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Earl Hamner

Eudora Welty

Earl Hamner, Eudora Welty, and Daniel Ponder

4-27-01, 2:00 EST 

Eudora Welty Newsletter:  As co-producer of the upcoming film The Ponder Heart, what were your responsibilities during the filming process? 

Earl Hamner, Jr.:  You know there are often tons of co-producers on a project of this size and usually they are chosen because of their background or their interest or their ability to contribute.  And I think that I was invited to take part because first of all I’m a southerner, second because I am an enormous fan of Eudora Welty, and third because I was available.  And it was a dream assignment for me.  Primarily, I worked with the writer Gail Gilchrist on the script because my specialty in the television business is script.  And that was my main contribution although I was present throughout the filming of the piece. 

EWN: How did you handle script changes that may have differed from the original novella? 

EH:  When you do an adaptation of a writer’s work, particularly a writer as talented and as distinguished and as revered as Eudora Welty rightfully is, you are very cautious.  It’s like the instructions given to aspiring doctors—first do no harm.  So you approach the work with the proper amount of reverence if you have a good writer.  I have done a good many adaptations in the past, most notably Charlotte’s Web—the E. B. White work where again, there is a writer we rightfully have high regard for.  So the first thing to do is to try to keep the integrity of the original writer’s work.  Sometimes you have to make surprising changes that disappoint usually the author.  I know once I adapted a book that had four seasons in it and because we were shooting on location I had to condense it all into one season which was springtime because that was when we were filming, and the authors were enraged with me, and I understood that.  I did not want to incur Eudora Welty’s rage.  I doubt that she has that much rage.  She seems like such a lovely person, but as a writer she is certainly entitled to her work being protected.  But the book did offer a challenge in that it is a told story, and the narrator, especially Miss Welty’s, is all over the place.  The structure that is required for a film is not the same structure that one would use or that Miss Welty used in telling her story.  So first I think we had to organize the story in a kind of chronological order and then with that skeleton to hang as much as possible of her original work onto that sort of new framework. 

EWN: So most of the script changes dealt with the chronology, the order in which they appeared?  You did most of your changes there as opposed to the actual events in the text? 

EH:  Exactly.  I don’t think we invented any events.  We may have modified the way in which Uncle Daniel meets Bonnie Dee.  I don’t recall exactly how he met her in the book [in the novella, Bonnie Dee traipses into town, gets a job in the ten cent store, where, one day, Uncle Daniel wanders in with the intent of telling a story but instead proposes to Bonnie Dee who is working behind the counter], but we had him simply observe her the first day she arrives in town.  But I think it works.  I wish you had been able to see the film beforehand. 

EWN:  That would have been ideal.  Fortunately though, Meribeth Fell who assists with the EWN was able to see it.  She mentioned that Bonnie Dee is hugged to death in the film whereas in the book she is tickled to death.   Can you elaborate on this? 

EH:  To be tickled to death under those circumstances seemed to be an additional threat.  There was so much going on in that scene where she does die so we made the decision that she died of fright rather than being tickled to death.  We have established early on that she is terrified of lightning, and to impose on that scene the additional fact of being tickled to death, visually didn’t seem to us to work.  That was a liberty that we took with Miss Welty’s work, and I’m guilty. 

EWN:  That is going to happen.  Welty acknowledges that any adaptation will change her work to some degree.  

EH:  She was very gracious about that.  I know I read that she was not especially fond of the liberties taken with the Chodorov and Fields version.   I know she objected specifically to some of their using dialogue that she had written for one person and they put it into the mouth of another person. And I can understand both points of view.  I can understand the playwrights saying, “Gee, Eudora wrote this so let’s use and not waste anything.”  But then on the other hand she had the purity of character that she had written it for and rightfully felt taken advantage of.   

EWN:  It sounds as if you researched what Welty had to say about other adaptations.  Did you read any reviews, critical analyses, or statements by Welty in order to prepare?  

