The Gardener's Son

Visions series logo with slogan:
"It's off-Broadway television."

The Gardener's Son was produced by KCET, a Los Angeles-based PBS affiliate station, as the twelfth installment in its Visions series of made-for-television drama films.[11] The series sought out original teleplays by American writers with no prior experience in television.[12] Many of the films were historical dramas, like The Gardener's Son.[10] Visions often addressed serious social issues with "a deliberate pace far removed from the forced urgency of commercial television," and served as "a proving ground for drama on public television as well as for talented actors, directors and writers."[13] Advertising materials pitched Visions as "Off-Broadway television".[14]

Production of The Gardener's Son cost $200,000.[1] Its budget reflected the average expenditure for entries in the Visions series, each made with much less money than the typical hour-long episode of major network era dramas.[lower-alpha 8] Funding was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.[12]

In the mid-1970s, Richard Pearce was known for his work as a cinematographer on documentary films such as Hearts and Minds (1974). Pearce had come across the story of while conducting research on a journalism grant from the Alicia Patterson Foundation.[15] He was using the grant funds to research the lives of Southern textile workers in the late 19th century.[16] He became interested in the 1876 murder of James Gregg by Robert McEvoy after reading about it in the footnote of a history book, later learning that the story had endured in local folklore.[17] Pearce went to Graniteville and spoke with many descendants of the original textile workers who came to the town in the 1840s, who he said "still tell Robert McEvoy's story—stories, I should say, because there are now at least eight or nine different versions."[18] Pearce pitched the story to Vision, and he was commissioned to direct and co-produce an episode.[16] It would mark his first effort in fictional filmmaking.[19]

Pearce consulted Tom Terrill, an economic historian at University of South Carolina who later published the article "Murder in Graniteville" giving an authoritative account of McEvoy's murder of Gregg.[20] Terrill identified Pearce's source for the McEvoy–Gregg story as Broadus Mitchell's 1928 biography of William Gregg, owner of the Graniteville mill and one of the most significant industrialists of the Antebellum South.[21] Mitchell's biography is a flattering portrayal of the elder Gregg, with a highly positive assessment of his patricianly leadership during the period of rapid industrialization. Gregg viewed the South's transition from an agrarian to a manufacturing-based economy as a means of enriching the general welfare of ordinary people and reducing poverty.[22] Mitchell's biography characterized Robert McEvoy's crime as an act of thoughtless violence perpetrated by the "bad boy of the village". Contrarily, Terrill analyzed it as a vindictive eruption of class consciousness by an alienated worker against a capitalist.[23] Pearce conducted and taped original interviews with Graniteville residents in 1974 and exchanged research materials with Terrill.[24]

McCarthy was asked to write a screenplay on the strength of his third novel, Child of God (1973). Pearce had been impressed by its demonstration of McCarthy's "Negative Capability".[25]

Pearce asked the novelist Cormac McCarthy to adapt the story of the McEvoys and the Greggs into a dramatic screenplay.[lower-alpha 9] To reach the author, whom he did not know personally, he sent a postcard to a P.O. box in El Paso, Texas.[lower-alpha 10][25] McCarthy was an obscure novelist at the time and had no prior experience in filmmaking.[lower-alpha 11] Pearce had been impressed by McCarthy's third and most recent novel, Child of God (1973), which tells the story of an alienated Appalachian man's descent into necrophilia and murder.[28] Already acquainted with the author's early work, Pearce felt especially impressed by the latest novel:

Child of God, the oddest of a wonderfully odd lot, had been the one that struck me. It was easily the most cinematic, but not in the conventional sense of the term. It had a rigor about it, a way of not taking the easy, 'novelistic' route. By never presuming an author's license to enter the mind of his protagonist, McCarthy had been able to insure the almost complete inscrutability of his subject and subject matter, while at the same time thoroughly investigating it. Here was "Negative Capability" of a very high order. I was hooked.[25]

Pearce and McCarthy collaborated on the screenplay together, working between motels in South Carolina and McCarthy's residence in Blount County, Tennessee. Research lasted from early April to November 19, 1975, as documented in a series of "research newsletters" sent by Pearce to the Alicia Patterson Foundation.[29] Pearce had already found many primary sources and public records for McCarthy to use as reference material. McCarthy's primary responsibility was dramatization of the historical material, though he soon became just as engaged with the research as Pearce.[30] The work brought them to the courthouse in Aiken and newspaper archives housed in Augusta, Georgia; McCarthy remarked that the latter were more useful.[16]

