First, a synopsis of the pilot for which we are seeking funds from the CPB.

Pilot program - OF LOVE AND DUST ( Ernest J. Gaines ) 90 minutes

The pilot of SOUTHERN VOICES is based on the second novel of Ernest J. Gaines, winner of the National Critics Circle Award for fiction and author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (television version - CBS) and A Lesson Before Dying (television version - HBO)

Of Love and Dust is the story of a young black murderer conditionally released under bond from a South Louisiana prison to work on a plantation under a tough Cajun overseer. These events take place sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Marcus Payne claims he is innocent of murder and killed only in self-defense. Prison has merely taught him bitterness. He recklessly invites disaster at every turn and rejects the friendship of the story's narrator, a stoic black tractor-driver, Jim Kelly. Kelly tries to steer the younger man away from the perils of offending the white world that controls them all. But the rebellious Payne soon antagonizes the overseer, Sidney Bonbon. Repeatedly punished Payne is unrepentant and refuses to be cowed. Yet his courage offends not only the overseer but most African - Americans working on the plantation, including Kelly. Dismayed by Payne's arrogance, Kelly grudgingly admires the younger man's determination to live true to himself. Then in an act of vengeance Payne tries to seduce Pauline, Sidney Bonbon's black mistress. When she rejects him, he seduces the overseer's young wife, Louise. Matters worsen when Louise and Payne fall in love and he secretly and then openly visits her whenever Bonbon is not there. Miraculously the overseer detects nothing but tension on the plantation is palpable. Payne has ruptured the social order and the black quarter fears a terrible retribution. At the shattering climax, Payne and Louise try to flee to California but Bonbon discovers them and kills Payne in a fight.

An accomplice to these events is the owner of the plantation, Marshall Hebert, who lives fearfully in the debt of Bonbon whom he secretly ordered to kill a man in some earlier time. He tries to persuade Payne to kill Bonbon offering him the means of escape from his jail term and the plantation. Payne refuses; he will not do yet another venal service for a white man but he seizes the means of escape. Kelly learns Marshall's secret and when Payne is killed and the matter smoothed over in the local court, Marshall suggests to Kelly, that it would be wise if he left the plantation. Kelly departs, taking the example of Payne's courage and defiance with him.

This is not just a story of white cruelty to blacks. Gaines clearly depicts the racial mores and fears that bind whites and blacks in a world where everybody is a victim. Sidney Bonbon tries to befriend Jim Kelly, but cannot. In an attempt to excuse himself, Bonbon confesses to Kelly that his own people would kill him if he had not killed Payne. Louise, Bonbon's wife, is a hapless girl from an up-country Baptist family, lost in the world of Cajun South Louisiana. Pauline, Bonbon's mistress is a self-denying, self-hating, woman who sleeps with the man who prevails over her people. Even Marshall Hebert is a victim, hostage to a terrible secret and a suffocating social order that he tries to escape in drink. Everyone, black and white, is prisoner to a life they could at least endure, until its ugliness is made manifest by the contest between Payne and Bonbon. Then in one terrifying moment the struggle between the two men reveals the despotic fate that governs all of them, a moment that offers no respite, only the terrible knowledge that unless they too find the courage to act as Marcus Payne has, nothing in their lives will ever change.

[Gaines] best writing is marked by what Ralph Ellison, describing the blues, called near-tragic, near -comic lyricism. Newsweek.

Gaines...[writes] with humor, a strong sense of drama and a compassionate understanding of people who find themselves in opposing positions. Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post.

We feel there are even stronger qualities to this gripping novel. All the characters are vividly etched, their roles are as powerfully drawn as the personas of a Greek tragedy. The effect is to make Of Love and Dust a morality tale of the terrible burdens people shouldered under the old white/black social order.