EH:  I read sort of at random.  I’ve been a Welty fan for many years as you know from that little piece I did introducing the film I just read at random.  I picked up some of her other work.  I read a lovely piece by Willie Morris, I think it was in Vanity Fair [April 1999], and he wrote a beautiful piece about Welty.  That was one that stuck in my mind so because instead of being this distant academic sort of person, she became, in Willie’s words, quite a real woman.  I remember one description of his taking her for a ride, and they came to a back country road.  And she was tired or something, and he said, “Would you like to take this road?”  And she said, “We would be fools if we didn’t.”   I thought that was so lovely.  It humanized her.  It brought her to me as a person rather than a distant sort of figure. 

EWN:  Finding out things like that, did that effect the way that you approached the adaptation? 

EH:  Of course, I did not do the adaptation; I advised.  But certainly, everything you know about a person is beneficial to trying to interpret or protect the new version of her work.  Incidentally, I saw The Ponder Heart in 1956, and in a very curious way, there are wheels within wheels.  In that production the Edna Earle character was played by the lady who later played on The Waltons as one of the ladies who made the recipes, you know the bootleggers.  Will Geer also played as the father [Grandpa Zeb Walton].   And loving Eudora Welty even back then, she came back into my life when I took this job.  I thought there were interesting wheels turning there. 

EWN:  I noticed you mentioned in your talk at Natchez that you had seen the Broadway production and that you didn’t catch all of it because you were looking to see if Eudora Welty was in the audience.  But I was wondering, what was your impression of that adaptation? 

EH:  I was not the least critical.  When I go to the theater, I don’t go critically.  If I am swallowed up by the production immediately, I know it’s good.  I mean like I’ve seen the Willy Loman play, Death of a Salesman [by Arthur Miller], probably ten times, and when I first saw it, I was totally absorbed and became a part of the action.  I was not in the audience; I was there.  That, I recalled, also happened with The Ponder Heart in 1956.  I suppose if I saw it later or especially now that I am more acquainted with the book that I would be more critical of its fidelity to her work and to the professionalism of the actors and the director.   

EWN:  Are you familiar with the second stage adaptation of The Ponder Heart done by Frank Hains in 1970? 

EH:  Is that the one that was done in Jackson? 

EWN:  It was. 

EH:  I read about that, but I was never able to get a copy.  And I wanted to because I read somewhere that Miss Welty approved and liked that version.   I would have liked to have been better acquainted with that one for any guidance it might have provided us with. 

EWN:  Welty did like that one better. 

EH:  I wonder if that was because it was done by hometown people, even the acting was done by hometown folks.  I expect that there had been less meddling with her original version in that one. 

EWN:  One thing that she liked about the Hains’s version is that it kept Edna Earle as the main focus as opposed to Uncle Daniel.  Basically, The Ponder Heart consists of only one voice, that of Edna Earle telling her experiences with her Uncle Daniel to the sole tenant of the Beulah Hotel.  In many interviews, Welty expressed concerns with how the Chodorov and Fields adaptation changed the focus of the play from Edna Earle’s storytelling to Uncle Daniel himself.  The Hains version, on the other hand, kept Edna Earle as a focus in Welty’s view.  How did your production handle this? 

EH:  Well, let me say first of all that my initial approach to this project had been a little off-beat for Mobil Masterpiece Theatre or for ALT films.  I suggested that we keep the Edna Earle character in a scene even in which she would not be logically be present.  She would have been—this is my notion—akin to the stage manager in Our Town.  And she would comment, and she would tell, and she would illuminate what was going on which would have enabled us to have stuck exactly to the way Eudora told her story within reason and within the confines of film.  Which I thought was sort of interesting.  Except for the stage manager in Our Town, I haven’t seen that technique used that much and haven’t seen it used at all, to my knowledge, in film.  And I thought it would be interesting to have her standing there as an observer but also even in scenes in which she was present to do asides to the audience.  But I was told that this was not an acceptable format for this particular show.   So then we went to a more usual approach to television drama which was the way it unfolded.  However, as time went by in the production, we did realize that we were losing Edna Earle’s voice, and when you see it, you will see that there are occasional comments, narration, and insertions of her voice to keep her presence there as storyteller.  So I think it’s half dozen of one and six of another.   But we were well aware that the storyteller was Edna Earle, that it was told and should have been told through her voice.  Her very opening narration in the present version is something like “My Uncle Daniel is just like your uncle if you got one.”  So she does start telling the story.  She is the once-upon-a-time voice.   

