Back in late 1927, a controversial and historically significant Paramount Pictures silent film titled “Stark Love” was shot in Graham County by writer/director Karl Brown, a former student of silent film-making legend D.W. Griffith. Only two copies of the film survive: one at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the other at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. These archival copies were made in 1968 when British film historian Kevin Brownlow discovered a single surviving copy in the Czech Film Archive in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

Jerry Williamson, long-time editor of the “Appalachian Journal” published by the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University in Boone, considers the film one of the most important and powerful cinematic studies ever made about Appalachia, all the more so since it was shot in the mountains rather than Hollywood. Williamson is of the opinion that of the over 700 Hollywood mountain movies shot since “The Moonshiners” in 1904 on down to the more recent “Sergeant York” and “Thunder Road,” that “Stark Love” is “quite simply one of the most stunning movie experiences.” After discovering the film, Brownlow sought out Brown in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, encouraging the old man to write his memoirs, which were published in part as “Adventures with D.W. Griffith” (1973). Brown also wrote a manuscript titled “The Paramount Adventure” that chronicled “his days as cameraman for Fatty Arbuckle, Will Rogers, and the director James Cruze, when he shot 28 films in six years, and then went on to make his first movie as a full-fledged director, “Stark Love.”

Of interest to area readers will be the Winter 1991 issue of “Appalachian Journal” in which Williamson reprinted a 46-page section of Brown’s manuscript titled “The Making of ‘Stark Love:’ From ‘The Paramount Adve’s recollections of Graham County and its people in the 1920s, ohis efforts to find amateur actors in an area where movies were considered sinful by most,” and his relationship with Horace Kephart, the Bryson City author of the classic study Our Southern Highlanders (1913). A short introduction by Kevin Brownlow on how he found the reclusive Brown (who died in 1990) and induced him to write about these matters is also included.

While filming “The Covered Wagon” in the Utah desert, Brown happened to read in an old Atlantic Monthly magazine a chapter of Lucy Furman’s The Quare People, a novel about Appalachia, which he said was his initial inspiration for “Stark Love.” So, in 1925, he went looking for a location for his planned movie. Brown wanted some “authentic” mountain people to appear in it, having been influenced in this regard by the recent successes of documentary movies like “Nanook of the North,” which had presented real people on film, not actors.

He first visited Berea College in Kentucky, then Nashville and Knoxville, and finally Asheville, where he found topographic maps showing “the highest valleys of the Smokies, near such fascinating place-names as Nantahala, Shuckstack, Siler’s Bald and any number of similarly romantic place-names.” He also chanced upon a copy of Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders, first published in 1913 and enlarged in subsequent editions.

Brown felt he’d found the authority he needed to make his movie, so he went to Bryson City to meet the author in the fall of 1925. Kephart, who had already heard about Brown’s desire to portray mountain people, agreed to help, gave advice about dealing with mountain people, introduced him around, and arranged for a mountain guide to assist him in Graham County. Although highly colored in places, Brown’s description of Kephart is one of the fullest available. Here are a few excerpts: “We stored our gear in baggage rooms (at the Bryson City rail station) while we wandered up the street looking for someone who might give us news of Kephart. Suddenly I saw and recognized him, standing negligently before the town’s one hotel ... (He) was a small man, something below medium height, but chunky and intrinsically formidable. But the one feature that distinguished him from all other human beings I have ever met was that one of his eyes was a bright blue while the other was a deep brown ... We crossed the street and ascended some wonderfully uneven steps (over Bennett’s Drug Store just off the town square) to land in an equally wonderful uneven office with a floor that was as wavy as a mild sea.

“Kephart’s desk was of the old rolltop kind, his typewriter a battered old Underwood 5. The nearby table was piled high with books, papers, magazines and letters, with everything piled on top of everything else. On the floor beside the desk lay a coil of twisted galley-proofs, waiting for some kindly soul to correct them. A few old pipes, thick-crusted and rank, lay on the desk while cloth bags of Havana clippings were handy to fuel these mephitic tobacco burners.