Programs to follow:

THE COURTSHIP OF MERLIN LEBLANC ( Tim Gautreaux ) 60 minutes

A story of three old men and a baby. When a widowed Cajun strawberry farmer Merlin LeBlanc returns to his little house he finds his twice married, twice divorced and hopelessly neglectful daughter waiting for him to babysit her small child while she takes off with a new boyfriend for the weekend. Her friend is a pilot who is going to fly them to Texas in his light plane. The weary farmer accepts the baby wondering why all his children have been so inept in the relatively simple business of making a life for themselves. His two hapless sons are dead, killed in drunken misadventures and his daughter seems no wiser bouncing from one boy friend to another, unable to make an living and stuck on drugs. That night brings news that the girl and her pilot have crashed in the Gulf, in very deep water. The farmer contemplates the smiling, gurgling little baby. He gives her some shotgun shells as pacifiers - too big to swallow he imagines - and goes about the task of setting up a nursery. His own father Etienne shows up and announces that Merlin is not suited to this, that he hasn't the feelings for child rearing . Father advises son to find a new wife! The son who still dreams of his dead wife is confounded. How will he find a woman at his age? Who would want to be wife to a farmer whose best prospects consist entirely of an acre and a half of strawberries?

Manfully he tries, tricking himself out in loud shirts and tight pants and visiting the local taverns. The women he meets are all more interested in the age of his truck and how much he owes on the house than they are on child rearing.

Merlin and Etienne are considering this when Etienne's father shows up, ninety-three year old Octave, who is outraged at the idea of his grandson trying to find a wife like a store bought item. He also disapproves of giving babies shotgun shells as toys. He kicks them off the porch and lays into his son and grandson.

At one point Octave lapses into silence and his son and grandson decide he has died. When the child whimpers, the old head rears itself and Etienne and Merlin almost fall off the porch. The child's great, great, great grandfather announces nurses say I pass away two or three times a week. I just come and go.

Three generations of LeBlanc men debate what to do with the tiny girl but old Octave's voice is the strongest. He tells Merlin he gonna raise that child with or without a woman, he gonna tell her about dogs and salesmen, about worms and bees, about cooking and cars and airplanes.

We leave them all in the warm sunshine, Merlin and Etienne amazed but determined listening to the whispering and singing from Octave and the new little LeBlanc.

RHODA ( Ellen Gilchrist ) 90 minutes

The adventurous, brilliant, romantic, outrageous Rhoda Manning grows from child to girl to woman and finally into middle age leaving behind a trail of unforgettable experiences for herself and anyone else who is witness to the arc of her life. In various states of mind that range from fanciful to delusional, Rhoda careens through life and people, in and out of schools, friendships, professions, romance, love affairs, marriages and divorces taking pleasure where she finds it and revenge when she doesn't. This extraordinary life is already accelerating in childhood, the period from which we will take one or two stories from this thinly veiled autobiographical collection that traces the antic life of author Ellen Gilchrist.

WOLF WHISTLE ( Lewis Norden ) 90 minutes

The murder of Emmett Till, a black child of the 1950s, was a particularly shocking episode in the South's record of violence against African-Americans, until the writing of this story. Lewis Norden transformed the lynching murder of a teenager whose crime was to whistle at a white woman into a tale more terrifying than any journalistic account. Painted as much as it is written, Norden pictures for us the various players in the drama in cartoon portraits of their lives, not cartoons as in comic books, but unemotional (in contrast to the emotions of their context!) descriptions and banal dialogue from the different participants: the victim, his killers, his would be guardians-- all set against symbolic and real imagery of the darkness that surrounds them all be it the depths of a swamp where the body will find its rest or the front seat of the car where the killer delivers a final death blow. The effect is closest to Gabriel Garcia Marquez' magic realism. The television translation will use vivid, surreal colors among other devices to paint this powerfully abstract picture of what Hannah Arendt would in other circumstances call the banality of evil.

