TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) - Light comes up on a white Italianate three-story house with wrap-around porch, not unlike something you might see in older neighborhoods abutting downtown Tuscaloosa.
The sun is arcing behind the roof and peaked towers, on what appears to be a golden idyllic afternoon. A shaggy-haired young man in aviator shades and three-day shadow lights a hand-rolled cigarette that, given the ’70s paisley shirt, probably does not contain tobacco.
Stumbling through greenery comes a barefoot young woman, struggling to zip up a sunflower-yellow dress. Billy, portrayed by Devon Bostick, leans over to assist Virginia, who turns around and looks upward. Even with her usually brunette hair cut into a Spicoli-blond shag, she’s recognizable as Natalia Dyer, feisty Nancy from Netflix smash “Stranger Things.”
Polo-shirted Dad, wielding a putter, intones for Billy, now sprawled across an expansive lawn, parent-to-child motivation: “You’re gonna dream yourself to death, son. You’ve gotta live in the real world.”
He’s a familiar face, too, veteran actor Tate Donovan, who’s worked in films from Disney’s “Hercules” — as the voice of the title character — to “Argo” and “Manchester by the Sea” to last year’s “Rocketman,” and in television from “The Man in the High Castle” to “The O.C.” to “Ally McBeal” and “Friends.”
Heavy guitars and drums kicks in: Minneapolis one-man-band Hastings 3000 playing “Modern Man.” Though it’s a recent cut, the driving punk aesthetic might fit the ’70s.
A simple black-on-white road sign says Entering Tuscaloosa County. A voice asks “What brings you to Tuscaloosa?” as the classic free-spirit montage zooms in, the car’s top down, Virginia sitting high on the seat back, yelping joyously, arms skyward.
It could be Tuscaloosa, just as it could be 1972, though of course it’s a facsimile of time and place, an independent film named not for our Druid City, but for the novel “Tuscaloosa” by W. Glasgow Phillips.
While the Bama Theatre’s marquee glows from a street corner, boat-sized Cadillacs sport vintage Heart of Dixie license plates and that hospital lawn rolling up to a columned red-brick Greek Revival mansion might suggest Bryce Hospital, filming for Philip Harder’s long-cooking project took place around and near his Minneapolis base.
“Tuscaloosa,” shot mostly in the fall of 2017, was released in theaters March 13.
Harder read Phillips’ novel not long after its release in 1994, and while working as a musician and filmmaker he plotted all along to turn “Tuscaloosa” into his first narrative feature film.
“In my late teens, early 20s, I realized there was this thing called punk rock,” Harder said in a phone interview. “They were screaming about things that were in my head.”
Harder has directed videos for Prince, Foo Fighters, Matchbox Twenty, Liz Phair, Incubus, Rob Thomas, Pulp, Soul Asylum, the Jayhawks, Son Volt, Sonic Youth, Robert Plant, Macy Gray, Hilary Duff, Firehose, Lisa Loeb, Bobby McFerrin, Low, Tanya Donnelly, Barenaked Ladies, Rufus Wainwright, the Afghan Whigs, Babes in Toyland, the Cranberries and Cornershop, among others.
As his bands traveled in beat-up vans, Harder toted along a Super 8 camera. Early on he directed the 1985 “King of Kings” for the Jayhawks, like Harder also a product of Minnesota’s Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. Though his own bands didn’t break through to big time, his commercial and short-film career took off.
“Suddenly, I realized a couple decades had gone past and I’d never made my movie,” Harder said.
Phillips wrote his first and so far only novel around the character Billy Mitchell, a 22-year-old University of Alabama graduate, loafing and doing grounds work at the mental hospital — inspired by Bryce — that his doctor-father runs. Though Billy is disaffected, unmotivated, his friendship with Nigel, who’s involved in civil unrest, and with Virginia, a patient at the hospital, tug him into the turbulent wider world.
“The first thing that resonated with me was the character of Virginia, how she’s thrown into this world against her will,” Harder said. “She’s basically institutionalized because she’s a free-spirited woman; the good doctor says because she’s a quote-unquote nymphomaniac.”
In Virginia’s determination to remain free at heart, and break free in reality, Harder saw something of McMurphy from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“I found myself cheering for her,” he said. “She’s so badass, so free-spirited.”
The real insanity was institutionalized racism, Harder said, sending young people to war against their will, police beating black people for asserting their rights. Resistance to white power takes form in Nigel, son of the woman Billy’s mother carried on an illicit affair with. As violence escalates, Virginia seems, ironically, to be “the only sane person in this entire world,” Harder said.
“Billy’s sort of oblivious to all this stuff,” the director said, adding that until reading the novel, so was he, in a sense. “When I first read this, I didn’t know about this concept we now call ‘white privilege.’ It opened up to me how institutional racism can go on generation after generation and generation.”
So he kept peeling the layers, the complexities and deeper meanings behind a story of fun and adventure, of romance.
“I had it in mind for many years, and tried a couple of times to get it rolling,” Harder said. ”… it just kept haunting me. It kept aging well over time. It was my obsession, and I’m so glad I finally got the opportunity to make ‘Tuscaloosa.’ ”
Harder first met Phillips, who’s taught at Stanford University, and worked on various emerging-media projects in Los Angeles, about 2000. They hung out at the beach all afternoon, and “talked about everything but the novel.” Harder invited him to video shoots, to show the novelist he was “somewhat legitimate.”
