Television
Shooting Audubon
John James Audubon’s life was the stuff of legend. Still, capturing the man who changed the way we view nature posed a daunting challenge for filmmaker Lawrence Hott.
By Ken Chowder
We’ve come to find John James Audubon. I’m with filmmaker Larry Hott at Oakley Plantation, near the Mississippi River in Louisiana. Hott is shooting a biographical portrait—John James Audubon: Drawn From Nature, which will be broadcast soon on the PBS show American Masters. I wrote the film; Hott’s directing and producing it.
“Everywhere we go around here,” Hott says, “it’s like, ‘So, hey, you want Audubon? We got Audubon.’ Every plantation, they want to say Audubon slept there. They name gas stations and office furniture stores and Baptist churches after him.” He’s not kidding. There are Audubon mobile home parks, Audubon caterers, Audubon pawnshops.
But that’s why Oakley Plantation is wonderful. Audubon really did sleep here; he lived and painted at Oakley for months in 1821, and the graceful white house has even been restored as an Audubon Commemorative Area. We are here to shoot part of our Audubon film. We take a walk outside, among the massive live oaks drenched with Spanish moss, while we figure out what to shoot.
And that’s when it happens. As we walk, the noise of birdspeak is so loud you have to raise your voice to be heard. A red-shouldered hawk shrieks above; pileated woodpeckers whack tree trunks; cardinals and blue jays speckle nearby branches, whistling and cawing, respectively. Audubon sketched or painted all those birds here. Many art historians say that here is where he turned the corner to greatness. We stand in the place where the artist stood, listening to exactly what he heard, and for a second we can feel him—can sense how it must have felt to live when American nature was not something that had to be searched out. It was there, all around you, and it was loud. This, in essence, was the metaphorical spot that Audubon inhabited, a world where you could not ignore the birds of America.
Yeah, but. Relating such a moment makes it sound like the making of a biographical documentary is a snap—you go where the guy lived, shoot it, and head home to write an article about it. Would that it were so. Hott and his partner (and wife), Diane Garey, have been making prize-winning documentaries for more than 25 years on everything from the Adirondacks to Cambodian refugees to Alaskan scientific expeditions, and I’ve been writing for them for 20. But every film is still like an obstacle race. The obstacles begin, always, with funding. Some 14 years ago I proposed a film on Audubon to National Geographic TV. The exec I talked to shrugged his shoulders. “Audubon doesn’t even make me twitch,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Don’t you know that birds are death to ratings?”
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| Director Lawrence Hott, on location in the Everglades, where passing airboats constantly intruded on the serenity, reminding him of the challenges of re-creating scenes from the early 1800s. Photo courtesy of Florentine Films/Hott Productions, Inc. |
Even when funding is finally in place, the challenges are legion, and you never know where they’ll come from. With the Audubon film, Hott soon faced an unlikely problem: He needed dead birds. Audubon painted by using real models—but dead ones. He would wire up the corpse of a freshly killed bird, then arrange it into a lifelike pose. Producer Hott wanted to film the procedure, but where could he find the corpses? Audubon, of course, shot his own, but that was out of the question now. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has strict rules about this kind of thing. Finally Hott got in touch with Arlene Kiesler, who cares for sick and injured animals in Otis, Massachusetts. Her goal is to release them back to the wild, but at times the magic doesn’t work. She brought him several songbirds that had died. In the end Hott used the corpse of a chuck-will’s widow.
So where do you get a live golden eagle? Audubon spent impassioned days painting one, and Hott wanted to re-create this scene as well. “That was strangely easy,” Hott says. “I just Googled for ‘Golden Eagle New England.’ The first hit was a place called Wingmasters, in Springfield, just 25 minutes from my home in Haydenville, Massachusetts. The woman on the phone sang the praises of her wonderful, glorious, 27-year-old golden eagle named Lakota. And she was right. Lakota has star quality.”
Hott wanted to show the process of making The Birds of America by pulling a print from a real Audubon copper plate. But . . . hmmm . . . who’s going to let you ink their invaluable plate? After many inquiries, he located Alan Gehret, director of the Audubon Museum in Henderson, Kentucky, who kindly let us work from its plate of the greater yellowlegs. The agreement included insurance guarantees, elaborate wrapping of the plate, and Gehret acting as personal deliveryman, driving the plate to Southern Indiana University himself. There, cameraman Michael Chin had to rig up a scaffolding to get high enough to film the plate and the enormous press.
The house at Mill Grove, Pennsylvania, where Audubon lived when he first came to America, played a vital role in his early life. It’s now the Mill Grove Audubon Center, but it, too, presents challenges to the filmmaker. “The house appears to be period-appropriate at a distance,” says Hott. “But when you get up close, you see air conditioners, drain spouts, storm windows. We had to choose our shots carefully. The best ones are from a distance.”
He also concentrated on the period rooms, supplementing the center’s collection of natural objects with additional items culled from other sources. After searching all over New England, Hott’s team persuaded a curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology to lend the project snake skins, stuffed birds, eggshells, and the like. They’re all in the film now, all looking quite natural, as if in Audubon’s old room.
