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(Santa Fe) Writer/director
Jim Terr has produced documentaries
which have won national praise, but even in some of those productions
he has a hard time suppressing his impulse to produce short films.
His award-winning
teen driving safety video, "No
Bloodshed" (a Parents Guide Top Ten Video of 2003) utilized clever
short segments by "Doofus Clueless, crash test dummy come back to life,"
which were extracted and combined into a ten-minute film which was featured
in the 2003 Santa Fe Film
Festival. This and another of Terr's documentaries are distributed
by Discovery Education, and no
less than thirteen early Terr shorts are featured on the prestigious British
pre-UTube short film web site, 3btv.com.
Now one of his short
films - the one that Terr considers his best - will see light as a feature-length
work. In fact, greater than feature length. Albuquerque radio station
KUNM-FM, the NPR flagship station for
New Mexico, will produce "The
Home of Katie Archer" as a two-hour radio drama for local and
national broadcast in the summer of 2007. Casting sessions were held last
week, bringing in over 100 actors to auditions in Santa Fe and Albuquerque.
The origin of "The
Home of Katie Archer" was a short film which Terr wrote and directed
called "The
Wrong Guy," which won First Runner-Up, Best Actor (Mary Evans)
and Best Editor awards at the 2001 Flicks on 66 Film Festival, now The
Duke City Shootout. That editor, incidentally, was Ryan
Denmark, who has now graduated to assistant editor on the past few
Spike Lee projects.
When KUNM put out
a call for radio scripts the following year, Terr expanded his "Wrong
Guy" story about two actors playing a hijack scene and then getting
hijacked for real, to a story about one of the actors struggling to make
it as a full-time carpenter and part-time actor in a small New Mexico
town visited often by Hollywood movies and settled by Hollywood actors.
Sound familiar?
That script, "Acting
Made Simple," was not chosen for production by
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Joe Peracchio and Mary Evans in "The
Wrong Guy," which in only five years bloomed into the feature-length
"The Home of Katie Archer,"
whose preview co-stars William Sterchi (below) and Evans
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the
selection committee for that contest, but radio theater producer
Rachel Kaub contacted Terr several times over the years to say that
KUNM would like to produce the piece as a radio drama.
By
the time Terr agreed, in 2006, the piece had grown to include a "back
story" about a local woman from the early 1900s who had an unheralded
role in a key struggle in the labor movement with social justice icon
Mary "Mother"
Jones. In the new, full screenplay, "The Home of Katie Archer,"
the town is thrown into turmoil when a forthcoming biography and TV
documentary highlights the previously-unknown heroine, Katie Archer.
The
town sees an opportunity to capitalize on the event with a museum and
standard "home of" tribute, but the local right-wing radio talk show
host and radio station owner objects to celebrating a "socialist," and
the battle -- sometimes comic, sometimes poignant -- is on.
The
story alternates between the current setting, in which the actor/carpenter
finagles his way into a Hollywood production shooting in town, and a
confrontation with a respected Hollywood actor settling nearby, and
the historical story of Katie Archer, Mother Jones, the 1916 Ludlow
Massacre, John D. Rockefeller and the birth of public relations. The
two story lines collide dramatically in the present time, "right there
in Pancho Flats," the small town depicted in the story.
Terr
has already spoken to several well-known celebrities about doing cameos
in the piece, including the part of John D. Rockefeller, and he hopes
that this will provide added visibility for finally seeing story produced
as a feature-length film production.
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