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Spring 2008 |
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A LOUISIANA STORY
Robert Flaherty's 1948 film masterpiece explores man's relationship with nature in the marshes of south Louisiana. That way of life has largely disappeared. But its spirit lives on in the boy who paddled his pirogue into millions of hearts.
By Ben Sandmel
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Every wild child is, perhaps, a prince in disguise.
Henry David Thoreau |
J.C. Boudreaux's FEMA trailer sits the end of a gravel road in the hamlet of Sweet Lake, southeast of Lake Charles, the insides seeming all the more cramped by the wide open skies and endless expanse of prairie outside. Like thousands of others in south Louisiana, Boudreaux, 72 and his wife Regina, are starting over. Their home in Cameron was swept away in Hurricane Rita, just as their first home was lost to Hurricane Audrey decades ago. |
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Still, Boudreaux radiates delight in his surroundings. "I'm no city boy," he says with a wide grin.
The mind goes on fast rewind to the same face sixty years ago when Boudreaux essentially played himself in Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story, the classic documentary film about a Cajun boy living deep in the marsh with his trapper parents and pet raccoon, and a crew of oil drillers who enter his world and change it forever.
Filmed in Iberia Parish near Avery Island, Louisiana Story was the capstone of Flaherty's long career making black-and-white documentaries about man and nature. His earlier works included Nanook of the North, Man of Aran, and Moana. Like Nanook, which had been financed by a French fur-trading company, Louisiana Story served commerce as well as art. It was conceived as a public relations tool for the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) - predecessor to today's ExxonMobil - which had begun to explore the wetlands and inshore waters of Louisiana.
Plot and character development were minimal: As the Cajun boy, Alexander Napoleon Ulysses Latour, Boudreaux paddles his pirogue along Bayou Petite Anse accompanied by his raccoon. He watches warily as a large and noisy drilling barge appears around the bend and anchors near the family's cabin. He meets and befriends the crew. The well blows out in spectacular fashion, but the crew manages to cap it. To help his new friends, the boy throws a little gris-gris down the hole. Oil begins to flow. The crew installs a Christmas tree and moves on, leaving no other trace of their presence. In the closing scene, the boy receives a new hunting rifle from his trapper papa - purchased with a royalty check from Standard Oil. |
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With this simple story, more "docudrama" than documentary, Standard Oil sought to show that drilling could proceed in harmony with nature and the lives of rural people. Louisiana Story could easily have turned into a heavy-handed propaganda piece, but Standard Oil wisely downplayed its sponsorship (the company's name does even not appear the credits) and gave Flaherty a level of creative freedom that his auteur stature deserved. |
The idea that Flaherty's cinematic genius could serve industry came from Roy E. Stryker, Standard Oil's legendary PR man who had joined the company from Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. As Information Director for the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s, Stryker had recruited gifted photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks to document the plight of rural folk in the Depression and Dust Bowl. His work resulted in 77,000 images that shape our view of the era today.
Louisiana Story followed in same powerful visual tradition. It was instantly recognized the world over as a work of art and an honest depiction of indigenous folk-culture. When they saw the Paris premiere, for example, Charlie Chaplain and Jean Renoir sent Flaherty a telegram: "JUST SAW YOUR MAGNIFICENT FILM. DO THIS AGAIN AND YOU WILL BE IMMORTAL AND EXCOMMUNICATED FROM HOLLYWOOD WHICH IS A GOOD FATE. CONGRATULATIONS."
Other accolades included an Oscar nomination and selection as one of the "Ten Best" pictures of the year by the New York Times. Virgil Thompson's original score derived from Cajun themes won a Pulitzer Prize. Richard Leacock's cinematography was highly praised - it is perhaps the film's most striking feature - as was the work of editor Helen Van Dorgen, who shaped hundreds of hours of rough footage into 90 compelling minutes.
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Louisiana Story's standing in movie history has grown through the years. In 1998, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its release, the original print was restored in a collaborative effort by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Library of Congress, the Nederland Film Museum in Amsterdam, and the Film and Television Archive at U.C.L.A.
For this year's 60th anniversary, Louisiana Public Broadcasting will air the original film and a new documentary titled Louisiana Story: The Reverse Angle, directed by LPB's Tika Laudun, and co-produced by Laudun and Charles Richard, director of the Cinematic Arts Workshop at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. Reverse Angle comes on the heels of Revisiting Flaherty's Louisiana Story, a series of six student films shot and screened in 2006 under the supervision of Patricia Suchy, director of the Film and Media Arts Program at LSU. |
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J. C. Boudreaux figures prominently in both the LSU and LPB projects, and he is delighted to see another spike in interest in Louisiana Story. "When it first came out in Louisiana in 1949," Boudreaux recalls, "I followed it for six or seven months from one theater to another in south Louisiana - Abbeville, Morgan City, Franklin, Lake Charles, Creole, Cameron. People made a fuss over me like I was a star. Oh yeah, I had a feather in my hat!
"I used to go movies when I was a kid," Boudreaux continues, "Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, things like that, but I never expected I'd be in a movie myself. It's funny to see yourself on the big screen. It'll make you self-conscious. I felt embarrassed. I thought my voice sounded funny. But everybody thought it was great and so I went along with 'em."
Boudreaux's performance was convincing because it mirrored his real life.
"I was similar to the boy in the movie," he says.
"I hunted and fished and trapped, I paddled around by pirogue. That's why they picked me. "I had pet raccoons, just like the boy I played. I had a skunk, too, and a possum. Coons are real sweet when they're young, very affectionate, and they'll come when you call them, just like a dog. But once they get to be about a year and a half old they get kind of moody and they're apt to bite you. I don't recommend them for a pet once they get to that age."
Boudreaux was literally plucked out of the bayous for the role.
"I grew up in Cameron Parish," he explains, "but in the summer sometimes I would visit Vermilion Parish, and the people from the movie found me in Gueydan. They gave me a screen test there. It was Frances Flaherty, Robert's wife. She asked me could I swim and I said 'Yes, ma'am, I'm born and raised in the water!' And I jumped in a canal with all my clothes on, and swam across it. She told me I had the part.
"So I went back to my uncle's house and he said 'well, if you're going to be in a movie, we have to give you a haircut' - I had long hair then, about three inches below my ears. Mr. Flaherty had set up his headquarters in Abbeville, and when I went there to meet him and he saw that I had cut my hair, he threw a fit! He threw his hat on the ground and started stamping on it, and he said 'I liked that boy's hair long! Now we have to wait three months for it to grow back until we can shoot!' Oh, he was highly upset!
"From that, my first impression of Mr. Flaherty wasn't too good. But we got along great. The only thing we disagreed on was that he wanted me to paddle the pirogue on the same side all the time. I guess that's how Nanook of the North paddled his kayak. I switch sides when I paddle a pirogue. We never did agree on that."
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Louisiana Story took more than a year to shoot - from the summer of 1946 through the fall of 1947 - and Flaherty provided Boudreaux with a tutor so that he could take time away from school. "There was no script," Boudreaux recalls with that broad boyish grin again. "Mr. Flaherty would tell me what to say at the moment. I didn't have to memorize lines. He'd say something like 'Holler at your daddy in French.' Mr. Flaherty didn't understand the French. I could have laid a French cursing on Mr. Flaherty and he wouldn't have known. Me, I grew up speaking French, I failed my first year in school because I couldn't speak English. They wouldn't let you speak French at school in those days.
"Anyway, we were shooting seven days a week, and I also had to put in 40 hours of school lessons per month. By the end I was glad for it to be over. I was ready to come home. It turned out that my folks had moved to Little Pecan Island, but I didn't know where Little Pecan Island was at. I was stranded!
Eventually, Boudreaux made it home "to mama and them. They had no idea I was coming in so it was a big surprise! And life started all over again, huntin' and trapping. That's what I did. Later on I worked on oil rigs for six years but I didn't like living away from my family. So I got a job as a telephone lineman. That suited me fine because I could work outside, by myself. I did that until I got hurt, and that's when I retired."
Fate has been much kinder to Boudreaux than it was to other Flaherty heroes living close to nature. The Eskimo hunter Nanook, for example, starved to death in the winter of 1924 two years after the movie was made. For Boudreaux, Louisiana Story was a happy interlude in a happy life.
"I enjoyed doing it, and that was that," he says. "I keep wondering: 'Are the people in Hollywood happy?' Every one of them has had four or five wives, but I still got the same one for 55 years. I mean I'm happy! Money's not everything. Happiness is what's important."
Despite his disregard for fame, Boudreaux can never escape the limelight completely. That's because "Mr. Morgan stirs things up." Mr. Morgan is his friend Elemore Morgan, Jr., the well-known Louisiana landscape painter and photographer who has a deeply personal interest in the film.
"Louisiana Story keeps popping up in my life," Morgan explains, "beginning with when it was filmed when I was a teenager. Besides hiring Robert Flaherty to make the movie, Standard Oil also hired some very distinguished photographers to take still photos. One of them was Todd Webb, who was a friend and photographic colleague of my father, Elemore Morgan. Then in 1949 my father photographed the Southern premiere in Abbeville.
"When I studied art in Europe and people heard that I was from Louisiana, they would ask me about the film and I realized what a great reputation it had abroad, although it was pretty much unknown at home," Morgan said. "I became interested in raising awareness of it."
Morgan has helped organize several museum shows and lecture series on the making of Louisiana Story. With his friend J.C. Boudreaux, he was interviewed for the LSU student films and LPB's Louisiana Story: The Reverse Angle. "I never thought this film would be such a recurring theme for me, but I glad that it has been. I feel strongly about Louisiana Story. It's part of our cultural heritage and history, and I want more people to know about it."
Morgan also has high praise for Boudreaux and the entire cast of Cajun "actors." "I don't think Hollywood actors could have captured the body language and the accents with the same credibility. That's a big part of the film's enduring appeal. Not to mention the beautiful cinematography. It's corny in spots, but those flaws don't undermine it." Morgan said. "Sixty years later, I think Louisiana Story rings true even though that pristine life no longer exists. There's enough of an echo of that life."
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Back in Sweet Lake, on a Sunday afternoon in early winter, a mouth-watering gumbo simmers on Boudreaux's stove, lending the trailer a cozy, homey atmosphere.
"I am the same J. C. that I've always been. I don't trap anymore, but I went duck hunting yesterday, and I got in two days of alligator hunting this year. I got married when I was nineteen and raised a family. My wife, Regina, she trapped me. I didn't even tell her I'd been in a movie."
"And if he had told me," Regina chimed in, with one eye on the Saints game, "it wouldn't have made any difference." |
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Author of Zydeco! New Orleans-based Ben Sandmel writes on music and the arts for numerous national publications and is also the drummer/producer for The Hackberry Ramblers Cajun and western swing band. He can be reached at hotbiscuits@att.net.
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