Making the Mini-Series
My Date with Angelina Jolie
I spent an afternoon with a future Academy Award winner in October, 1996, during the filming of "True Women", a mini-series based on the historical novel by my sister, Janice Woods Windle.
As the time, "True Women" was being made "on location in Central Texas." That was not quite what my sister had wished, not where the action had actually taken place, in the towns of Gonzales, San Marcos, and Seguin. Most of the shooting was done around Austin, and a week was spent in San Antonio.
Angelina Jolie was playing the part of my great-grandmother, Georgia Lawshe Woods, who lived and died in San Marcos. She had asked my sister to arrange a visit to San Marcos, just 30 minutes south of Austin, because she wanted to better understand the character she was playing in the CBS mini-series. (Angelina read the entire novel, and reread the section on the life of her character several times during the filming.) She told Jeffrey Nordling, who played the supporting role of her husband, Colonel Peter Woods, that I would be taking her on a tour. He asked to come along.
At the end of the week's work in San Antonio, I met Angelina in the lobby of the St. Anthony Hotel. At a motel on Loop 410 we picked up Jeff Nordling. (She already had star power to command the best rooms.) No need to open the trunk: Moving luggage back to Austin was the job of someone working for the production company.
We headed up I-35 to San Marcos and first visited the little monument on the grounds of the Hayes County Courthouse, erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Next we stopped at the First United Methodist Church. I told them that according to family legend, the bell hanging in the steeple came from Fort Hawkins in Macon, Georgia. That was where Benjamin Hawkins, the grandfather of Georgia Lawshe Woods, had served as the Indian agent appointed by George Washington.
We drove up the hill on Comanche St to Woods St, just above where the old Woods house stood for a century. From there we could take in the view that Georgia Lawshe Woods enjoyed from her second story porch -- over the town itself and out toward her plantation on the Blanco River.
Next we went to the beautiful city cemetery and spent some quiet time at the gravesites. The young actors silently, almost prayerfully (if I may dare to say that about denizens of Hollywood), contemplated the people whose lives they were portraying in the mini-series.
After a quick ride through the Belvin Street Historic District, where Cherokee McGehee's home still stands, we stopped again on the Courthouse Square to have lunch. Angelina ordered a turkey sandwich, hold the mayo. She actually ate all of the lettuce, a tomato slice, and some of the turkey, giving Jeff her French fries and leaving most of the bread from the sandwich. Please don't think it's easy being a Hollywood star!
Then it was time to move on, because shooting would start early again the next morning. We left on the old Post Road, passing Lime Kiln Road, where the freed slaves Martha Benny and Ed Tom Lawshe had lived out their days, crossing the Blanco River and stopping briefly at the cemetery where Martha Benny is buried. We were in Austin by sundown.
But even then I could have told you: Jeff was a nice guy who will have a nice career, and Angelina was going to be a STAR. She was poised and self-confident, serious about her work, in control and taking no nonsense.
The gossip on the set was that Angelina might get an Emmy nomination for her work in "True Women". She did not, alas, but only three years after "True Women" first aired on CBS, she won an Oscar for her role in "Girl, Interrupted".
I was with Angelina Jolie and Jeffrey Nordling for about five hours. They were both friendly, easy going, and remarkably "normal" considering the stresses and strains of their chosen careers. The stars and most of the cast of "True Women" later made a hasty one-day visit to the sites in Seguin and Gonzales that are in the book. Many descendants of the main characters met the cast members at my mother's house, the Bettie King home. That turned out to be some consolation for the fact that in the script the character of Bettie King was a small part, and then was edited out altogether when the film was cut to fit the two-night limit imposed by CBS.
My sister learned that the network rules of mini-series are strict. Forget the glory days of "Roots" or "War and Remembrance", when a mini-series could fill a week or more. Nowadays two nights is the maximum in the U.S. ("True Women" showed in a longer, three-night version on the BBC.) Cutting my sister's sprawling "century-long, Texas-wide" generational epic to fit the two-night maximum was very difficult, and made for some choppy and confusing passages.
Another network rule is that the viewers should meet all the main characters in the opening scenes, and then their lives should intertwine in the later scenes. Of course, my sister's book did not fit that formula either, so drastic measures were required. Euphemia's early childhood was relocated to the state of Georgia. The frontier town of Seguin was moved so close to San Marcos that a lady could just ride over on horseback for a visit most any afternoon. And so forth.
All along, the network types fretted that there were too many characters, too many names, too many faces for the viewers to follow in the few hours allowed. As a result, many characters hit the cutting room floor.