As their work continued, Pearce and McCarthy uncovered numerous historical details—sometimes highly miscellaneous—that complicated the Mitchell biography's rosy picture of the Greggs and their impact on the regional economy and people. They learned of an 1875 labor strike responding to docked wages and an 1877 petition to the governor, bearing hundreds of signatures, requesting that he commute McEvoy's death sentence.[23] "We spent four weeks," McCarthy said, "in South Carolina researching the thing—in Columbia I even found a 22-page letter McEvoy had written Gov. Wade Hampton. And even then no one was quite sure why McEvoy did it. He just came into Gregg's office one day and shot him."[31]

Pearce and McCarthy decided to leave the question of Robert McEvoy's motive purposely ambiguous.[23] McCarthy told the Burlington Daily Times-News that the killing happened for no apparent reason, or "at least no single, clearly-defined reason, but obviously occurred because of a multiplicity of intertwined ideas and relationships that took their toll on the boy who was to become a murder."[32][lower-alpha 12] Pearce aimed to achieve a plausible, authentic portrayal of the character's emotional state without definitively spelling out the factors that cause the killing.[33] The narrative's uncertainty and complexity, Pearce said, were "a reaction against the type of movies on TV" in which "[n]othing is left open to several interpretations, nothing is left to the imagination. I bent over backwards to avoid doing that. In so many movies, the motives and characters are too clearly defined. Life isn't that way."[34]

McCarthy valued verisimilitude and drew every named character in The Gardener's Son from a verifiable person in the historical record.[16] Beyond historical and literary influences, McCarthy likely drew cinematic inspiration from film titles listed in his archived notes like Black Orpheus (1959), La Dolce Vita (1960), In Cold Blood (1967), and The Great Gatsby (1974).[35] Like the McEvoys, McCarthy remarked he too had grown up Irish Catholic in the South within majority-Protestant communities. Regarding Robert McEvoy's status as "a black sheep, the bad boy of the town," McCarthy said: "That was familiar to me, too. The kid was a natural rebel, probably just a troublemaker in real life. But in our film he has a certain nobility. He stands up and says, 'No, this is intolerable and I want to do something about it!'"[36]

Top cast and crew (left to right: Dourif, Pearce, Hausman, and McCarthy) at a press conference in Graham, North Carolina on March 23, 1976, promoting local auditions.[37]

Casting was primarily handled by co-producer Michael Hausman, whose previous experience included Miloš Forman's Taking Off (1971) and Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid (1972) and Mikey and Nicky (1976).[16] "We stressed to the actors," Hausman said, "that this is a 'prestige' venture rather than a profit-making one, since we obviously couldn't offer larger salaries."[37] Despite the modest budget, Pearce said he found casting straightforward because the quality of writing provided by McCarthy drew actors' attention.[38]

Brad Dourif, cast in the lead role of Robert McEvoy, told the press he chose to join the project for its screenplay.[37] Dourif had recently been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975).[38] Hausman convinced Ned Beatty to play the role of Pinky by scheduling his scene to be filmed when he could stop en route to New York from an unrelated shoot further south.[16] The main cast is rounded out by Kevin Conway, Nan Martin, Anne O'Sullivan, Penny Allen, Jerry Hardin, and Paul Beatty.[39]

More than 100 North Carolinians participated as extras, while another 34 locals had bit parts.[2] Auditions were held in Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill.[40] With less than a week before filming, the production still needed more adult men as extras for crowd shots, so Pearce, McCarthy, Dourif, and Hausman held a press conference on March 23, 1976, at the arts center in Graham, North Carolina to publicize further auditions in the area.[37] Some parts—like those of the black gravediggers—were cast informally through a truck driver Pearce met at a gas station in Burlington, who he called his "unofficial casting agency" and "one of [his] most valuable contacts".[16]

Glencoe Mill Caswell County Courthouse Prestwould Graniteville Map of filming locations in North Carolina and Virginia (plus the story's historical setting of Graniteville, South Carolina)

Though the story is set in South Carolina, The Gardener's Son was mostly filmed in North Carolina.[41] The location scouting process had led Pearce and McCarthy to consider sites in South Carolina and Georgia. Their main concern was period accuracy, without for example visible power lines in the background or modern aluminum siding on buildings. The crew and lead cast used the city of Burlington as their central base from which to travel for locations shoots.[32]

Cinematographer Fred Murphy shot The Gardener's Son in color on 16 mm film.[41] Other major crew members on set included art director Patrizia von Brandenstein and costume designer Ruth Morley.[42] Principal photography lasted from March 29 to May 7, 1976,[32] amid an unseasonably warm spring heat wave.[43]