EWN:  Speaking of that quote, “My Uncle Daniel is just like your uncle,” I was wondering if growing up in Schuyler, Virginia, you felt any kinship between Welty’s fictional town and its citizens and your hometown or other small towns of your experience? 

EH:  I feel kinship with everything Eudora Welty has ever written.  And I don’t know whether it’s the similar background of small town or whether it’s just that she writes with such a universal voice.  I know in Losing Battles a family gets together, and I think they are celebrating the birthday of an elderly lady—she may be going on a hundred or something.  But everybody talks at once.  It reminded me so much of my own family which is a big sprawling clan of Southerners, and if you get together at a funeral, or a birth, or a birthday, everybody talks at once and it’s impossible to make any sense of what any single person is saying.  It’s a chorus of voices, and it’s comforting, and it’s exalting and wonderful.  And you don’t have to know what a person is saying.  It’s just all those voices blending together and telling.  The Southern need to tell, to connect, to know.  I know you, you know me, you are learning about me through my talk.  I know to an outsider it sounds like babble, but to those to whom it belongs, it’s communication and loving and exciting.   

EWN:  That seems to be particularly what’s going in The Ponder Heart with the exception that its just one voice we focus on at that time.  Edna Earle is really involved in that storytelling, its loving process, in the narrating of Uncle Daniel’s story. 

EH:  And loving the reader.  That’s Eudora saying to the reader, “You are wonderful; you understand; we are communicating; we are in touch.” 

EWN:  You have adapted your own novels into film and television.  How was it transforming Eudora Welty’s novella into a film?  Were there particular challenges to producing The Ponder Heart?   

EH:  Sometimes language itself is a problem because you are writing for people who didn’t live in Jackson, Mississippi.  In my case, you are writing for people who didn’t live in Schuyler, Virginia.  In my own case, I was writing for people who were Baptist, and a lot of my people had never even been in a church.  You take a chance.  It’s a baby that you don’t how it is going to be clothed when you send it out. 

EWN:  Were you involved with any of the casting for the film? 

EH:  Yes. 

EWN:  How did you go about trying to find actors and actresses to match the idiosyncratic characters of The Ponder Heart, particularly characters like Uncle Daniel and Edna Earle? 

EH: Well, I think Peter MacNicol [Uncle Daniel] had been in everyone’s mind from the very beginning.   

EWN:  You had other notable actors and actresses for the film including JoBeth Williams and Angela Bettis.  

EH:  In the casting, one thing I think that gives, you know that word verisimilitude—the appearance of reality—I think one thing that gives our version of The Ponder Heart a great verisimilitude was the casting of a good many of local people.  We cast the grandpa [Boyce Holleman] locally.  And he is just wonderful and very believable.  Also the accents give local feeling.  And that is a nice thing that happens when somebody’s accent is so right that even if someone has a British accent, they can approach that local speech.   If you got one person that says it right, others can approximate.   

EWN:  In the Madison County Journal, you were quoted as saying of the film’s location in Mississippi, “I feel like this is sacred ground. . . It is sacred because this is where Eudora lives, and I feel any writer would feel that way.”  Could you expand on this?   

EH:  I remember being asked that question and that is what I meant.  That is Eudora Welty country, and we were honored to be there.  She has immortalized that area, and it would be sacrilege to film it anywhere else. 

EWN:  Am I correct that most of it was filmed in Canton, Mississippi? 

EH:  Yes. 

EWN:  Why was that particular location chosen? 

EH:  Canton is a marvelous little town built around the courthouse square, and it’s been preserved.  I think the people there were well aware they had a treasure, and they kept the square and the courthouse within a proper period.  You go back in time.  I think it was in Civil War time when the town was built and maybe prior to that because in the surrounding area there are marvelous plantations and beautiful old homes.  It was just exactly right for the filming. 