Yet in the end, my sister was quite pleased by the mini-series with credits reading "Based on the book True Women by Janice Woods Windle." Compared with many other movies and mini-series "based on" novels, True Women is remarkably faithful to its source, including several important scenes taken almost directly from the printed page.
Janice worked hard to make the TV movie faithful to her book. She had been extended the courtesy of an invitation to visit the set for the first shoot. Quietly and tactfully she made herself so useful that she was asked to stay around. Thereafter she tried to be on the set every day, available to answer questions that came up, and often able to head off small errors, like wrong dates or mispronunciations, before they made it onto film.
Janice gives most of the credit for the success of the mini-series to the producer, Craig Anderson, and the director, Karen Arthur. They were unusually willing to pay attention to her efforts to keep the film as faithful to the spirit of historical accuracy as her book.
Craig Anderson, who had worked several times with Hallmark Entertainment, had fallen in love with True Women when he first read the book, and he optioned it for a TV movie very soon after it was published. He shopped the project to the networks, and CBS showed interest. Barely a year after the book came out, blazing speed by Hollywood standards, a screenwriter was assigned to work on a script.
Back to that business about filming "on location." My sister had wanted the mini-series to be as accurate a portrayal of authentic Texas history as it could be. And she very much wanted it filmed in the small towns where the actual events took place.
Chris Loftin, the scriptwriter, deserves thanks as well. Right at the beginning of the process, Janice got on the phone and lobbied him to visit Texas. She urged him to come in the spring to see the wildflowers in bloom, and he obliged by scheduling his visit for early April, 1995. People in Gonzales arranged for Janice and Chris to ride in a horse-drawn wagon the six miles or so out to the Peach Creek home of Sarah McClure Braches. (She was the character played by Dana Delany.) The roadsides were covered with daisies, gaillardia, and other Texas wildflowers.
A few days after that wagon ride I went with Janice and Chris to San Marcos. We walked along the Blanco River where the cotton fields of the Woods plantation had been, went up on the hilltop where the house used to stand, and visited the beautiful cemeteries. A few last bluebonnets of the season were still blooming amid the tombstones.
Everywhere Janice kept calling attention to the beauty of the land, the flowers, the trees, the clear streams of fresh water. She told Chris she hoped that True Women on film would show the beauty of the Texas landscape the women settlers had loved so deeply. She did not want it to look like the dusty badlands of a Western filmed in a California desert.
Months later Janice learned that alternative budgets were being drawn up, based on filming in Canada and Utah. She called producer Craig Anderson to implore him once more to consider filming "on location" in Texas. He told her that he understood she wanted the scenery to be green, with lots of trees and water.
But he was on a deadline, because CBS wanted to TV movie in time for the "sweeps" in early 1997, when network viewership would be measured. Since filming might have to begin as early as September, would it be too dry in Texas? Janice bravely told him that September always brings rains and turns everything green again.
When the CBS brass signed off on the plan to film the mini-series in Central Texas, Janice was elated. Then she learned more hard rules of the movie business.
Because the film crew needed dozens of motel rooms, it would take over all of one motel and part of another nearby in Austin. That had to be Austin (or else San Antonio). With guest stars coming in for a few days of shooting on their scenes, as well as network and production company executives coming and going, locations had to be near an airport.
And a union rule requires that the crew members start being paid half an hour after they leave their motel, whether the location site is nearby or far away. This rule makes sense, but it meant that using far-away locations would cost much more than sites near the headquarters. Since the workdays almost always went from early morning into the evening, just another hour on the road would mean another hour of overtime pay.
Gonzales, San Marcos, and Seguin, never seem so far from Austin as when you think about paying overtime to the camera crew, sound and lighting technicians, make-up artists, wardrobe assistants, voice coaches, stunt doubles, caterers, and all the many others required to make a movie.
In the end, much of the filming was done at the Jourdan-Bachman Pioneer Farm, a 100-acre preserve on the northeastern edge of Austin. There log cabins and various old-time buildings have been collected to give an educational and historical view of rural life in the 19th century.
As it happened, Pioneer Farm was in financial distress and was preparing to suspend operation when the movie offer fell from the sky. The production company for "True Women" rented the premises from September into December, and the resulting publicity helped bring new visitors when Pioneer Farm reopened for business.
There were indeed some rains in September, as Janice had promised, and the autumn fields at Pioneer Farm showed lots of green.