Filming began at the restored cotton mill in Glencoe, where the majority of the shoot occurred. The Glencoe mill came to the crew's attention through Brent Glass,[lower-alpha 13] who was conducting a survey of the region's historic industrial architecture.[37] Glencoe was used for exterior scenes at the mill, while mill interiors were shot at Baxter, Faust & Kelly Co. textile mill in Worthville near Asheboro.[7] Other shooting locations in the Burlington area included a local greenhouse and the cemetery at St. Paul's Episcopal Church[lower-alpha 14] in Alamance near the Alamance Battleground.[46] Farther locations were the Caswell County Courthouse and city jailhouse in Yanceyville;[31] and the Prestwould plantation across the state border in Clarksville, Virginia.[32]

• Filming locations
• 
  The historic cotton mill in Glencoe, North Carolina ()
• 
  Caswell County Courthouse in Yanceyville, North Carolina ()
• 
  Prestwould plantation in Clarksville, Virginia ()

McCarthy was present on set for the duration of shooting and became involved with many facets of production. Pearce estimated that he and McCarthy met with more than 1,000 people throughout the process.[47] McCarthy endeared himself among the cast and crew with his humorous impromptu storytelling.[48] Dourif recalled the author's fascinated appreciation for the particularities of local dialect:

I guess there's something about the way characters use language. You know, Dickens always defined his characters so well with language. And I'm just remembering what a kick it was. We were out looking at locations, and this old guy was showing us around and he'd say: "Well, y'know, th'other day... went over, got in m'car, so t'speak... turned on the engine, so t'speak..." And I remember McCarthy's delight at that. He was describing it to somebody, saying: "My God—this guy was talking about things that'd really happened, but he'd always say so to speak as if it were a metaphor, as if it didn't happen!" There it is. There's the writer. How the way this guy used the language was telling you so much about him. So easy to do, so easy to write—but so clear.[49]

However, McCarthy did not much enjoy making The Gardener's Son. While the experience satisfied his curiosity to observe and participate in filmmaking up close, its difficulties clarified his preference for the writer's life. "It's back-breaking work," McCarthy told his local Knoxville newspaper. "On location for 30 days, and the last week we were working 16 to 18 hours a day. You've got to be some kind of weirdo to think that it's fun. But it sure kept my interest up—and writers are basically pretty lazy people."[47] More than three decades later, he had similar recollections for The Wall Street Journal: "Dick Pearce and I made a film in North Carolina about 30 years ago and I thought, 'This is just hell. Who would do this?' Instead, I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window."[50] Asked if there was "something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing", McCarthy replied: "Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs."[50]

Charles Gross composed the score. The music is influenced by traditional Appalachian music.[12] Among the instruments heard are banjo, fiddle, Jew's harp, acoustic guitar, and brass, such as a muted trumpet. Aside from the themes heard during the opening and closing credits, the drama makes spare use of background music, mostly for transitions between scenes. Describing the score as "acid bluegrass", Eli Friedberg of The Film Stage said its sound unmistakably dated the film to the late 1970s yet at the same time gave the 19th century period piece a timeless feel.[51] As of 2017, Gross's music for The Gardener's Son had not been released as a soundtrack album or other audio media.[52]

Print ad in the Los Angeles Times on October 19, 1977, promoting the upcoming launch of the Visions series with a calendar of episode titles, screenwriting credits, and premiere dates.

Print ad in the New York Times on January 6, 1977, promoting that night's premiere broadcast of The Gardener's Son on WNET.

The Gardener's Son premiered on PBS stations at 9 p.m. on Thursday, January 6, 1977.[17] Initial reviews were generally enthusiastic.[53] In The New York Times, John J. O'Connor noted the film's unconventional narrative, its historical authenticity, and the passionate quality of Dourif's performance. O'Connor wrote that the film "strays far from the path of standard television. It refuses to be hurried; it fails to tie up loose ends and refuses to send us off to bed secure in the knowledge that everything in this life has a defined beginning, middle and end."[17] Alan M. Kriegsman of The Washington Post hailed The Gardener's Son as the standout from the Visions series to date, writing that the drama "reflect[s] a writer's accurate ear for local vernacular, and a filmmaker's grasp of the revelatory power of imagery," with further praise for the cast and score.[12] In the Winston-Salem, North Carolina paper The Sentinel, Genie Carr highlighted the climactic scene when "16-year-old Martha McEvoy pleads in vain with her older brother Bobby—handcuffed and guarded by a burly deputy sheriff—for understanding of her life, and his own," saying the moment "brings tears in a film that for more than an hour has emphasized the deadly placid surface stretched tightly over controlled feelings." In Carr's reckoning, the storytelling was true to the emotionally repressed realities of life in the old mill town. He applauded the cast, particularly Martin (who he wrote "controls each of her scenes just as Mrs. Gregg controls each situation she enters") and O'Sullivan (who "combines the face of a young worker—beautiful but quickly becoming too old and weary—with the depth of a tender, but wise-too-early girl").[54]