“Kephart leaned back in his creaky-springed swivel chair and said, as a sort of cue, ‘Well?’ ... I decided then and there that this was no man to fool with. There was something so direct and honest in his bearing that he reminded me of others of his kind ... so, even though I knew in advance it would be an uphill job, I decided to be as honest as I could manage, considering that I was somewhat out of practice.”

In essence, after describing in considerable detail his own early adventures among the mountain people - whereby Kephart “had dropped into their midst as from another planet (in 1904)” - he advised Brown to “be a gentleman and you’ll be treated like one,” and that “honesty is not only the best policy: it is the only one.”

Kephart arranged for a mountain guide named Jim Bob Marcy to assist him in Graham County. Although highly colored, Brown’s account of his sojourn in far southwestern North Carolina is both entertaining and informative.

“Jim Bob drove us first to the baggage room where we picked up our camera equipment, and then he headed us out of town over a road which I would never compliment by calling it merely atrocious ...,” Brown recalled. “On and on we went, heading straight up or straight down, sometime on tire-tracks that served as roads and once or twice bumping and rocking along stream beds which were the only roads possible in those pinched-in guts of cliffs.... There was one store that carried everything from meat to mortuary necessities. Bib overalls, the uniform of the mountaineers, hung in racks close to the barrel of salt pork, the only meat-product on sale. There was a village square, standard equipment of all towns large and small, from Boston Common to this barely perceptible dot on the map called Robbinsville.”

Brown changed guides in Robbinsville, recruiting a man named Davey Crockett to take them into the Santeetlah area of Graham County. On Christmas Day, 1925, he was still camping out in an open area he called the “polo field.” There he made contact with a gentleman named “Shotgun John” Smith, who helped him meet others that might take part in the film. In particular, Brown was looking for a fiery young girl who could play the lead in his movie. And he found one such, but her father was suspicious of the “movie fellow” and wouldn’t consent, saying that none of the women in his family would become “movie Jezebels.” Brown learned, however, from Shotgun John that the man’s daughter had been promised in marriage to a man whose own son became his chief rival for her affection. Suddenly, he had the rest of his story idea: a beautiful, spirited mountain girl fought over by a mountain man and his own son. During this visit, Brown and his assistant took shots that would eventually be in the movie: log cabins, people working in fields, a man making shingles, scenery, etc.

And in the summer of 1927 he returned with plenty of financial backing from Paramount to set up a “base camp” in an abandoned store building at the end of Robbinsville’s main street. In an outburst of activity that must have amazed town residents, “Lines of communication were established for meats, vegetables, and fresh fruits. Lumber of all sizes appeared, enough for a small town. A huge army-type range was brought up in sections. A cook and flunkies reported for duty. Everything flowed into town, then out along the trail after being divided into muleloads.” Unable to find locals to take the principal parts, he sent his assistant Col. Paul Wing to Knoxville, and he came back with one Helen Mundy, an 18-year-old “mischievous little gamin” who became a local legend in Robbinsville. Worried about appearances as well as actual scandal, Brown says that he paid the local sheriff money so that extra deputies could be hired to keep an eye out for Helen Mundy. Brown eventually used many local people in several key scenes. The company also built a large permanent camp up in the mountains, having to blast out a road to the site. In addition to providing an ongoing sideshow for county residents, the movie people spent a lot of money. Locals were hired to take prominent roles in the movie. When the film was finished, Paramount didn’t quite know what to do with it. It was like nothing else ever done. On the one hand, it was so much like a documentary and totally non-urban as to make the company nervous for its reception; and, on the other hand, it was so blatantly violent and sexually suggestive - there’s a violent attempted rape at the end - as to invite the censor’s condemnation. Brown had a hard time getting it shown, so he finally rented a theater in New York City and staged his own premier in March 1927. The print that was shown had been heavily edited to tone down the rape and fight at the end. When “Stark Love” was eventually shown in Robbinsville, the people, understandably, were not amused. But, in retrospect, the making of the film as recorded in Brown’s memoir provides a document that opens a window on how outsiders viewed and related to this region not so very long ago. In some regards, things may not have changed all that much. After all, when the movie “Deliverance” appeared in the early 1970s, it brought people streaming in looking for the same romantic and grotesque aspects Brown thought were the norm.

(George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 287713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.)

 

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