But Phillips wouldn’t get pulled into deep discussions.
“Anytime I asked him what is this or that about, he would just not answer the question,” Harder said. “He wants me to interpret it myself. And I in turn want the viewer to interpret the movie.”
Attempts to reach Phillips for this story were unsuccessful.
Producer Scott Franklin, who’s worked with Darren Aronofsky from “Mother!” to “Noah” to “Black Swan” to “The Wrestler,” all the way back to “Requiem for a Dream” and “Pi,” encouraged Harder.
“We talked every once in a while, and he’d say ‘You should make that movie,’ ” Franklin eventually became one of the producers of “Tuscaloosa.”
After the presidential election of 2016, Harder and fellow Twin Cities native Patrick Riley felt the time was ripe for a movie addressing some of the underlying political issues felt to be coming back to the fore.
“It was a time when people were wondering what to do” in response to Trump’s electoral college win, Harder said. Riley began seeking funding from other investors in the Twin Cities area.
″(Riley) accidentally fell into the producer’s role, because we didn’t have anybody else,” Harder said, laughing. “So he took a crash course in how to run a movie.”
Reached by email, Riley noted practicalities of an indie-film budget kept them from shooting “Tuscaloosa” on location. They could shoot down South, ”…or in Minnesota, where we would have the advantage of a local crew who has worked with Philip on music videos and commercials over the last 25 years.”
One key was finding the stand-in for Branson Asylum on the campus of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, a city of about 20,000. In Carleton they found locations for the hospital’s interiors and exteriors, along with a manicured lawn, the doctor’s house, a “vintage downtown, and many nearby rural roads for driving scenes.”
“And we thought well ‘Stranger Things’ shoots in Atlanta to create Indiana,” Riley wrote, so “we can do the opposite.” Still photos, such as from the Bama Theatre, were distressed and laid into the project. In the trailer, there’s a brief glimpse of the familiar red-and-blue Bama marquee, advertising “Lady Sings the Blues,” the ’72 film about Billie Holiday, starring Diana Ross.
“So it was a little bit Northfield, a little bit Tuscaloosa, and a whole lotta CGI,” Riley wrote.
“The remainder of the locations are set around the Minneapolis metro area, with the Mississippi standing in for the Black Warrior River” and Lake Superior subbing for the Gulf of Mexico on a beach road trip.
“The historical train bridges over the Mississippi river in Minneapolis were an almost perfect match for Tuscaloosa train bridges,” Riley wrote. “We shot the majority of principal photography in October, which allowed us to simulate the fall colors of Central Alabama in mid-November.”
The screenplay is credited to both Phillips and Harder, who adapted the novel for the screen.
“We didn’t change the script to fit our times, but it worked for our times,” Harder said. “It’s based on an older novel, about the ’70s, and released in 2020.
“What can we say about our current political times; what can we do? I think the early ’70s was much more liberal, with women’s liberation, the black power movement, anti-war movement.
“I feel like we’ve gone backwards, not forwards.”
From passing through agents, editors and publishers, a novel is well-vetted, but the director did adapt internal monologues into externalized actions, and stick to one time period, rather than flashing back. They added archival footage from anti-war and other protests, and of Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door, to set a tone, and do “some of the heavy lifting for our story.”
Throughout, Phillips remained hands-off; asked if he wanted to see a script, he averred.
“He talked more about Tuscaloosa being a really nice place, a cool place,” Harder said. “He wrote this novel as a college student; it just came out of him.”
As seed money came in, Harder hired Bess Fifer, who’s worked on projects from “Sex and the City” to “Daredevil” to “Luke Cage” and, crucially for this project, “Stranger Things.”
“The only way to make this movie, we had to have names” to help garner distribution, Harder said. Fifer began by landing Donovan, who called the director back promptly. “He said ‘I like the fact that I’m playing the villain, but not a typical tabacky-chewing racist.’ ”
Though just 25, Nashville-born Dyer is an 11-year TV and film veteran, beginning with 2009′s “Hannah Montana: The Movie.” Her breakthrough came with the buzz-heavy launch of “Stranger Things” in 2016, where she plays Nancy Wheeler, one of the intrepid teens who help investigate the dark mysteries of the Upside Down.
Canadian Bostick has a string of movie, TV and voiceover credits running back to 1998, including “The 100,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and the 2017 “Okja,” written and directed by Bong Joon Ho, who won three Oscars for his 2019 “Parasite.”
An indie film can’t pay even name talent top dollar, though.
“For Tate, Devon and Natalia, the script resonated,” Harder said. “They knew (the project) was legit. They looked at my music videos, and knew they were going to be in good hands, working with me.”
Watching Dyer work, Harder felt she loved playing Virginia.
“You can’t predict her,” he said, “as I couldn’t predict how the novel would end, when I read it.”
The filmmakers did bring Phillips to the set for a few days. After watching, Harder recalled him saying “I can’t really remember what my characters looked like now. Now that I’ve seen (the actors), I think that’s what they look like in my mind.”
On that tight budget, filmmakers had to “beg, borrow and steal everything we could get, but I think we put it all on the screen. It really looks like the ’70s,” Harder said.
Still, it remains a fictional world.
“I think ‘Tuscaloosa’ just represents a place and a time,” Harder said. “It could be a lot of towns in the South, quite frankly.”
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