Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."
I'm your host, Glenn Holland.
Tonight's film is "Cross Creek," a biographical drama released by Universal Pictures in 1983, Martin Ritt directed from a screenplay by Dalene Young based on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' 1942 memoir of her life in a homestead in North Central Florida.
"Cross Creek" stars Mary Steenburgen as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Rip Torn, Peter Coyote, and Alfre Woodard, with Dana Hill, Keith Michell, and Malcolm McDowell in supporting roles.
The film opens at a soiree along the coast of Upstate New York, an upper-crust affair attended by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and her husband, Charles.
Out of the blue, she informs him that she has bought a property in Northern Florida, site unseen, and plans to move there alone.
to concentrate on her writing.
She makes the drive south and arrives in a town near her new home just as her car breaks down.
The man who runs the local hotel, Norton Baskin, offers to drive her to her destination.
After many miles on country roads, they arrive in Cross Creek and her new property, a rundown homestead in the midst of a sadly neglected orange grove.
Despite some misgivings, Marjorie is determined to stay and devote her time and attention to finishing her most recent novel, a gothic romance.
As she works slowly to fix up the house and property, Marjorie is visited by some of her new neighbors.
First is backwoods man, Marsh Turner, and his teenage daughter, Ellie, who keeps a deer fawn as a pet.
Next is Geechee, a black woman who offers to cook and clean for her despite Marjorie's protest 'cause she can't afford to pay her much.
As Marjorie realizes the amount of work the orange grove requires, she hires other local people to help her out.
When they clear a channel, she'll allow water into the grove's irrigation system.
The prospects for a successful crop and Marjorie's life in Florida greatly improve.
Norton Baskin has Marjorie's car repaired and refurbished and visits her frequently, but she keeps him at a distance.
Although she wants no romantic entanglements that might interfere with her writing, she still becomes involved in the lives of the people around her, especially Geechee, Marsh, Ellie, and the rest of the Turner family.
When Marjorie finally finishes her novel and sends it off to her editor, Maxwell Perkins, he turns it down, but at the same time, he praises the realism, the depth, and the keen insight he finds in her letters to him describing her life at Cross Creek.
His words lead Marjorie to consider making Cross Creek, the place and its people, the new focus of her literary work.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born in Washington, DC in 1896.
She began writing stories to the age of six, and at 15, won a prize for a short story she had written.
Marjorie received a degree in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she also met her future husband, Charles Rawlings.
They married in 1919, and lived briefly in New York City before moving to Louisville, Kentucky.
They both wrote for the Louisville Courier Journal, and later moved to Rochester, New York to write for the Rochester Journal.
Marjorie's contribution was a syndicated column called "Songs of the Housewife" After 10 years as a journalist, Marjorie used an inheritance from her mother to buy a 72-acre orange grove in Cross Creek, a hamlet in northern Florida.
When she first moved there in 1928, Cross Creek had no paved roads and no electricity except that provided by gasoline-powered generators.
The nearest town of any size, Hawthorne, was 17 miles away.
When Marjorie Rawlings moved there, Cross Creek was home to just seven families, five white and two black.
Her white neighbors were people known as Florida crackers, the descendants of Scots-Irish, Scottish, and English colonists who had settled in the remote backcountry of the Southern American colonies.
Cracker was an Elizabethan word meaning braggart and blowhard.
An 18th century letter to the Earl of Dartmouth tells us, cracker is a name they have got from being great boasters.
They're a lawless set of rascals on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode.
Some of them in time, change their place of abode to what would become Central Florida.
The name of Marjorie Rawlings' housekeeper, Geechee, indicates she was a member of the Gullah, a distinctive Southern African American ethnic group.
The Gullah lived primarily in the Lowcountry salt marshes and waterways along the coastal plain of Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, and on the Sea Islands along the Southern Coast.
They have a unique creole language and culture ultimately derived from the languages and cultures of West Africa and the Congo.