At the 29th Primetime Emmy Awards in September 1977, The Gardener's Son received one Emmy Award nomination—recognizing Gene Piotrowsky in the category Graphic Design and Title Sequences—although many sources have erroneously claimed it received two nominations.[lower-alpha 15] The Village Voice named it one of the best films of 1977 in a write-up by Tom Allen.[58] He said it was the year's "most provocative unknown American movie", worthy of comparison to The Battle of Algiers (1966), and a fine example of "class-conscious filmmaking, a rarity in this country, that is squeezed for humanistic insights rather than doctrinaire propaganda."[59] Later, in an essay for Film Comment asking if the medium of "telefilm" had experienced its own "Golden Age of TV Drama" yet, Allen cited Pearce as one of the two "most promising" directors working in TV since 1975 (alongside Robert Markowitz), writing that The Gardener's Son and his later TV film Siege (1978) had "demonstrated more of an engaged social conscience wed to a commendable level of craft than any other active filmmaker in America."[60]

Critical response was not unanimously positive. In the Los Angeles Times, the critic James Brown dismissed The Gardener's Son as too dreary and directionless for audiences to connect with its historical themes on its own terms. "McCarthy and Pearce have asked the audience to determine Robert's motivations," Brown said, but he found this was "a less than compelling task" given the drama's reliance on vague symbolism and emotional detachment from its central character. Brown said Dourif "alternately underplays and overstates the role," though he commended much of the rest of the cast, particularly Hardin and O'Sullivan.[61] A reviewer for the North Carolina newspaper The Greensboro Record said the film "contained dialogue gross enough to make an alderman blush, to say nothing of repeated blasphemies of the commoner sort" and objected so strongly offended to its content that he called for its permanent removal from the airwaves, invoking obscenity law via the Communications Act of 1934 and Title 18 of the U.S. Code.[62]

The premiere screening of The Gardener's Son took place at the Hugh M. Cummings High School auditorium in Burlington on December 17, 1976, ahead of its broadcast premiere, with seating by invitation only.[63] More than 400 people attended the screening,[64] including more than 100 people who had played bit parts or appeared as extras.[32] A local journalist reported locals had been "looking forward to [the screening] with mixed feelings of trepidation and pride."[65]

Encouraged by critics' favorable response to the broadcast, McCarthy and Pearce explored the possibility of a limited theatrical release. However, they learned that a theatrical version would be expected to undergo re-editing for a shorter runtime. The format would need to be converted from 16 mm to 35 mm film. Such a process "takes money", as McCarthy noted in a 1981 letter.[66] The film never reached a cinematic release.[41] However, the film did screen out of competition at the Berlin International Film Festival and Edinburgh International Film Festival.[1] Reviewing the film at Edinburgh, The Observer's Russell Davies dubbed it a "nice art-house job" and detected a modern subtext in "the shell-shock-eyed" expression worn by Dourif throughout the historical drama: "Whether or not the derangements of Vietnam were uppermost in the director's mind, they are certainly outermost in Dourif's face."[67]

Through 1978, the film also screened at a San Francisco, California showcase for independent filmmakers;[68] at the Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina; at the University of South Carolina in the state capital of Columbia;[69] at the Columbia Museum of Art;[34] and for a senior citizens club in Graniteville, where the film takes place.[69] North Carolina newspapers reported that the film would screen at the 30th Cannes Film Festival,[70] but this did not materialize. Years hence, McCarthy scholars have occasionally organized screenings at academic conferences devoted to the author's literature.[71]

Dourif later revealed he felt the film was, despite its merits, fatally flawed by McCarthy's anticlimactic ending: "If he had had a really good resolving third act, he'd have had a movie. It was close."[72] Jerry Hardin, who played the McEvoys' gardening father, had voiced strong disagreements with Pearce during filming about the emotional handling of the plot development and maintained strong feelings about these differences decades later.[73] McCarthy said he felt mostly satisfied with the film but regretted that it had been filmed in color on 16 mm instead of black-and-white on 35 mm film.[74] In Pearce's foreword to the published screenplay, he called The Gardener's Son "my education as a filmmaker" and said McCarthy had become a godfather to his daughter and, "in many ways, to all the films I've made since."[1]