Drilling Down to Reality

People across the country watched the Oscars on Sunday to celebrate all the big movies of last year. In this previous blog post, I took a more local view, writing about finding out that the movie Best Pancakes in the Country was filming here in the Little Rock area. In various interviews, one of the producers mentioned that this was the fifth movie his production company had filmed in Arkansas in recent years, which led me to scour the internet looking for the others. I had imagined myself well informed, but I soon discovered that I had missed quite a few, even some starring big-name actors, such as Sovereign, a 2025 movie starring Nick Offerman and Dennis Quaid about the murder of two West Memphis policemen by so-called “sovereign citizens” in 2010. This movie was filmed in northwestern Arkansas but didn’t receive any kind of wide release, despite critical acclaim, going direct to video on the same day it screened in a handful of theaters.

And there were so many movies like this, movies with big-name actors, that went directly to DVD or video-on-demand. Fortunately, Michael Chambers, who does AV collection development for the Central Arkansas Library System, has a pretty good eye for Arkansas-related productions, and so when available, the library had managed to snag DVDs of many of these. Both Mindcage and Chariot starred Oscar nominee John Malkovich. Pursuit had John Cusack. While Trail of Vengeance might be more famous for the lackluster performance of lead actress Rumi Willis (daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore), it had Graham Greene of Dances with Wolves fame in a supporting role, while another Oscar nominee, Mariel Hemingway, was in the Christian feel-good film God’s Country Song. Alec Baldwin made something of an appearance in Crescent City.

All of these (and more) were filmed in Arkansas but went straight to DVD or video on demand, or maybe had a limited release in places like the United Arab Emirates or Italy. As it happens, I have a friend who has been involved in local film production for decades, and I reached out to him to ask how, exactly, these things got made. What is the economic sense behind this? He said that streaming and the foreign market are the main sources of revenue and that a surprising number of people will give the worst bit of schlock a looksee if it has a big-name actor on the marquee.

Anyhow, I’ve now seen a lot of terrible movies that were filmed in Arkansas. And I had something of an epiphany. One of the things we do here at the Encyclopedia of Arkansas is drilling down to reality.

Let me explain. Most books published do not become bestsellers or objects of critical adoration. They sell a few copies and then are out of print and, save for a few archives and libraries, probably forgotten. A few rare volumes do achieve some status, but it does not represent reality well to only have information on the celebrated works of literature like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. To represent the realities of both the publishing industry and how Arkansas has been represented in literature, you need to cast your net wider.

Similarly, most movies made are not blockbusters or Oscar winners. In fact, the overwhelming majority of movies simply don’t catch that many eyes at all. You aren’t representing the film industry accurately if you only highlight the critical darlings and those that packed them in at the theaters.

Let’s take this further. During the Civil War, there were plenty of major military maneuvers here in Arkansas, but if you glance through the relevant volumes of The War of the Rebellion, you will find many, many more minor skirmishes and scouting expeditions. Most soldiers’ experience of the Civil War wasn’t a matter of cannon and cavalry charges—it was going out in small groups from places like DeValls Bluff to check on telegraph lines.

And look at a state map. Across Arkansas, you will see hundreds of little dots marking cities and towns. But if you look through the historical records, you can find the names of thousands upon thousands of settlements, many of them no longer in existence, that once dotted the landscape.

People sometimes wonder why we continue to add material to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. Haven’t we got all the “important” stuff already? Maybe we do. We certainly have everything someone might need to pass a high school or university Arkansas history course. Enough for most journalists and lawmakers to find the site useful, certainly.

But now that we’ve got the “important” stuff, we can drill down more. Now that we have all the movies like Sling Blade that certainly earned their spot in the limelight, we can explore the true nature of the film industry, including all of those movies that, whether justified or not, were filmed and then forgotten. The books no longer in print, the Civil War events that didn’t change the tide of the conflict, the settlements where people lived but for a few years.

With all of that, we start to get closer, bit by bit, toward an accurate representation of what Arkansas actually was, and what it is right now. We may never capture everything. There is certainly plenty of history that has been lost. But with each little bit that may strike someone as “marginal” or “niche” or “unimportant,” we start to piece together the fabric of reality for this state and its people.

And that is never a “niche” pursuit for us.

By Guy Lancaster, editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas