Black & white documentary

'Waking in Mississippi,' a look at race relations, real and fictional, is a journey home for two local filmmakers, each with a unique perspective on life in the South.

The South has long provided material for filmmakers, but these two are making a film about making a film about the South.

They're wondering if the national media's reliance on iconic images of the Old South is justified, and they're wondering what it is about Hollywood's magic that it can seem to blunt the jagged edge of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

And last but not least they're wondering how in the world Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd and Matthew McConaughey managed to sweat so much in the movie "A Time to Kill."

The project is called "Waking in Mississippi," and Christine Herring and Andre Robinson are using it to tell another chapter in the development of Canton, a small town -- population 11,000, 70 percent of whom are black -- near the Mississippi Delta. Canton served as the filming site for the fictional town of Clanton, the setting of "A Time to Kill," the John Grisham novel-turned-blockbuster about the animosities resulting from the trial of a black man who kills the white men who raped his young daughter.

"Waking in Mississippi" will use interviews with both black and white Canton residents, combined with interviews with "A Time to Kill" director Joel Schumacher, novelist Grisham and actor Samuel L. Jackson.

In 1995, Herring and Robinson traveled to Canton from their homes in Durham to film Hollywood's version of a race riot. The year before the threat of real rioting had caused town officials to call in the National Guard.

Canton is Herring's hometown. In 1994, while she was still a student at Duke, she received news from her parents that the town could elect its first black mayor, who was running against a white opponent. But election officials called the race a tie. The candidates accused each other of cheating. As a runoff election was called, tensions mounted so much so that the National Guard was summoned after someone called for rioting in the town's square if the white opponent won.

Herring, who studied film at Duke, grabbed a video camera and zipped home to interview people.

"People were really afraid," says Herring. "Kids weren't allowed to go outside. I got calls from people telling me to come home and vote. People called my parents and told them that I hadn't sent in my absentee ballot yet."

In the end there were no riots and the black candidate won the runoff.

Then Herring learned that Warner Bros. was going to spend five hot and smoldering summer months filming in Canton and that townspeople were being hired to pretend to be rioters, and being asked to don sheets and hoods and pretend to be members of the Ku Klux Klan. The movie's producers even hired members of the National Guard, the same people called to Canton a year earlier, to play themselves.

The irony goaded Herring into picking up her camera again. This time she brought along Robinson, with whom she had worked on a student film years before and who had signed on as her collaborator.

They decided to tell the town's story, the story of how a town can seem to forget that the same tensions they are playacting had been all too real just one year before.

"The year after the threat of real rioting, you have people dressed in Klan outfits in the middle of town," says Robinson. "They said, 'This isn't real.' A year ago they were real. We wanted to know what happened in the interim.

"We used one watershed event in the town's history, the election of the first black mayor, by framing it within another, the filming of 'A Time to Kill.' We just wanted to raise some questions about where the townspeople thought they were heading and if the filming was good for them, because, ironically, they were selling an image that they were trying to get rid of at the same time."

So here was Herring, a white woman who had attended an all-white private high school, driving down into the Mississippi Delta with a black man from Arkansas at her side, who himself had graduated from Little Rock's Central High School. Robinson's alma mater was also home to the so-called Little Rock Nine, the first black students to enter the formerly all-white school in 1957 despite the governor's attempts to keep them out.

"That proved to be quite controversial," says Robinson. "A black man and white woman alone in a car in Mississippi? At some point we had bought into the stereotypes about the area, even though we were both from the South." They decided to ask a white male assistant to accompany them to Mississippi.

Nothing happened to them. But what they found surprised them. Herring's hometown had been transformed by Hollywood. When they arrived in Canton in October 1995, the movie crew had taken over the town. Cameras were everywhere. So were the national news media. Townsfolk wanted to get glimpses of stars Bullock or McConaughey or Jackson. Autographs. Press. Catering. Costumes. Economic windfall.

"The first cappuccino bar in Canton opened then," says Robinson. "It was just this intense experience and we were excited."

They wanted to turn that excitement into a project that would give Canton a voice of its own, says Herring, instead of having Warner Bros. or the national press speak for it.

So for her film, there will be no narration.

The only voices you'll hear are the townsfolk riding alongside the principals of the movie.

"All these icons were being played over and over," says Herring, "and it's consciously not about us."

But their project may be more about them than they are ready to admit. For Herring, the film may be helping her deal with being a Southerner and not having to always defend it.

"When I came to Duke I told people I was from Mississippi and they would assume I was a racist," says Herring. "It was the whole Southern apologist thing. I would learn all this stuff at school and then go home and try to have a dialogue with this new voice, and I was probably very self-righteous. I finally learned to deal with it by learning how to use a camera and talking to people through that."

For Robinson, the project is helping him confront the experiences he had growing up black in the South, but had never come to terms with. After graduating from Central High, he escaped to the University of Delaware. He studied in Costa Rica and learned to speak fluent Spanish. He graduated and then lived in Japan for three years, where he learned how to speak fluent Japanese. This project, he says, demanded that he get into a car with a white woman and drive with her to Mississippi.

"I had escaped all of that in a sense: in Delaware, in Japan," says Robinson, who is also political science Ph.D candidate at Duke. "It was something I always had to negotiate so now it's a way of exorcise a large part of what I had not let go of in my childhood."

The film should be ready this month, and Herring and Robinson are hoping to move it to festivals in addition to classrooms. They want it to become a starting point for people to examine issues of media representations of race, but they want it to to be entertaining, too. As entertaining as its inspiration.

Or maybe not.

"['A Time to Kill'] was entertaining," says Robinson. "Well, OK, for a Grisham movie it was entertaining."

Howard Henry Chen may be reached at 956-2464 or hchen@nando.com