Reeling in the Years

It had been nearly 57 years since J.C. Boudreaux climbed the clamshell Indian mound on Weeks Island where, as a youngster, he starred in 1948's Louisiana Story. Since then, he's shunned the Hollywood spotlight and avoided almost every limelight, opting for a simpler life that could have belonged to any South Louisiana man with a strong back. Days in the oil fields and nights as a shrimper turned into retirement as a telephone company lineman. He's put on his share of years and pounds, but in early March, you'd think the 70-year-old was 13 again - despite the addition of a few wrinkles, bifocals and a patty of frosty hair - as he, the size of a bear cub, dashed through the thick brush with the ease and speed of a rabbit, anxious to be the first to reach the site of the set's cabin.

"After about 30 minutes of it, I will know how old I am," Joseph Carl Boudreaux later confessed. Lagging behind him - a gaggle of reporters, a couple guides and renowned painter and photographer Elemore Morgan Jr. This month, Morgan lends his name and expertise as he helps the Banner Series of Lake Charles put on three events connected to the movie. The first is the opening of Louisiana Story: A Photographic Journey at the Imperial Calcasieu Museum April 20. The exhibit includes photos from the filming by distinguished shooters Todd Webb, Arnold Eagle and John Collier. The following Saturday, Fiddlers 4 play a concert featuring Michael Doucet's adaptation of the film's score. The next day before the movie is shown, now in a restored DVD format, Morgan gives a lecture and slide show on the movie.

March 13, however, was about two friends fulfilling a field trip they have been trying to take for around 20 years. When Boudreaux left Weeks Island after shooting concluded, he didn't put much thought into when he might see the location again. As the years rolled by, he and Morgan - with whom Boudreaux first came into contact in the 1980s - began plotting to return. Before he jumped out of the three-person boat that carried him and Morgan and bounded up the steep, shell hill, all Boudreaux says he remembered of the site was the hill, a cabin and that they arrived there via the Intracoastal Waterway. Today, the route has changed a little as they headed through a landing in Lydia to get to the site, but he says he is certain the destination was the same.

"After 50-something years, the old mind gets ... it's not weak 'cause it never was really strong," laughs Boudreaux, his grinning eyes hidden behind his tinted glasses.

In the 1940s, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey launched a PR tear after their involvement with Hitler's Germany resulted in an image snafu. Instead of spin-doctors, they invested in funding photographers to capture images of procuring oil across the country. Anyone - all magazines, newspapers etc. - could take advantage of the thousands of stills by great photographers such as Sol Libsohn and Gordon Parks as long as they credited SO, Standard Oil. They stepped it up a notch and contracted Robert Flaherty into making a movie about the oil company and the community from which it drew crude. Two decades earlier, Flaherty's film Nanook of the North spurred the label "documentary" with its tale of a fur trader in the icy north and the hardships he overcame. After its release, he made other movies cementing his place as the father of the documentary.

The story goes that on a trip to Louisiana to scout locations for Standard Oil, Flaherty spotted a derrick being towed down a scenic bayou and developed an idea to juxtapose beauty and industry. The crew came to Weeks Island, coerced a trapper out of his cabin and Flaherty shot Boudreaux and other authentic locals in a fictional manner doing what they naturally did. They also came to Avery Island to shoot the wildlife preserve. The end result told the happy-ever-after story of the oil company coming to the bayou. At the time, Boudreaux had no real clue what was going on around him or what his acting would produce. The Cameron Parish native, who had been discovered while visiting an uncle in Gueydan, wasn't even sure what they meant when they said he was going to be a star.



Art Imitates Life

This exhibit is not the first time Louisiana Story has been mentioned in the same breath as art. It was once said that you could take any screen shot from the black-and-white movie and have a beautiful nature print. When it was released, it was hailed as one of Flaherty's finest productions and prompted Charlie Chaplin to wire him, "Just saw your magnificent film do this again and you will be immortal and excommunicated from Hollywood which is a good fate congratulations." When the Academy Awards for that film year rolled around, Louisiana Story didn't get announced as a winner in the Best Story category (now Original Screenplay), only mentioned as a nominee. Internationally, it has received acclaim, even though here it is not exactly a household name.

Throughout his days, Morgan has never been able to shake the film, from a festival in Oregon that asked him to give a lecture to the Lafayette Natural History Museum & Planetarium having him pick photos from the Standard Oil collection for an exhibit that also showed the film. His father, also a famed Louisiana artist, shot the film's premiere in Abbeville. With this exhibit, he hopes that more Louisiana residents will find it harder to brush away than Scooby-Doo 2.

"I have been wanting to try to make not only people in Louisiana more aware of it but also leave behind some kind of a permanent record, somewhere in the state, of the film having been made here," says Morgan. For him, the film has qualities that exceed the stereotypes critics toss on it.

"A lot of people think it's kind of na*ve now, because the oil industry has brought a lot of environmental problems, but I claim it's a good example of art transcending the original intentions of its patrons," says Morgan. "The cinematography of it, the music and the poetry, it's a poetic thing about Louisiana. It still holds up, I think."

