By Kate O’Hare
Chicago Tribune Media Services
Although producer Barney Rosenzweig is a native of Los Angeles, there’s something about east Tennessee that keeps drawing him back. In the early 1960s he was a producer on Disney’s “Daniel Boone,” starring Fess Parker as the frontiersman who served two Congressional terms (1827-31, 1833-35) as a representative from Tennessee. Now he’s returned to the Great Smoky Mountains for “Christy,” a period-drama series premiering April 3 at 7 p.m. on CBS-Ch. 2. The series’ first one-hour episode airs April 7, also at 7 p.m.
“Christy” was born during a conversation with CBS entertainment chief Jeff Sagansky. Recalls Rosenzweig: “He said, ‘You know what I’ve always wanted to do?’ I said, ‘No, what’s that?’ ‘Have you ever heard of a book called “Christy”?” I said, ‘Sure, I’ve heard of it. I know the guy who owns it.’ He said, ‘You’re kidding! You know him?’ ‘Sure, I know him. You really want to do this? I’ll get him for you.'” The “guy who owns it” is Ken Wales, an old friend of Rosenzweig’s. He had been battling for years to make a movie of “Christy,” Catherine Marshall’s (“A Man Called Peter”) 1967 novel about a middle-class young woman in 1912 who goes into the poor, isolated town of Cutter Gap in the mountains of east Tennessee to be a teacher.
So Rosenzweig called Wales, who was still scrambling to find money for the project, and said: “Ken, you’ve been trying to get this made for eight or 10 years. The time has come to make this picture. I can help you get it made.”
Since “Christy” is a sprawling book with many characters, turning it into a feature film had proved problematic over the years. Rosenzweig, executive producer of “Cagney & Lacey” and “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill,” decided instead to turn it into a series, “It’s a massive tale,” he says. “It’s hard to tell it in two hours. In fact, in our (first) two hours, we barely get her there, and we collapsed even more than I think I would have liked to. (Also) in a series we can keep reinforcing what I think is the central theme of the book, which is a person comes there to teach something and winds up learning about life, about people and about herself.”
Rosenzweig says “Christy” was the most expensive pilot he had ever shot. All that money and effort rests squarely on the shoulders of young Kellie Martin, an Emmy nominee for her role as Becca in ABC’s “Life Goes On,” who stars as Christy. She has a strong supporting cast: Tyne Daly as Miss Alice Henderson, Christy’s Quaker mentor; Tess Harper as Fairlight Spencer, a local woman who teaches Christy about mountain customs; and Randall Batinkoff and Stewart Finlay-McLennon as a preacher and a doctor, the two young men in Christy’s life. But even with this help, Martin still must stand on her own. Did Rosenzweig have any worries about depending so heavily on Martin? “None. I think she’s an authentic television star. I know how difficult it can be to put one person in almost every scene of a picture. For a person to carry a drama, all alone almost, is a herculean task. I knew when I saw our picture put together, and I was never bored by her, that I was in good hands. This is a real, exceptional young woman.
“If you had asked me the question before I made the show, did I have any trepidation about it, I would have said, ‘Absolutely.’ I was scared pea-green. She was in every scene and you did not get bored with her. You believed her; you cared about what she was going to do. I did not have to keep making cuts in the picture where it was playing more at her back, because I was tired of looking at her face. She is an authentic television star. This girl has an amazing opportunity to win over audiences.”
The series was shot on location near the tiny town of Townsend, Tenn., just north of the boundary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which lies along the border of Tennessee and North Carolina. The production company rented a family-owned farm and built the sets there.
“The Tennessee part was really wonderful,” says Tyne Daly. “First of all, the territory is so beautiful, so very beautiful. You can’t really mock that up anywhere in, say, Ojai, Calif., or even on soundstages. The changing light and all of that stuff was wonderful. I think that our cinematographer and our director really exploited that beautiful look. It’s part of what our heroine, Christy, falls in love with. She’s a city girl, basically, who comes up to the country. The mystery and the extraordinary physical beauty of the place really captures her soul. Hopefully, it will be part of what captures the audience’s imagination.” According to Daly, Martin herself was captivated by the lush mountains and the change of seasons.
Along with geography, “Christy” offers a little history. Many of the people who settled in the Great Smoky Mountains were Highland Scots driven off their land after Charles Edward Stuart, called Bonnie Prince Charlie, led a rebellion against English rule in the mid-1700s. Rosenzweig didn’t ignore this. He recalls: “In one of the episodes, we (have) the doctor, Dr. Neil MacNeill, who is the direct descendant of the man who founded the community, lecture at the school. He talks about the history of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the fights against the English. You can see, when the camera pans the kids who are in the schoolhouse, their pride in their heritage. It’s touching stuff, and we use Scottish bagpipes to score the moment.”
“Christy” is the sort of positive, family-oriented series that many media critics and viewers say they’d like to see. Rosenzweig is eager to see if they mean it. “If we fail, there will be a whole lot of reasons and excuses for it, but I’m hoping that we succeed. I hope people will appreciate that this is what they keep saying they want to see. This is their chance to put their money where their mouths are.”
Says Daly: “The story is about a young woman who’s searching for herself, as all young women are and have been since time immemorial, who takes herself to a foreign place thinking, ‘That will do it.’ And as you know, if you’ve lived more than, say, 30 years, you will always bring yourself to wherever it is you’re going. So she still has to face all of her difficulties in this foreign place. But some of them are brought into high relief because of the difference between the experiences she’s had so far and what she’s now encountering.
“The problems of poverty and homelessness and ignorance and all those evils we’ve known for a long time, might be more clearly defined when you look at them from a distance. I’m hoping that’s the truth of it.”
