Customer Reviews

Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies

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This is a well-researched look at Hollywood's never-ending fascination with moonshine, country bumpkins, and what goes on up there in the hills beyond Beverly. In the early 1920s as more people moved to the cities, Hollywood found it could make money telling audiences about the places they'd left behind. Lurid tales of sex and debauchery, such as 1950's "Tobacco Road," undercut the good-hearted goofiness of the Ma and Pa Kettle series of the 1940s. By the 1990s, the Coen brothers' "Raising Arizona" was a hit on the strength of Nicolas Cage's ironic portrayal of a lovable yokel (an updated edition of this book would have to include the current TV show "My Name Is Earl," proving this archetype isn't dead by a long shot).

Williamson covers a lot of ground here, from "The Andy Griffith Show" to John Boorman's "Deliverance," and his conclusions are fairly broad ones. His best writing narrows focus on a specific film or theme: the on-location making of the log-cabin potboiler "Stark Love" (1926) is wildly detailed, with newspaper reporting and interviews with local extras who made appearances in the film as members of an "authentic" mountain family. Lots of movie stills, contemporary cartoons, and detailed captions accompany the text. At times the book reads like a college course -- Williamson is a professor at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, and acknowledges the input of several students -- but for film buffs and general readers, "Hillbillyland" is an entertaining look at how the film industry exploits one facet of American culture.

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