The road to the production of a motion picture based on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' 1942 memoir "Cross Creek" was, like the road to her homestead, a long one, overshadowed by the beauty of the place itself.
Producer Robert Radnitz purchased the rights to the book, hoping to express on film the interconnection between Marjorie Rawlings and the backcountry of central Florida.
"There was such a feeling of place in the book," he said.
That's something that has always interested me because I think all of us are very influenced by where we happen to live.
After several years, Radnitz turned to Martin Ritt to direct.
Ritt had directed Radnitz's 1972 film "Sounder" about a family of African American sharecroppers during the Depression, one of many films Ritt directed about the South.
"The essence of drama is change," Ritt has said, and the South has gone through more changes than any other section of the country.
To accurately convey the sense of place that was so important to the story, the film was shot on location at Ocala, Florida near where Marjorie Rawlings house is now a state museum.
Radnitz said the location was almost another character in the film and the cinematography by John A. Alonzo beautifully conveys that character in carefully composed scenes of land and water.
Of course, location shooting had its less desirable aspects as well, including inconvenient rainfall, snakes, alligators and the ubiquitous mosquitoes.
Mary Steenburgen tried to find some inspiration in such annoyances.
She said, "I felt I was being bitten by the same mosquitoes and hearing the same sounds as Marjorie Rawlings."
Steenburgen, despite an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work in Jonathan Demme's "Melvin and Howard" in 1980 was not the sort of star movie moguls had in mind for "Cross Creek."
"The script was turned down by every major studio in town," Robert Radnitz later said.
"They all said to me, God, it's beautiful.
Come back if you've got Jane Fonda or Meryl Streep."
Radnitz cast Steenburgen who was from northeast Arkansas because "I wanted a lady out of middle America who had a lot of the good qualities associated with that section of the country.
I just thought she was right."
Radnitz also cast Malcolm McDowell, the British actor who was then Steenburgen's husband in the role of editor Maxwell Perkins.
Alfre Woodard was nominated for an Academy Award for her supporting role as Geechee and won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture.
Her character was a combination of the real Geechee and Rawlings' later housekeeper, Idella Parker whom Rawlings called the perfect maid.
"I don't think this role as a maid is demeaning at all," Woodard said.
"It wasn't written that way.
I thought this woman was quite wise and very much in touch with the earth.
She was alive and I fell in love with her immediately."
The character played by Peter Coyote, hotelier Norton Baskin, became Marjorie Rawlings' second husband when they married in 1941, more than a decade after the events portrayed in the movie.
Baskin was 82 when the film was made and has a cameo as the elderly man who directs Marjorie to Norton Baskin's hotel towards the beginning of the movie.
He came on location several times during the shooting.
"I was tickled to death when I met Peter Coyote," he said.
"He was macho as hell, which I wasn't.
He is six foot one, handsome, athletic, whereas I'm five foot eight and anything but.
I always wanted to look like that."
[host chuckling] Mary Steenburgen greatly benefited from Norton Baskin's presence on the set.
"A lot of people down there really glorified and romanticized Marjorie," she said.
"Whereas Norton tended to be real straight about her.
It's very easy to approach a character like that, a so-called strong woman who overcomes the odds and give a one-note performance.
Strength is only one thing a person has.
I'm real strong and I'm also real feminine and I don't find a struggle having those two things under one roof Norton helped me to see that the same was true of Marjorie."
It's notoriously difficult to make a compelling motion picture about a writer.
Steenburgen said, "Writing is essentially an internal process.
To try to make that external has always been a trap for actors.
I don't know if I licked the problem.
I tried to show her passion for wanting to be the best writer she could possibly be."
Producer Radnitz said, "I'm sure some critics will feel we haven't dramatized the creative process but that's really not what this picture is about.
It's about a community and its people and their impress on Marjorie Rawlings.
Fundamentally, it's about the land because that's what inspired Marjorie and gave her a chance to fulfill herself."
Please join us again next time for another Saturday Night at the Movies.
I'm Glenn Holland.
Goodnight.