EWN:  Since you had your hand in the script, I was wondering if you had a tight rein on the actors’ and actresses’ interpretations or did the production allow them to experiment with their characters? 

EH:  I would have to defer to the director on how much she allowed them, whether that was their intepretation or if they had free rein to do what they liked.  My impression of Martha [Coolidge] was that she spoke with each actor prior to shooting.  She and the actor had worked out their common concept of the character.  I remember when she came out of the meeting with Peter MacNicol, she said, “You know what his interpretation of Uncle Daniel is?”  And I said, “I’d be curious to know.”  And she said, “He calls Uncle Daniel, God’s fool.”  And I thought, “Gee that is a lovely approach of an actor to a character.”  I could see how an actor could work with that in formulating and projecting his concept of the character.  

EWN:  Marian Rees, the executive producer, was quoted by the Madison County Journal as saying, “When you’re adapting a book to film . . . you add another collaborator to the mix: the book’s author.  Our challenge will be to remain true to those visions, so that people who are familiar with the novel or story will find the writer’s strengths, and . . . spirit in the films.”  Do you agree with this statement? 

EH:  Absolutely. 

EWN:  And to what extent do you feel bound to the author’s original vision and when do you feel it is okay to break from the bounds of the original vision? 

EH:  If it does not work for television.  If some element simply doesn’t work.  If it’s not filmable.  If it’s foreign to the total presentation, then you can take some liberties.  When I did Charlotte’s Web, I took liberty with E. B. White’s novel.   I invented a character.  And I lived in terror that Mr. White was going to come after me and kill me. (laughter)  It was just a little gosling who didn’t know how to swim, but still I felt like I violated this writer’s work.   

EWN:  Does this sense of violation come from being a writer yourself? 

EH:  Yes.  I think so.  I did not adapt my book Spencer’s Mountain.  The requirements of the sale to Warner Brothers was that the man who was going to direct it would also write the adaptation.  So I simply sold the rights to Warner Brothers, but they did give me some script approval.   And when it came back there was a line—you know the father and mother were based on my own father and mother—that the father said to the mother at one point, “Well like when we were young and sneaked off into the bushes.”  I went to Warner Brothers and said, “You’ll kill my mother if she reads a line like that.”  I hope my mother and father really did sneak off into the bushes, but I don’t want it in a film. 

EWN:  In an interview with country.com <www.country.com/music/green/ chat031599.html>, a fan asked you concerning The Waltons, “As the show evolved, do you feel that it remained true to and consistent with the original books on which it was based?”  You replied, “In spirit, but not in fact.”  Would this reply work for the adaptation of The Ponder Heart as well? 

EH:  I think we stayed in fact and in spirit close to the original, to the written version.  Somehow when a book gets up off the page and onto the screen there is a whole other defining version of it.  Once you see it, you can’t imagine it anymore.  It exists as you have seen it.  That used to be the lovely thing about radio.  Everybody could hear a radio drama, and it was wonderful and different to each person’s own imagination and own experience and life approach.  But once you’ve seen it on television, it has that particular life.  Like it has one life at a theater piece in 1956 and another life here.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it won’t continue to have other adaptations.  I mean, The Ponder Heart on Mars for God’s sake. 

EWN:  Speaking of the 1956 version on Broadway, Chodorov and Fields worried that the courtroom scene where Uncle Daniel gives away his money would appear like a bribe to a New York audience.  Did you feel that this was an issue for the film version as well? 

EH:  We considered that because it’s not spelled out in the book.  We did not want that for Uncle Daniel, and I don’t think that Miss Welty intended it to look like a bribe, so we had Uncle Daniel go to the bank beforehand sort of convinced that he was going to be convicted even though he knew he was innocent, and we gave him a line saying, “I won’t need this where I am going,” and he throws huge piles of money into the air.  And it’s after that, that he is pronounced innocent.  I think it is open to interpretation, and we chose that interpretation.   

EWN:  Welty once said of The Ponder Heart that it could be treated many different ways; however she said, “a film is the way I would best imagine it." Did you find that The Ponder Heart made as smooth a transition to film as Welty imagined? 

