Director recalls shooting film in Calico Rock

As soon as he saw it, he knew he'd struck gold.

When film director Charles B. Pierce was scouting locations for his 1974 film Bootleggers, he had to look no farther than Calico Rock.

"I had gone up to Mountain Home, and that wasn't going to work," he said.

Pierce then drove down Arkansas 5 through the scenic hills of the Ozark National Forest to Calico Rock.

"I made up my mind I was going to shoot in those hills as soon as I got up there," Pierce said in a recent interview at his home in Redfield.

Pierce is best known for producing and directing The Legend Of Boggy Creek, a Bigfoot docu-drama shot in southwest Arkansas. But Bootleggers, the director's next project after Boggy Creek, showed his progression as a filmmaker andshowed a good story with quality special effects could be shot in Arkansas.

The film was a Hatfield/McCoy-type story of feuding moonshiners. While the film starred seasoned actor Slim Pickens, it was the premiere of a young starlet that garnered much of the film's attention.

Jaclyn Smith of Charlie's Angels fame got her film debut as Sally Fannie Tatum, the love interest to the film's lead character. Pierce said he found Smith at a hotel bar in Dallas.

"I was under pressure to cast that part, so I told [the film's producers], 'All right, I'll go find somebody for that part right now,'" Pierce said. "I walked up to this blonde and said, 'I'm Charles B. Pierce, and I'm a moviemaker.'"

The blonde wasn't interested in the acting gig, but her brunette friend (Smith) asked Pierce, "I'm the samesize; I just have darker hair," Pierce recalled.

Smith was cast without an audition.

Though he said he enjoyed working with the cast, Pierce's favorite memories of shooting Bootleggers were the high-speed car-chase scenes through the mountains and the interaction with local residents.

Pierce's wife, Beth, recalled one story from when Bootleggers was being filmed. She said Charlie, as she calls him, approached a local family about renting their house to film its exterior for several days. To do so, though, Pierce would need to take down a large television antennae in the front yard. The family agreed, with the condition that the film crew put the antennae back up each day before 5 p.m. "so they could watch their shows."

Pierce agreed, and when they were done filming and put the antennae back up the final day, Pierce sent his crew inside to make sure the TV was still working.

"It wasn't working," Pierce said, "so we replaced the cable. It still wasn't working ... so I said, 'Just go to town and buy them a new TV.'"

Pierce's crew bought a color TV, and when they hooked it up, the family's mother said, "Well, we ain't had a picture in years. We've just been listenin' to it."

Pierce said he met lots of good folks in and around Calico Rock in the '70s, and while his career and life have taken him to California and back to central Arkansas, he still gets a wistful look in his eyes when he recalls making Bootleggers in Izard County.

"I've crossed them old hills a time or two," he said.

- jlemaster@arkansasonline.com

Three Rivers, Pages 121, 132 on 05/18/2008

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