WHERE TROUBLE SLEEPS ( Clyde Edgerton ) 60 minutes

The ominous title refers to a dog! Trouble sleeps on a country store porch in Listre, North Carolina where a mysterious stranger in town first stops sometime in 1950. The dog continues to sleep through all the chaos caused by the man's coming - chaos which flows in and out of the store and across the porch where Trouble slumbers unhearing and unperturbed.

Progress is in the making for Listre. After a head on collision between a mule and a truck the town petitioned the state for a blinker light at the town's one intersection. It helped but it also put Listre on the map. Soon outsiders were passing through. And one, driving a stolen car decided to take up residence at the Settle Inn.

Listre has a population of 511. Its local businesses are one grocery, one filling station, one hardware store, one variety store, one barbershop, one auto shop/grill, The Settle Inn and one church, Southern Baptist, of course. Its number one community concern for some time now has been increased congestion at the crossroads.

We are witnesses to a unchanging little town whose people consist of good ole boys, good little boys, little old ladies with shotguns and whenever Trouble awakes, a dog who can tell the weather. It's a place where a primary ingredient of grade school education is a visit to the state's electric chair. It is into this small town's serenity that a sinister visitor steps and pauses. He sees it as a place ripe for picking. But the surprise is on him. A tale in which rootless amorality meets deep rooted moral flexibility by an author who has been described as Eudora Welty meets Mark Twain.

THANATOS SYNDROME ( Walker Percy ) 90 minutes

A Psychiatrist recently released from prison for selling uppers without prescription to sleepy truck drivers is welcomed home to New Orleans and the prospect of reinstatement and an exciting new research job. He soon discovers a strange pattern of behavior among his woman patients - a tendency to act in a provocative, even animal like sexual manner when he interviews them. They also exhibit an uncanny ability to calculate distances or solve other math problems without benefit of calculator, pen, or paper. He also finds a reluctance on the part of his medical superiors - to whom he is accountable until reinstated - to take this behavior seriously.

Aided by a talented and beautiful cousin with whom he seems to have more than a cousinly relationship, he discovers that the federal research center where he works has been secretly putting a heavy metal additive in the local water supply because it has been demonstrated to have a socially beneficial effect on the local poor and black population. Crime on the streets is down and learning is up in the schools. The fact that this is coupled with a bizarre sexual effect is only noticed by the Psychiatrist.

Author Walker Percy's pessimistic view of society finds a Biblical resonance in the role played by a half mad priest who takes an even more dismal view of the world than the Psychiatrist who is trying to help him. He will not come down from a fire tower where he makes his home like some modern St. Simon Stylites, the early Christian ascetic who rejected the world sitting out his life in the desert atop a tall stone column.

Dark as the author's views are the story is told with campy humor which takes its climax when the doctor in charge of our Psychiatrist's fate is found to be among a group of doctors and educators that are doctoring the local water. To boot they are running a pornographic ring which photographs the sexual activity brought on by drinking the water. Our hero, the Psychiatrist, forces those in control to drink the water they have used on others. Their respectability dissolves into a scene from a menagerie. The lead doctor - the Psychiatrist's boss - vaults up a set of stairs and beats his chest like a male gorilla demonstrating. At this point the local sheriff arrives. When one of the effected women presents herself to the embarrassed sheriff, the gorilla throws himself down the stairs and attacks the sheriff. The scene ends like a Monty Python comedy with women chirping like female apes and their mates fighting with deputy sheriffs.

The various turns of this story, its religious and Orwellian overtones, make it a literary and dramatic mother lode with its tone running from ominous and conspiratorial to slapstick comedy.

FAMILY LINEN ( Lee Smith ) 60 minutes

The prolific and much honored author Lee Smith unfolds a family saga cum murder mystery. The murderer and family member is not revealed until the end although the trail is hot from the beginning. A large and diverse family is the environment of the story. The point of view is continually changing as we hear from one and then another different family member about the others. If there is any central figure it is Sybil, a very attractive but prudish older daughter who under hypnosis recaptures a childhood image of the murder. In a series of comic incidents in which she becomes ever more shrill, Sybil propels the story as the family gathers for the funeral of their mother. Much dirty family linen is revealed in the process but it is nonetheless a redeeming story which leaves the family exhausted but reconciled in new ways.