Some key scenes called for wildflowers, and the natural grasses were supplemented with paper bluebonnets pulled from boxes labeled, like so much merchandise today, "Made in China." A crew would "plant" a section of a field with bluebonnets before a scene would be filmed. If another take was needed, and it usually was, more paper flowers would be stuck in the ground to replace those trampled, by, say, Sam Houston's horse.
Angelina Jolie and the crew were in San Antonio for a week because the scene of the Council House War was filmed on the grounds of Mission San Jose, to evoke the feel of the old Spanish settlement built largely of stone. Other scenes, supposedly taking place in Georgia, were filmed that week at a grand plantation-style mansion in Alamo Heights. Some shooting took place a few miles west of Austin on Willie Nelson's ranch, and along rivers in the Hill Country.
Janice said that one of the most affecting moments in the filming came after the producers issued a call, carried by Austin media, asking for women extras who could drive wagon teams of horses or mules for the reenactment of the Runaway Scrape. Some of the Hollywood team expressed misgivings about finding enough women with this vanishing skill to make an impressive scene.
When the day came, plenty of women who knew about driving horses and wagons heeded the call. The camera panned across a landscape dramatically filled with refugee women, horses, and wagons desperately fleeing Santa Anna.
Janice talked with the women who had come to work as extras in the TV movie, and learned that almost all of them had read True Women. In fact, most were proud to say that they also were descended from women ancestors who had taken part in the Runaway Scrape!
Of course, nothing comes out perfect, no matter how hard you try. Still, can you really tell that the bluebonnets are paper and not real? The flowers may look rather tall, but then again, the grass is also quite high in certain scenes supposedly taking place in early spring, between the fall of the Alamo on March 6 and the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21. Because after all, the grass you see was filmed in the fall.
And while Janice was able to forestall some bloopers, she wasn't on the set every hour of every day. So if catching anachronisms in movies amuses you, watch for the screen door on Aunt Sarah's house when the raiding Indians come to call. I'm not sure when screen wire was invented, or when the product reached these parts, what do you think - 60, 70, or 80 years after the last great Comanche raid into Central Texas? Well, whatever. At least "True Women" was not filmed in Canada, or Utah, or the California desert.
Indeed, it looks like my sister got her wish that Texas should be portrayed on screen with beautiful wildflowers, streams of clear water, and great green trees -- even if the TV movie was not filmed on location in Gonzales, San Marcos, and Seguin.
by Wilton E. Woods
I spent an afternoon with a future Academy Award winner in October, 1996, during the filming of "True Women", a mini-series based on the historical novel by my sister, Janice Woods Windle.
As the time, "True Women" was being made "on location in Central Texas." That was not quite what my sister had wished, not where the action had actually taken place, in the towns of Gonzales, San Marcos, and Seguin. Most of the shooting was done around Austin, and a week was spent in San Antonio.
Angelina Jolie was playing the part of my great-grandmother, Georgia Lawshe Woods, who lived and died in San Marcos. She had asked my sister to arrange a visit to San Marcos, just 30 minutes south of Austin, because she wanted to better understand the character she was playing in the CBS mini-series. (Angelina read the entire novel, and reread the section on the life of her character several times during the filming.) She told Jeffrey Nordling, who played the supporting role of her husband, Colonel Peter Woods, that I would be taking her on a tour. He asked to come along.
At the end of the week's work in San Antonio, I met Angelina in the lobby of the St. Anthony Hotel. At a motel on Loop 410 we picked up Jeff Nordling. (She already had star power to command the best rooms.) No need to open the trunk: Moving luggage back to Austin was the job of someone working for the production company.
We headed up I-35 to San Marcos and first visited the little monument on the grounds of the Hayes County Courthouse, erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Next we stopped at the First United Methodist Church. I told them that according to family legend, the bell hanging in the steeple came from Fort Hawkins in Macon, Georgia. That was where Benjamin Hawkins, the grandfather of Georgia Lawshe Woods, had served as the Indian agent appointed by George Washington.
We drove up the hill on Comanche St to Woods St, just above where the old Woods house stood for a century. From there we could take in the view that Georgia Lawshe Woods enjoyed from her second story porch -- over the town itself and out toward her plantation on the Blanco River.
Next we went to the beautiful city cemetery and spent some quiet time at the gravesites. The young actors silently, almost prayerfully (if I may dare to say that about denizens of Hollywood), contemplated the people whose lives they were portraying in the mini-series.
After a quick ride through the Belvin Street Historic District, where Cherokee McGehee's home still stands, we stopped again on the Courthouse Square to have lunch. Angelina ordered a turkey sandwich, hold the mayo. She actually ate all of the lettuce, a tomato slice, and some of the turkey, giving Jeff her French fries and leaving most of the bread from the sandwich. Please don't think it's easy being a Hollywood star!
