Category: A Victory!
Despite my involvement Heart of Dixie was actually quite a flop, earning a bit north of $1 million against an $8 million investment.
When I was in college I was kind-of a movie star. I played in an actual Hollywood movie. It was a ghastly film but an extraordinary experience. I got into a fake fight and inadvertently knocked the movie’s female lead stupid, grinding the entire production to a halt.
The movie was titled Heart of Dixie. Fret not, you’ve likely not heard of it. It was a ham-handed coming-of-age drama wherein Yankee actors shot a movie in the South with atrocious fake regional accents. However, it was my first (and only) real taste of stardom.
How awesome was I, you ask? Well, not meaning to brag, but my left hand figured prominently on the back of the box at Blockbuster, back when Blockbuster was a thing.
I played a National Guardsman safeguarding the arrival of the first black student at a fictitious Alabama university. The entire sordid narrative seemed a thinly-veiled reference to James Meredith’s matriculation at the University of Mississippi in 1962. It was even shot on the Ole Miss campus where the real riots actually took place.
James Meredith was the first African-American student admitted to the University of Mississippi back in 1962. His arrival sparked several days of racial violence. Things are way better today. Our riot scene was recreated at the same spot. Public domain.
I was a freshly-minted paratrooper. Unlike the other college student extras who signed up to be Guardsmen, I actually looked the part. That bought me the prime position in front of Ally Sheedy, the real star of the movie. She was coming off of War Games and The Breakfast Club and was, as a result, a proper movie star. She was skinnier up close than I had expected.
Phoebe Cates, Virginia Madsen, and Treat Williams rounded out the lineup. Don Michael Paul played a substantial role, but his claim to fame at the time was limited to a well-known TV commercial for Doublemint Gum (he actually told me that). Kurtwood Smith played a college professor.
Making movies involves a great deal of waiting, at least for a peon like me. During once dead stretch I enjoyed an extended discussion with Kurtwood Smith. He played the villain Clarence Boddicker in Robocop.
I asked him about the guns they used in that movie. His character logged a fair amount of trigger time behind the Cobra Assault Cannon. This fictitious prop was built around a .50-caliber Barrett M82 anti-materiel rifle. He said it was very heavy.
These Federal Marshals are heading onto the Ole Miss campus to try to help keep the peace back in 1962.
Public domain.
The Setting
They split us faux Guardsmen into two ranks facing outward to form a cordon through which the young female African American student must pass.
Extras playing students and angry redneck townspeople were arrayed on the outside of the cordon. Fake Federal Marshals escorted the young lady toward the building. Because of my military bearing (I guess) I drew the prime spot restraining Ally Sheedy.
The entire scene is maybe five minutes on screen. Making it required two long hot days. Most of that was spent with me holding a welded up M1 Garand rifle while Ally Sheedy stretched to see over my shoulder while looking pensive.
Kurtwood Smith played the villain Clarence Boddicker in Robocop. He said the weapons they carried, which were made from Barrett M-82 rifles like this one, were very heavy.
Most of the weapons were rubber dummies. Because I was in the close-ups, mine was an actual rifle that had been demilled. During our production breaks I entertained the cast and crew by disassembling and reassembling the thing on the sidewalk.
My job was actually pretty cool. Once the director yelled, “Action!” all heck broke loose. The angry crowd rioted, and the poor black girl got jostled. Amidst the chaos this redneck guy breaks through the far side of the cordon and spits on her.
I see him do it, inexplicably hand my rifle to the guy beside me, and proceed to pummel him vigorously before passing him off to a fake cop.
Ally Sheedy takes advantage of the hole I left in the line to slip in and emote with this girl. With the spitting redneck now subdued, I grab my rifle and use it to push Miss Sheedy roughly back into position.
Then the fake Governor makes a rousing racist speech, and everybody goes home. At least that’s the way it was supposed to play out.
I entertained myself over two days of shooting a movie by stripping and reassembling my demilled M1 rifle.
Tragedy Strikes
At one point during the riot scene an overexuberant townsperson jolted me vigorously. I reflexively rotated to regain my footing and caught Ally Sheedy, the star of the entire movie, under the chin with the very real muzzle of my rifle, knocking her right into next week.
We didn’t get any classes on how to be a good extra, but I’m pretty sure cold cocking the movie’s lead would not have been in the curriculum.
Fortunately there was already too much footage with me in it for them to fire me. Miss Sheedy disappeared to her trailer to have her bruises camouflaged by the makeup department, while several hundred extras just sat around … all thanks to me.
When she returned I apologized vigorously, but she clearly didn’t want to talk about it. However, I can sincerely say I once actually beat up a movie star. Ally, if you’re out there someplace — no kidding, I really am sorry.
The young lance corporal tucked the wood stock and clenched the pistol grip of his Lewis gun, a “light” machine gun he was all too familiar with from his time lugging one around during the First World War. His assistant gunner secured a magazine on top of the gun and gave his shoulder a quick tap, indicating he is loaded and ready to fire.
To the right and left of him, his fellow soldiers did the same with their Lewis guns. The anticipation was building, his heart began beating faster and faster. He felt anxious, but not like he did in the trenches during the war. This was a feeling of familiarity without the risk or sense of danger.
Someone off to the side of the firing line yelled, “Targets spotted, open fire!”. He pulled the trigger, the bolt closed, and the first round from his machine gun went off, producing a rhythmic symphony of automatic weapons fire. In the distance, several hundred meters ahead of him, the lance corporal could see his target plain as day: emus. A nice-sized group of them numbering 50 or more were scrambling across the Campion, Western Australia plains to avoid the snapping and whizzing of bullets being thrown at them at the cyclic rate.
Eventually, the mob of emu scattered, and the soldiers ceased-fire with no birds in sight to engage with their guns. As the lance corporal’s assistant gunner moved to replace the empty mag of his machine gun, he thought, I can’t believe we’re here to shoot emus. Nevertheless, his unit, the Seventh Heavy Battery, Royal Australian Artillery, spent the next month doing just that between November and December 1932.
The events described above may sound like a story someone’s grandfather fabricated to tell their grandkids. Still, one of the strangest chapters in history saw Australian troops deployed to Western Australia to assist local farmers with an overwhelming emu population.
Most have come to know this as the Emu Wars, but in 1932, it was simply a growing and aggravating nuisance to the farmers of Campion, Western Australia. Farmers already struggling to make ends meet after the rippling effects of The Great Depression now faced the threat of giant flightless birds ravaging their crops.
So, what were the results of this unique military action?
The answer may surprise some, but even with the abilities of a technologically advanced and far superior force, the deployment to quell the emu horde resulted in a failure.
For a month, the Army patrolled the countryside looking for emu, even enlisting the help of locals to lure them towards patiently waiting machine gun crews. But after the expenditure of nearly 10,000 rounds of ammunition, the military action only managed to produce roughly 950 dead emus—a dent compared to the estimated 20,000 thought to be out roaming Western Australia.
With the results of their actions seeing no significant improvement, the Army eventually left. It would appear that the Emu War was lost for the moment, giving those flightless birds free rein over farmers’ crops.
And with the Army gone, farmers still demanded the government develop a solution for emus and the destruction of their crops. Unfortunately, no such answer or solution would come immediately; however, years later, the government issued a paid bounty on emus that allowed farmers and locals to deal with the birds on their terms. The results proved very successful, with more than 50,000 emu bounties collected in less than half a year, thus bringing a triumphant end to the Emu Wars.
