the early part of Chesnutt’s career, and it looks like this film will soon be released on DVD.
Ignacio Michaud was born and raised in Chile. In 2005 he moved to Atlanta. At night he paints and, during the day, he works as a translator at a farmers’ market on Buford Highway. In this segment he talks about the multicultural qualities of Buford Highway and compares the spatial layout of the street to a neighborhood in Santiago.
From 2004 to 2006, I produced videos for the online scholarly journal Southern Spaces. The journal’s editor Allen Tullos developed a special kind of video content for the site: poets reading their work at the locations in which their poems are set. Words remain the foundation, but images and sounds can add new resonance and connections. I helped Allen produce a few of these videos, and, in the past couple years, my friend Matt Miller has done a great job of expanding the project.
The most special “Poets in Place” performance I helped produce was for Natasha Trethewey’s “Elegy for the Native Guards.” We met Natasha in Gulfport, Mississippi (her hometown) and traveled with her to Ship Island, where the Civil War-era Fort Massachusetts is located. This fort was home to the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the first African-American combat units to fight in the Civil War. As we winded down our shooting with Natasha, a group of African-American Civil War re-enactors arrived on the island via the ferry boat. It was almost as if Natasha’s poem had conjured up the Native Guard soldiers.
A couple months after we shot the video, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Ship Island suffered major damage. The eastern part of the island was totally submerged, and the boardwalk, pier and visitor’s center next to the fort were destroyed.
In 2007 Natasha Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, which contains the poem “Elegy for the Native Guards.”
Undoubtedly, one of the most tragic incidents in Atlanta history is the Winecoff Hotel fire, which occurred on the morning of December 7, 1946. 119 people lost their lives, and it’s still the worst hotel fire in U.S. history.
Sam Heys and Allen Goodwin wrote the definitive book about the fire, The Winecoff Fire: The Untold Story of America’s Deadliest Hotel Fire. Allen maintains a website about the fire and its aftermath, and the site contains lots of photos and anecdotes about the victims and survivors.
Sam graciously met me in front of the site of the old Winecoff Hotel to provide the basic story of the fire, including a discussion of the famous photos of the fire taken Georgia Tech grad student Arnold Hardy. After twenty-five years of neglect, the building re-opened in 2007 as the boutique Ellis Hotel.
A couple years ago I produced a short documentary about music archives and archivists. The following segment, which focuses on Kirk West and the Allman Brothers archive in Macon, was the first part of that film.
Thanks to Hibbotte for major production assistance with this piece.