Then it was time to move on, because shooting would start early again the next morning. We left on the old Post Road, passing Lime Kiln Road, where the freed slaves Martha Benny and Ed Tom Lawshe had lived out their days, crossing the Blanco River and stopping briefly at the cemetery where Martha Benny is buried. We were in Austin by sundown.
But even then I could have told you: Jeff was a nice guy who will have a nice career, and Angelina was going to be a STAR. She was poised and self-confident, serious about her work, in control and taking no nonsense.
The gossip on the set was that Angelina might get an Emmy nomination for her work in "True Women". She did not, alas, but only three years after "True Women" first aired on CBS, she won an Oscar for her role in "Girl, Interrupted".
I was with Angelina Jolie and Jeffrey Nordling for about five hours. They were both friendly, easy going, and remarkably "normal" considering the stresses and strains of their chosen careers. The stars and most of the cast of "True Women" later made a hasty one-day visit to the sites in Seguin and Gonzales that are in the book. Many descendants of the main characters met the cast members at my mother's house, the Bettie King home. That turned out to be some consolation for the fact that in the script the character of Bettie King was a small part, and then was edited out altogether when the film was cut to fit the two-night limit imposed by CBS.
My sister learned that the network rules of mini-series are strict. Forget the glory days of "Roots" or "War and Remembrance", when a mini-series could fill a week or more. Nowadays two nights is the maximum in the U.S. ("True Women" showed in a longer, three-night version on the BBC.) Cutting my sister's sprawling "century-long, Texas-wide" generational epic to fit the two-night maximum was very difficult, and made for some choppy and confusing passages.
Another network rule is that the viewers should meet all the main characters in the opening scenes, and then their lives should intertwine in the later scenes. Of course, my sister's book did not fit that formula either, so drastic measures were required. Euphemia's early childhood was relocated to the state of Georgia. The frontier town of Seguin was moved so close to San Marcos that a lady could just ride over on horseback for a visit most any afternoon. And so forth.
All along, the network types fretted that there were too many characters, too many names, too many faces for the viewers to follow in the few hours allowed. As a result, many characters hit the cutting room floor.
Yet in the end, my sister was quite pleased by the mini-series with credits reading "Based on the book True Women by Janice Woods Windle." Compared with many other movies and mini-series "based on" novels, True Women is remarkably faithful to its source, including several important scenes taken almost directly from the printed page.
Janice worked hard to make the TV movie faithful to her book. She had been extended the courtesy of an invitation to visit the set for the first shoot. Quietly and tactfully she made herself so useful that she was asked to stay around. Thereafter she tried to be on the set every day, available to answer questions that came up, and often able to head off small errors, like wrong dates or mispronunciations, before they made it onto film.
Janice gives most of the credit for the success of the mini-series to the producer, Craig Anderson, and the director, Karen Arthur. They were unusually willing to pay attention to her efforts to keep the film as faithful to the spirit of historical accuracy as her book.
Craig Anderson, who had worked several times with Hallmark Entertainment, had fallen in love with True Women when he first read the book, and he optioned it for a TV movie very soon after it was published. He shopped the project to the networks, and CBS showed interest. Barely a year after the book came out, blazing speed by Hollywood standards, a screenwriter was assigned to work on a script.
Back to that business about filming "on location." My sister had wanted the mini-series to be as accurate a portrayal of authentic Texas history as it could be. And she very much wanted it filmed in the small towns where the actual events took place.
Chris Loftin, the scriptwriter, deserves thanks as well. Right at the beginning of the process, Janice got on the phone and lobbied him to visit Texas. She urged him to come in the spring to see the wildflowers in bloom, and he obliged by scheduling his visit for early April, 1995. People in Gonzales arranged for Janice and Chris to ride in a horse-drawn wagon the six miles or so out to the Peach Creek home of Sarah McClure Braches. (She was the character played by Dana Delany.) The roadsides were covered with daisies, gaillardia, and other Texas wildflowers.
A few days after that wagon ride I went with Janice and Chris to San Marcos. We walked along the Blanco River where the cotton fields of the Woods plantation had been, went up on the hilltop where the house used to stand, and visited the beautiful cemeteries. A few last bluebonnets of the season were still blooming amid the tombstones.
Everywhere Janice kept calling attention to the beauty of the land, the flowers, the trees, the clear streams of fresh water. She told Chris she hoped that True Women on film would show the beauty of the Texas landscape the women settlers had loved so deeply. She did not want it to look like the dusty badlands of a Western filmed in a California desert.
