‘Saving Willie Mae’s Scotch House’ to Air May 28 on Mississippi Public Broadcasting
OXFORD,
Miss. – A few weeks after Hurricane Katrina, Willie Mae Seaton returned
to her ravaged New Orleans restaurant, then planted herself outside the
building and waited.
When a police officer asked if she could
help, the nearly 90-year-old woman reached into her purse and produced
a small bundle, which she unwrapped to reveal one of her last
possessions – a James Beard medal, one of the most prestigious awards
in the culinary world. She had earned it for more than a half-century
of cooking simple, yet delicious meals out of a kitchen that was now
destroyed.
“When we found that scene, we knew we had a film,”
said Joe York, producer and director of “Saving Willie Mae’s Scotch
House,” a documentary developed by the University of Mississippi’s
Media and Documentary Projects Center. The documentary, completed in
November 2008 after 18 months of filming and editing, focuses on Seaton
and the renovation of her restaurant by a handful of volunteers.
The
film has received national attention via airings on public broadcasting
around the country since December. It is scheduled to play on
Mississippi Public Broadcasting at 9 p.m. May 28.
“In a way,
this one restaurant, on this one corner, is a metaphor for the city as
a whole. It’s still there, they still serve good food, but it is
different somehow,” York said
Post-Katrina, Willie Mae’s Scotch
House, at the corner of Saint Anne and North Tonti streets, might have
been torn down, like myriad other homes and businesses in New Orleans.
York and his documentary crew followed volunteers – many of whom had
never even heard of the Scotch House before – as they worked to bring
the restaurant back. It was a process that started as a moderate repair
job but evolved to an extensive overhaul that took more than a year.
Since the renovation, the restaurant has been featured on cable television food and travel shows such as “Man v. Food.” Although Seaton has retired from the kitchen, the business is run by her children and grandchildren.
“It is just a wonderful little film,” said Art Starkey, director of programming for Mississippi Public Broadcasting. “It has a strong regional interest coming from Katrina, but this is a film that anyone would like because it is filled with good people.”
Starkey was key in launching the film into national play when he forwarded the documentary to the National Education Television Association, a group that distributes films with national interest to public broadcasting stations around the country. Starkey noted that the film has received high play in places such as San Francisco.
So far, the film has also aired on public broadcasting in Kentucky, Georgia, Utah, Oregon, California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Louisiana and Ohio among others, according to data collected by NETA.
The hardest part of producing the documentary was cutting the footage down to one hour, York said. Although he has made short films for years, this was his first feature-length effort.
He decided early during the editing process that the film would focus on the restaurant and corner where it stands. If a person was not talking about Willie Mae’s restaurant or that corner, that content would be cut, no matter how poignant.
“All the people in this neighborhood were interesting,” he said. “Some were elegant speakers, some were angry, but that wasn’t the story we were telling.”
Among the volunteers who rebuilt Willie Mae’s were Oxonians John Currence, restaurateur and New Orleans native; John T. Edge, acclaimed food writer and director of the UM Southern Foodways Alliance; and Mary Beth Lasseter, SFA associate director.
For Currence, who played a major role in the renovation and the film, the challenges varied from making the time away from his businesses – he was sometimes driving from Oxford to New Orleans twice a week – to dealing with the city of New Orleans itself. Acquiring a simple business license was a challenge in the months after Katrina.
He said he jumped at the project because he wanted to do something for the city.
“When I received that phone call to join the SFA and help clean up Willie Mae’s, I knew I had found what I was looking for,” he said. “It really presented itself to me in a mystical way. I was looking. I wanted to do something for my hometown, but I just didn’t know how.”
Many of the volunteers featured in the film belong to SFA. They were called in to help clean after the storm, not knowing the scope of the project.
“I think the strongest part of the film is it shows how important the restaurant was to the locals,” Lasseter said. “A lot of the people who came down had never eaten at the Scotch House. The film really pulls together a view of the project that a lot of the volunteers didn’t realize.”
Housed in the UM Center for the Study of Southern Culture, SFA is a group of more than 800 food lovers. Members gave such positive feedback from their experiences at Willie Mae’s that SFA leaders developed the “Skillet Brigade,” an effort that has members volunteering at existing projects in their own communities. These include community gardens in Atlanta, kitchens in Jackson, Miss., and bake sales in New Orleans – all with humanitarian efforts behind them, Lasseter said.
The documentary also can be viewed online at: http://www.olemissmedia.com