Everlasting Stream PBS documentary based on journalism professors memoir
By Craig Chamberlain, News Editor 217-333-2894
Walt Harrington was a Washington Post reporter, immersed in the “achievement culture” of the capital, when he first went rabbit hunting one Thanksgiving near rural Glasgow, Ky., with his father-in-law and three other men.
Harrington, now chair of the UI department of journalism, was a white suburbanite who had never killed an animal himself, and had no real desire to. His father-in-law, Alex, Alex’s brother Bobby, and their lifelong friends Lewis and Carl, were blue-collar African-Americans who had lived in the same community and hunted together for decades.
The story of their annual hunts, what Harrington learned from the four men, and how it changed his views and priorities, became the subject of a memoir published in 2002, “The Everlasting Stream: A True Story of Rabbits, Guns, Friendship and Family.”
On Nov. 15, “The Everlasting Stream” will come to PBS as a one-hour documentary, to be broadcast at 9 p.m. on WILL-TV. The film is a production of Kentucky Educational Television, Kentucky’s statewide public broadcasting network, which first broadcast the film last fall.
Following closely the spirit of the book, the film is about “notions of manhood, friendship, camaraderie, sense of place, the importance of place and continuity in a meaningful life,” Harrington said, “and how that is increasingly a challenge for modern people who move from place to place, who chase careers from town to town.”
In segments spaced throughout the film, Harrington informally interviews the men, Charles Kuralt-style, on walks through farms and the local town, leaning on pickup tailgates, in a favored backyard shed, among other places. He asks them about their lives and each other – their qualities, foibles, how they met, their hunting skills (or lack thereof).
Interspersed with these segments are scenes of the men out on the hunt with their dogs, or gathered together at places such as the local diner. Other segments feature striking autumn visuals from the Kentucky countryside, accompanied by Harrington’s descriptions of the sights, sounds, smells and experience of an early morning hunt.
Harrington said he wants viewers, especially those with a low opinion of hunting, to see how “it fits into a culture and a world … and that it’s not ugly or mean or violent in that world.” At the same time, the film is not really about hunting, he said. “Hunting is simply the vehicle for the telling of the story of these men’s lives and what I learned from becoming their friend.”
Harrington said he thought little of it when KET first approached him about the possibility of doing a film based on his book. He knew that many such projects are considered and never make it into production.
Even when the project was approved, Harrington said he wanted to make sure he could be involved as a producer and in the shaping of the material. That was easily worked out, he said.
The filming took place in and around Glasgow over two hunting seasons. Through his involvement in that, as well as the production work that followed, Harrington said he was impressed with the time, talent and resources required to produce even a small-scale, one-hour documentary. “It was really an amazing thing to see how stuff like this is put together,” Harrington said.
In addition to his appearance in the film, Harrington wrote the script, which won a regional Emmy Award from the Ohio Valley Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
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