Months later Janice learned that alternative budgets were being drawn up, based on filming in Canada and Utah. She called producer Craig Anderson to implore him once more to consider filming "on location" in Texas. He told her that he understood she wanted the scenery to be green, with lots of trees and water.
But he was on a deadline, because CBS wanted to TV movie in time for the "sweeps" in early 1997, when network viewership would be measured. Since filming might have to begin as early as September, would it be too dry in Texas? Janice bravely told him that September always brings rains and turns everything green again.
When the CBS brass signed off on the plan to film the mini-series in Central Texas, Janice was elated. Then she learned more hard rules of the movie business.
Because the film crew needed dozens of motel rooms, it would take over all of one motel and part of another nearby in Austin. That had to be Austin (or else San Antonio). With guest stars coming in for a few days of shooting on their scenes, as well as network and production company executives coming and going, locations had to be near an airport.
And a union rule requires that the crew members start being paid half an hour after they leave their motel, whether the location site is nearby or far away. This rule makes sense, but it meant that using far-away locations would cost much more than sites near the headquarters. Since the workdays almost always went from early morning into the evening, just another hour on the road would mean another hour of overtime pay.
Gonzales, San Marcos, and Seguin, never seem so far from Austin as when you think about paying overtime to the camera crew, sound and lighting technicians, make-up artists, wardrobe assistants, voice coaches, stunt doubles, caterers, and all the many others required to make a movie.
In the end, much of the filming was done at the Jourdan-Bachman Pioneer Farm, a 100-acre preserve on the northeastern edge of Austin. There log cabins and various old-time buildings have been collected to give an educational and historical view of rural life in the 19th century.
As it happened, Pioneer Farm was in financial distress and was preparing to suspend operation when the movie offer fell from the sky. The production company for "True Women" rented the premises from September into December, and the resulting publicity helped bring new visitors when Pioneer Farm reopened for business.
There were indeed some rains in September, as Janice had promised, and the autumn fields at Pioneer Farm showed lots of green.
Some key scenes called for wildflowers, and the natural grasses were supplemented with paper bluebonnets pulled from boxes labeled, like so much merchandise today, "Made in China." A crew would "plant" a section of a field with bluebonnets before a scene would be filmed. If another take was needed, and it usually was, more paper flowers would be stuck in the ground to replace those trampled, by, say, Sam Houston's horse.
Angelina Jolie and the crew were in San Antonio for a week because the scene of the Council House War was filmed on the grounds of Mission San Jose, to evoke the feel of the old Spanish settlement built largely of stone. Other scenes, supposedly taking place in Georgia, were filmed that week at a grand plantation-style mansion in Alamo Heights. Some shooting took place a few miles west of Austin on Willie Nelson's ranch, and along rivers in the Hill Country.
Janice said that one of the most affecting moments in the filming came after the producers issued a call, carried by Austin media, asking for women extras who could drive wagon teams of horses or mules for the reenactment of the Runaway Scrape. Some of the Hollywood team expressed misgivings about finding enough women with this vanishing skill to make an impressive scene.
When the day came, plenty of women who knew about driving horses and wagons heeded the call. The camera panned across a landscape dramatically filled with refugee women, horses, and wagons desperately fleeing Santa Anna.
Janice talked with the women who had come to work as extras in the TV movie, and learned that almost all of them had read True Women. In fact, most were proud to say that they also were descended from women ancestors who had taken part in the Runaway Scrape!
Of course, nothing comes out perfect, no matter how hard you try. Still, can you really tell that the bluebonnets are paper and not real? The flowers may look rather tall, but then again, the grass is also quite high in certain scenes supposedly taking place in early spring, between the fall of the Alamo on March 6 and the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21. Because after all, the grass you see was filmed in the fall.
And while Janice was able to forestall some bloopers, she wasn't on the set every hour of every day. So if catching anachronisms in movies amuses you, watch for the screen door on Aunt Sarah's house when the raiding Indians come to call. I'm not sure when screen wire was invented, or when the product reached these parts, what do you think - 60, 70, or 80 years after the last great Comanche raid into Central Texas? Well, whatever. At least "True Women" was not filmed in Canada, or Utah, or the California desert.
Indeed, it looks like my sister got her wish that Texas should be portrayed on screen with beautiful wildflowers, streams of clear water, and great green trees -- even if the TV movie was not filmed on location in Gonzales, San Marcos, and Seguin.
by Wilton E. Woods