Provinces of Night: Confirmed | Movie Set On the Way
Toby Keith
Hilary Duff
The local film community was hush-hush about a new feature film probably coming to town… well, it’s been confirmed.
Production offices for “Provinces of Night” were opened Monday at EUE/Screen Gems Studios’ Wilmington campus.
“We’re excited to have them,” said Aaron Syrett, North Carolina Film Office director. “They’ve been working on this for a while.”
The movie, produced by Jay McPhaul and directed by Shane Taylor, is based on a book with the same title by William Gay. The trade magazine “Production Weekly” earlier this month, announced that Hilary Duff, Toby Keith, Pell James and Bruce McGill will be starring in the film… a movie so Southern-fried, it features a banjo-playing nomad and a wife who ran off with an illegal drug seller.
Details of the movie’s plot are not available, but an Amazon.com review of the book says it’s about a teenager, in 1950’s rural Tennessee, who finds himself home alone after his father runs off to kill his wife’s lover. At the same time, the teenager’s grandfather returns home after 20 years away, to discover that his remaining two sons are an alcoholic womanizer and a Bible-thumper who has a habit of putting curses on his enemies.
Most, if not all, of the filming will take place on-location, said Bill Vassar, executive v.p. of EUE/Screen Gems in Wilmington.
Vassar said local crews will be working on the film for five weeks.
This is the first commercial feature to be shot in the Port City since “Nights In Rodanthe.”
The film will be directed by Shane Dax Taylor. It’s not said where Duff will even come into play in the story, but given that she’s on the top, she must have a big part.
The story line is rumored to be as follows…
“It’s 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he’s been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won’t be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he’s an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.’s grandson, is pleased with the old man’s homecoming, but Fleming’s life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.”
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