From The Attic — for a Kinder, Cooler America
JEREMIAH, KY — The film crew was wrapping up when the trouble began.
Excited about the day’s footage — weary miners on rickety porches, barefoot kids in shacks — crew members hardly noticed the grizzled old man approaching. “Get off my property!” Hobart Ison shouted. “NOW!” Then he pulled out a .38. Shot in the chest, cameraman Hugh O’Connor’s last words began with “Why?”
In 1967, Appalachia was synonymous with American blight. The War on Poverty was sending young volunteers into these hills, trailing clouds of journalists. So when the mountain man killed the cameraman, locals understood. “They’ve made enough fun of mountain people,” one told the Lecher County D.A. “Let me on the jury, Boone, and I’ll turn him loose.”
Enough! Enough of stereotypes. Hillbillies, Hatfields, McCoys. Why couldn’t Appalachia tell its own story?
Shortly after Hobart Ison’s trial ended in a hung jury, another stranger with a camera came to Appalachia. But recent Yale grad Bill Richardson did not point his camera. He taught people how to use it. His idea was “to offer a counter narrative to the one that made Eastern Kentucky the poster child for American poverty.” Renting a storefront in Whitesburg, Richardson set up shop — Appalshop.
“There was a sense of curiosity,” recalled Herb Smith. “A lot of energy and anger at the failure of the American government to help us. And we were high school kids, fascinated by all that film gear.”
A half century later, now hunkered down in an old Coca-Cola plant on the edge of Whitesburg, Appalshop is a beacon in a beloved and beleaguered region. Coal mining is endangered. Opiods make headlines. Poverty tightens its grip. But against these odds, the people of Appalachia continue to create a river of music, art, and tradition. That river flows right through Appalshop.
With grants from the NEA, the NEH, the MacArthur Foundation and others, Appalshop has crafted a collective portrait of this unique region — its music, its life, its heart. “There have been years, as we say, of thin cows and years of fat cows,” said Herb Smith, who has made 60-some Appalshop films. “But we have learned to gear down and carry on.”
Appalshop’s cultural celebration includes: CDs of mountain music and storytelling on the June Appal label; books displaying quilts, carvings, and other crafts; a regional theater, a Mountain Tech Media lab, and films, 120 and counting.
Appalshop films range from short profiles of musicians and artists to longer documentaries about social issues. Prison abuse. Women’s shelters. Marijuana as cash crop. Other films profile the hardships of mining, the endurance of old-timers, the hope in girls basketball. Appalshop films have screened on PBS, at Sundance, at MoMA and other museums. And you can screen them through the streaming service Vimeo.
Bill Richardson’s “portable” camera weighed 20 pounds. Today, anyone with a phone can shoot a movie, which is why Appalshop’s summer Appalachian Media Institute teaches the finer points of filmmaking. An annual Seedtime in the Cumberlands music fest draws crowds. Appalshop’s online archive lets you browse thousands of artifacts. And WMMT-FM features banjos, fiddles, and plenty of mountain talk.
Still, stereotypes persist. “Hollywood likes stock characters,” said Herb Smith. “Cowboys and Indians are easy characters everyone thinks they know. It’s the same with hillbillies. You think it’s over and then, lord have mercy, here they come again.”
One shop can’t kill off a stereotype, but Appalshop continues to reach out. For the last few years, Smith and other locals have reached across America’s political divide.
Since 2017, “Hands Across the Hills” has connected Western Massachusetts, bluest of the blue, with Lecher County, reddest of the red. Visiting delegations have shared food, talk, and family stories. Politics has reared its raw head but more bridges have been built than burned. “The Massachusetts people have been amazing in welcoming us and pushing us just a bit to explain ourselves,” Smith said. “I’m a filmmaker, but I still think the best way you can do that is face-to-face.”
As the old song says, “it’s a long way to Harlan,” but Appalshop makes the journey a two-way trip. And with a dozen young staffers now buzzing around the old bottling plant, Smith, 68, sees “a generational transition. It’s a charge to see them pull it off.”
Hobart Ison, finally sentenced to ten years, served one year before parole. In 2001, an investigation explained why locals seemed to sanction the murder. Not from some “clannish suspicion of outsiders“ but “because they perceived the prying eyes of reporters to be an assault on manners, common decency, and the integrity of their communities.”
“Americans have been suckered,” Herb Smith told The Attic. “News shows portray all these poor mountain people. Partisan politics continues to divide us. It only makes our job at Appalshop more important. If you just have these cardboard characters, we will never deal with the reality.”
