Bay St. Louis Gets Ready for Its Closeup
By Pam Firmin, The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss.
Jul. 15–The mood of the Coast last September still felt close to Katrina when independent filmmaker Michael Culpepper visited from Seattle.
"I was there again in March, and all of a sudden it felt very different," he said in a recent telephone interview. "There was a lot of building going on. There was a positive feel, something that was very exciting to me. You probably don’t see it because people on the Coast are so close to it, but for me to come back every six months, it’s very profound. I felt the momentum that was beginning to happen."
Culpepper is back again this week to film the story he wrote about fictional people dealing with Katrina stuff.
He said it’s loosely based "on the kinds of things I’ve heard, people’s struggles, their tenacity not to let this be the end of things, an attitude that ‘these are hard times but we will survive.’
Filming begins Wednesday in the parking lot of Hollywood Casino and will continue in and around Bay St. Louis through Sunday, Culpepper said. He chose Bay St. Louis because it is picturesque and has "a lot of devastation."
Its actors are from the South because "accents are important to me," Culpepper says. "I don’t want anybody pretending." Extras come from the local area and were scouted out ahead of time.
Titled "After All That," the film is a 15-to-20-minute vignette about a 60-something-year-old man, who lost his home and is helped by his nephew as he tries to figure out what he has to do next.
"I’m 45," Culpepper said, "and can imagine having a hard time trying to figure, ‘How do I start over?’ The nephew is self-reliant — says, ‘We are going to figure this out together.’
"It’s kind of a snapshot, artful, that I’m trying to make. I am not trying to make it a documentary. All of us have to explore loss at some level. I am intrigued about how you respond to loss."
Culpepper’s interest in the Coast started with stories told by his mother in Vicksburg, who repeatedly came here after Katrina as a volunteer with her church. He also has relatives in Gulfport.
"The national media were not showing much about Mississippi," Culpepper said, "just New Orleans. I kept going down there. I had been wanting to do a short film… "
The initial venue for his work, he speculates, will be film festivals, followed by cable TV.
Culpepper’s previous film work includes "Bachelor Farmer," a documentary based in Idaho that premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was screened in Washington D.C., and Atlanta and the rights to it were purchased by MTV Network.
‘After All That’," he said, "can expect similar venues as quirky as that."
Culpepper file Profession: Mississippi native Michael Culpepper teaches interior design at Bellevue Community College in Seattle. Until 10 years ago, when he decided to make films, he was a full-time architect and once worked in Jackson with the Canizaro architectural firm.
Plans: Culpepper has been making films on the West Coast for a while but lately finds himself being pulled back to Mississippi, where he’s plannng several more films. Two take place in Pascagoula. One that he has purchased the film rights to is by award-winning Mississippi writer Larry Brown and is a short story titled "Gold Nugget," which is set in Pascagoula.
The Culpepper file
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