Calling it art doesn't phase Boudreaux. "I don't really know what to say. I kinda feel honored to be part of it. Back home, us we're everyday people," says Boudreaux. Admittedly - and to the delight of this shy man - he has not signed many autographs aside from when he followed the movie to Franklin and other local screenings. He confides he'd much rather be fishing or out watching races. "Somebody asked me here a while back, 'You know, have you ever thought about following the career?' What for? I told them I had several kids and a wife of 52 years. Ninety-nine percent of the people in Hollywood don't have it. It's not me. It's not the money or the fame that makes me happy."

There might be grounds for a good urban myth about the fate of Flaherty's stars. Nanook of the North's star died within a few years of the movie, reportedly of starvation. Sabu of The Elephant Boy would star in various other movies, but died suddenly at the age of 39 after being given a clean bill of health from his doctor. J.C. Boudreaux hasn't changed a lick and is still going strong, but his film career lived and died with Louisiana Story. Although that was his first and last movie, he says he really doesn't care. When shooting stopped, he went right back to living a life that mirrored the movie.

"We lived off the land. We go to the store about once a month, for flour, for cooking oil. We had our own hog, we had our own beef. We had everything," he says of his life before and after becoming a leading actor in an Academy Award-nominated movie, for which he made a handsome $25 a week and a $3,000 bonus at the end of the shooting.

When Boudreaux started the film, his knowledge of the motion picture business was almost nonexistent. He says he had seen a couple of Tarzan movies but never gave much thought to what made the apes and tigers dance about the screen. The following months did little to school him in the ways of cinema-making.

Being a Flaherty movie, there wasn't a whole lot of acting by the actors. Most of the lines were ad-libbed. What the cameras saw, Boudreaux really did in his everyday life. When the 13-year-old caught an alligator for them on Avery Island, it wasn't his first. He continues to hunt alligators, and a couple of years ago bagged a 12-and-a-half footer. One of the raccoons used for his pet in the movie actually belonged to him and would cheerfully cling to his shoulder. He says he preferred it to the one film-watchers see swimming about the bayou, because the "trained" coon from the cast bit.

According to Morgan, the film filled the Flaherty mold that defined early documentaries. "He only made (a few of them); they all have the same formula. He would go some place that really interested him and just get to know the local people. He never used professional actors, and it was always the same tale: basically how people locally were adapting and dealing with nature and how they were living their lives, how they were surviving."

Of Boudreaux and his costars, Morgan beams, "You look at this film, I keep thinking how rich these personalities were." For the father, the cast picked Lionel Le Blanc, who spoke a legit Cajun accent that Morgan says can't be found in Hollywood. According to his readings, casting spent lots of time looking for the right whippersnapper.

Stories differ on how the youngster was originally discovered - did a principal tell the crew of a boy constantly bringing critters to his school or did the photo of the lad at a relative's house send the cast scurrying to find him? Either way, one day while he was in Gueydan, standing on the corner eating ice cream waiting to see a Tarzan movie - he says it might have been Tarzan of the Apes - a station wagon pulled up to Boudreaux and asked him if he could swim.

"So we went to the irrigation ditch in Gueydan. I took my shirt off and just bailed on in and swam across. They said, 'You mind if we take pictures?' and I said, 'Go ahead.' It started from there." When the screen tests came back showing that he had no bad side, they relocated him to Abbeville, where the cast stayed during the 14 months of shooting.

"There were so many skills he already had," Morgan says, standing up to paddle his pirogue as an example. "As Flaherty says, and so does Helen van Dongen (a female editing pioneer who kept a diary of her involvement in the film), this guy is so much at home in this kind of nature we are in."



Dénouement

Until 1984, Boudreaux had little other than memories for souvenirs of his days working on Louisiana Story. When he received an invite to Flaherty's memorial centennial, he had one simple request.

"That was one thing I kind of specified. Y'all get me a copy of the film, I'll go. Otherwise, I'll stay home." When the organizers promised, he was off to Los Angeles to pay tribute to the man he says was a lot like Leo: "He liked to roar."

Like the birthday party, Weeks Island offered a few more possible memorabilia. When Morgan told Boudreaux that he was keeping his eyes peeled for a snake, the nature boy at 70 told Morgan he saw a small one and would have caught him if he had known Morgan was looking for one.

Boudreaux's finds that day aren't limited to the slithering kind. On the back side of the mound, he locates a pile of weather-worn boards.

"That's an indication that at one time they had something here. I'm just wondering if that's it or not," says Boudreaux. Truth be told, it's hard to imagine those boards being out there for nearly 60 years and still intact, even after Boudreaux picks them up to pose for a picture. And Morgan's sources tell him that the cabin was on the front of the mound, 40 feet of which has long since been washed away.

Looking at the smile on his face, a permanent fixture at least for today, it doesn't seem to matter. He is 13 again, running through those same thickets, climbing those same mounds, gazing at different barges heading down the same canal.

All that is missing are the rolling cameras and a genius director putting timeless images onto celluloid.



nick.pittman@timesofacadiana.com