EH:  Yeah.  I think it is highly filmable.  You can get a lot of nuance in film that is illuminating.  I think it lends itself up very much to film.  I think a lot of her books do.  I know when Marian Rees was first looking for a project from that part of the country and, Eudora, of course, came briskly to mind and several of her works, I know I nominated several of Eudora’s works as possible candidates for this particular film, this particular vacancy which was filled by The Ponder Heart.   But she is highly filmable.

EWN:  What was your first exposure and response to Welty’s works? 

EH:  “The Petrified Man.”  I was a soldier I think when I first came across that story. 

EWN:  And what sort of impact did that story or her writing in general have on you? 

EH:  A favorable impression.  A discovery of a wonderful writer.  Someone that I knew I would want to read again and again.  Someone whose work you look for.  When you see the name in The New Yorker by so and so, you go to it. 

EWN:  Do you have a particular favorite? 

EH:  I love those short stories—“The Petrified Man,” “Why I Live at the P.O.,” and some of the other short stories.  I think Losing Battles, as much as it reminded of my own clan.  She’s best at short stories and novellas.   

EWN:  As a writer yourself, who are your influences?   

EH:  I keep a copy of William Faulkner’s Nobel Speech in 1952 beside my desk—I’m looking at it right now.  And nobody could be further apart than me and William Faulkner, but yet what he says about writing and about writers and what we should keep in mind while writing, unites us. 

You know, somebody was in my office the other day, and they said, “I’m teaching a writing class.  Any suggestions?”  And I took my copy of the Faulkner speech and copied it.  And handed it to him and said, “This is all any writer needs to know.  Give them each copies of this and tell them to go write.” 

EWN:  Do you feel a particular connection to Southern writers?   

EH:  Yes, I do.  And I suppose it is because we all write about family and clans.  I sometimes think that may be one influence on Southern writing that people don’t often point out is that we were losers, we lost what my Aunt used to call, “the Wah.”  And I think we are still recovering from our place in history.   Maybe recovering isn’t the right word; we are still dealing with it, still influenced by our past. 

There is a new young writer that I just discovered; his book is called Clay’s Quilt by Silas D. House.  He writes about West Virginia coal miners.  It’s a wonderful, wonderful book.  So often those people get treated like hillbillies, and they talk like characters out of Barney Google. 

EWN:  I noticed in your Natchez speech that you received a note from Eudora Welty saying that she loved your works as well.  What did that mean to you? 

EH:  Quite a lot.   That was after I had sent my copy of Losing Battles to her with my friend, Mary Jackson, who had been in the 1956 The Ponder Heart as Edna Earle, and she was going down to see Eudora.  So I said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were a friend of hers.”  I met a darling writer recently.  I was at book festival in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and I met a writer named Ruth Williams.  And she was kind enough to give me a ride, and she is from Mississippi—and she casually mentioned that she knew Willie and then that she knew Eudora.  I pursued relentlessly for stories which she very nicely gave me. 

EWN:  If you had the opportunity to meet Welty today, what would you like to say to her?  

EH:  I think I would be speechless.  I would probably declare my ardent love and admiration.  I would gush and embarrass both of us. 

EWN:  What would you like the audience of The Ponder Heart to take away from the movie? 

EH:  The need to read her book and all of her books.  Which ironically is the whole point of the ALT film—it has a tie-in to the NCTE <www.ncte.org>.    

EWN:  Speaking of the showing of these, do you know when The Ponder Heart will air? 

EH:  Knowing you would ask this, I called the office just a moment ago before you called and they said in the fall—no specific date. 

EWN:  Would you like to say anything else to conclude? 

EH:  Just as one writer working with another writer’s work enriches the one who is the lesser writer, I am a better writer for having worked with Eudora Welty’s work.  It is something ineffable.  But it enriches one’s own work.  I read once that if you have trouble getting started writing in the morning, it’s a good idea to take the work of someone whom you admire and type a few pages of that work, and it will infuse what you do during the day.  However, I tried that with one of William Styron’s novels.  I typed a page.  It did not infuse my work.  It so intimidated me that I couldn’t work.  (laughter)