Audubon was a challenge. But there are challenges and hard choices in almost every scene that a filmmaker shoots. Hott wanted to re-create a vicious fight that Audubon had in Henderson with a man named Samuel Bowen, who owed him money. To us it seemed a pivotal moment in Audubon’s life: It was around the time when he was clapped into jail for his debts—a huge crisis for him—so the street fight seems, in a way, as if Audubon were wrestling with his own inner demons. But how do you shoot it so it has a symbolic as well as a dramatic feel? Do you film it straight, showing actors’ faces—or in extremely tight close-ups, so it seems subjective? Or should you shoot it at six frames per second, to give it a staggered, surreal feel? Even details of the scene presented dilemmas. In real life one of Audubon’s arms was in a sling while he fought Bowen. So do you show the sling—which begs another question or anecdote—or do you omit it, which is inaccurate?
“The fight scene took a lot of planning,” Hott recalls. “First we hired two teenaged boys to act it out, like a rehearsal. We video- taped it maybe 10 times, trying out all angles, clubbing and knifing techniques. Then I showed the rehearsal tapes to cinematographer Stephen McCarthy, and we worked out a plan. We shot it at six frames per second and at regular speed [24 frames per second], and we used both in the final. We added a little slow-mo, too.”
Sling? “No sling,” Hott says. “Too confusing.”
Some challenges are endemic to any film that seeks to represent the past. On every live shot Hott had to remember that Audubon had died in 1851. No telephone poles, no electric lights or outlets, no clothing with zippers. No anachronisms. Nature was inescapable in Audubon’s time, but that’s changed. Modernity has a way of butting into almost every view. At Bayou Sara, Louisiana, Hott was trying to film the Mississippi at sunset when one of the biggest barges known to man plowed into the frame. It stayed there for 45 minutes. In the Everglades, passing airboats continually splashed rooster tails into another beauty shot. In New Orleans, buildings where Audubon had lived are still standing. But they’re hard to film because they bear plaques commemorating his former presence. The artist was a dead-broke, failed entrepreneur when he came to New Orleans. There probably weren’t many Audubon plaques speckling the French Quarter at the time.
The present has other ways of intruding, too. In New York City, Hott wanted a shot over the Henry Hudson River Parkway to show the area where Audubon spent his last years, near 155th Street in Manhattan. In those days the Audubon family kept chickens, horses, cattle, elk, foxes, and wolves. One day they pulled a sturgeon out of the Hudson that was eight feet long and weighed over 300 pounds. In more modern times, police swarmed all over Hott and his cameraman, concerned that the filmmakers were potential terrorists out to capture images of the George Washington Bridge.
One of the surprises the film had in store for us was Audubon himself. I hadn’t known, for example, that he was almost certainly the first person to band birds in America—eastern phoebes, soon after his arrival in Pennsylvania from France in 1803. I had known that Audubon, born out of wedlock, invented a proper if imaginary childhood for himself, and claimed that he’d been taught to paint by a great master. His tall tales and penchant for the dramatic pose are well known, but I was surprised at the scientific accuracy of his paintings. “In general, he got it right,” Bill Steiner, the author of a guide for Audubon collectors, told us. “The birds are almost all exactly as they appear in nature. Audubon was a keen observer and a good scientist.”
Nor had I known how self-consciously this Frenchman represented himself as a “typical American.” To sell subscriptions to The Birds of America in England, he deliberately played the part of the frontiersman. He dressed in wolfskin, put bear grease in his hair, and at dinner parties in the great houses of England he would hoot like a barred owl or give war whoops like an American Indian. He wrote down “American Woodsman” as his “occupation” in hotel registers. His seal bore the motto “America My Country.”
Audubon’s life often intersected those of celebrities and celebrated events. He stopped in at the White House to dine with Andrew Jackson (“The general ate very moderately, his last dish consisting of bread and milk,” Audubon noted). Later he popped up in the brand-new Republic of Texas, where the Capitol was still under construction. Encountering Sam Houston coming out of a grogshop, Audubon shared a drink with him, “wishing success to his new republic.” On that same trip, in Alabama, Audubon passed through the line of Indian removal to the West and was shaken by the tragic sight of Creek warriors in irons: He had happened upon the infamous Trail of Tears. In Edinburgh, Scotland, Audubon hobnobbed with Sir Walter Scott, and the young Charles Darwin listened to him lecture on America’s birds.
His was a big life, full of incident and achievement. A storyboard of its many events—from a mid-Atlantic attack by pirates to a knife fight on the frontier to election into The Royal Society in London—would leave a Hollywood fantasy colorless by comparison. Audubon’s life seems invented rather than lived. At times his version of it surely was invented, but even the real life has a distinctly exaggerated, mythical feel.
Yet in every film biography you have to do two things. Yes, you play up the achievement of its subject, but you must reveal the personal side as well, the needs and desires and human failings. Audubon had his failings. He loved his wife and sons but abandoned them for years at a time. He was arrogant and vain—and insecure to boot. He struggled for many years, but in the end he succeeded utterly. The self-taught artist created one of the most ambitious works of the 19th century, and he changed the way we look at nature in America.
When you live with Audubon for a while, his passion becomes contagious. One day Larry Hott and cinematographer Allen Moore were shooting in the Everglades, at the observation tower at the end of Shark Valley. At sunset wading birds—ibis, herons, egrets—come here to roost. That day they came in all of a sudden, flying low, silhouetted against the setting sun, thousands of birds. It quickly became too dark to film. The arriving birds simply shut off the sunlight. But that was the moment, as Hott tells it now, when he felt he knew what he wanted the film to accomplish. The moment when they put down the camera, and just watched.
Ken Chowder has scripted more than 20 documentary films, including the upcoming John James Audubon: Drawn From Nature. He has also published three novels.
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