Consultants:

These choices represent many months of research and reading. Our principal consultants were scholars: Benjamin Dunlap, President, Wofford College; John Reed, University of North Carolina; Lucinda McKeithan, North Carolina State University; and especially Robert Brinkmeyer, Jr., University of Arkansas. Others who were helpful were Staige Blackford, Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review; David Lynn, editor of the Kenyon Review, Alexander Moore, Acquisitions Editor, University of South Carolina Press, Roger T. Donald, former Editor-in-Chief, Little Brown & Co; Randy Akers, Executive Director of the South Carolina Humanities Council; and author and composer G. K. Barranger.

Rights:

While we have not optioned nor bought rights to any story, the televison rights are available. We are also assured by authors, agents or publishers that they can be obtained at a cost consistent with a PBS program budget.

Work Sample:

We are offering the one-hour Public Television drama TRIFLES as an example of our past work.

Talent:

We will seek out fine actors who are prepared to be part of these programs. As we and others have demonstrated, talented name actors are prepared to work for scale in order to perform PBS drama, as they did in TRIFLES .

TRIFLES has three Tony Award winning and one Theater Hall of Fame winning actors. They are...

Marian Seldes ( on Broadway, lead roles in Medea, Crime and Punishment, Ondine, The Chalk Garden, Equus, Deathtrap .....in films: Digging to China, Tom and Huck, Home Alone III....in television series: Murphy Brown, Murder She Wrote, Kate and Allie among many others);

Maryann Plunkett ( on Broadway, lead roles in St. Joan, The Crucible...in television, guest leads in Star Trek, Matlock, Miami Vice, and Murder She Wrote);

Mia Dillon (on Broadway: Crimes of the Heart, The Corn is Green, The Miser, Da, Hay Fever.....in television Law and Order, The Money Pit, The Cosby Show, Mary and Rhoda).

Proposed Production and Broadcast Schedule:

Based on the experience of TRIFLES and other films ...

• The script will require three months to write.
• Pre-Production will require nine weeks.
• Production will require three to four weeks.
• Post Production including delivery of the final program will take eight weeks.

The pilot program will be ready for broadcast and other forms of distribution 23 weeks after we initiate Pre-Production.

We envision an initial three-year production cycle of seven programs to establish the series. There will be the pilot program the first year; three programs the second year and three the third year. The series will provide three new one-hour dramas a year once the series is underway. The preceding year's production will provide three re-runs, making a total of six plus repeats or a total of twelve broadcasts each year.

Thus there will be one broadcast the first year with one repeat. In the second year there will be three new broadcasts with one repeat each plus a re-run of the pilot plus a repeat. In the third year there will be three new broadcasts with repeats and three re-runs with repeats.

After the initial two years we will review plans for production beyond the third year.

Broadcast Plans:

We plan to offer these programs for national broadcast to PBS.

Movie Post Mortem:

We hope to produce a separate studio based half-hour to each movie in which a spokesperson (perhaps a celebrity) introduces a famous artist, an actor or television personality, and a scholar or writer and engages them in a discussion of the story. We will invite thoughtful, popular personalities, not necessarily Southern, e.g. Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington, Richard Dreyfus, Morgan Freeman, Oprah Winfrey, whose presence will help draw an audience. We will invite scholars and writers celebrated in their own fields like Toni Morrison, John Updike, Shelby Foote, John Grisham and in some cases the author of our movie property. A :30 promo touting the movie and this discussion will precede each movie. The conversation will heighten viewers appreciation not only of the story but of literature by offering star role model interest.

A separate budget will be established for the half-hour Post Mortem but is not under consideration at this time.