Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Film a chance to ‘Stay More’
Biopic about Donald Harington selected for film festival
“What would we give to have a recording of Shakespeare? What would that add to the understanding we have of his work?,” Brian Walter muses. “Somehow, the life of an author can inform and enrich the understanding of his work, and we have the technological means now.”
It was with that thought in mind that Walter began to film interviews with Arkansas author Donald Harington not long before the end of his life. The result was a two-part documentary, Stay More: The World of Donald Harington and Farther Along: The World of Donald Harington, Part 2. The second half, released in November 2015, will be among featured presentations April 9 at the Ozark Foothills Film Fest in Batesville.
Walter and Harington met in the late 1990s while Walter was teaching English at the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville. Both were fans of Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita, and Walter says they met either in an online discussion forum or when Harington saw one of Walter’s pieces in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Either way, Harington invited Walter to Fayetteville for lunch.
“The mortifying part was I hadn’t read any of his work,” Walter remembers.
Born Dec. 22, 1935, in Little Rock, Harington lost his hearing to meningococcal meningitis when he was 12. His father was abusive, his life in Little Rock unsettled, and at Drakes Creek, the Madison County community where he spent summers with his grandparents, “the young Harington developed his love of the Ozarks … absorbing the local accents and idiom from the residents who nicknamed him Dawny and who shared tall tales and humorous yarns with each other from their porches in the evening,” Walter writes.
When he began to write, Harington turned Drakes Creek into Stay More and published Lightning Bug, his first of 13 Stay More novels, in 1970.
“I discovered that there was no way I could escape from the Ozarks, so I might as well settle down and realize that I had to devote the rest of my life to Stay More,” Walter quotes Harington as saying.
“We had kind of an irascible relationship,” Walter says of his friendship with Harington. But Harington also dedicated With to Walter and made him a character in the final chapter of his final work, Enduring.
Walter’s films were an extension of his friendship with Harington and his work teaching film studies at Washington University before he became an associate professor of English and director of convocations at St. Louis College of Pharmacy, he says.
“As I was working on things, this was after he had passed, I thought, ‘I’ve got so much good material here,’” Walter remembers. “Even though for conventional documentarists seven or eight hours might not seem enough time, but as a word merchant, Don was pouring out a lot of wonderful stuff. I couldn’t compact it into two hours. The first rough cut was probably four and a half hours long!”
Then Walter found what he calls “a natural dividing point in his life and career” and ended up with two 90to 100-minute films.
That was one hurdle bested. But he still needed to find a way to make more than a “talking head” biopic.
“How do you take something that primarily exists on the page and take it to a visual medium? That’s a challenge. I spent more time adding visual effects to the second one to add some visual spice,” Walter says. “I knew it was not something that was ever going to show up at your local multiplex. But it could be something that would inspire people to pick up Don’s books or pick them up again. Hopefully I could do that by letting Don speak in his own voice but adding sort of a narrative flow.
“I wanted it to have the same effect as reading one of Don’s books — we learn to smile through our tears, to laugh through our tears.
“The key thing is, this is an Arkansas and even an Ozarks connection, and Don remains the Faulkner of the Ozarks,” Walter concludes. “Hopefully it means this can work in more ways than the first one did.”