Stranger With a Camera transcript

Stranger With a Camera transcript

- I come in from work one evening. Sitting on the porch, I had the baby on my lap. And there was that Hugh O'Connor or another man come there and wanted to take my picture. And I'd give him permission for it, so he went back to the camera and started taking the pictures.

- They were over in this area here, taking the pictures from the people that was in the house over here. There was houses all up and down through this spot at that time. Hobart Ison was coming up the road, had a '49 Buick, and he seen them taking those pictures of his renters. And he came up the road right here and pulled in. He got out of the car right there and came over to where they was at.

- It all happened awfully fast. A man drives up, opens the door of a car, takes a few steps, screams at us, shoots a gun off.

- Mr. O'Connor briefly looked down in amazement and saw a hole in his chest, and he looked up in despair and said, "Why did you have to do that?" And with blood coming from his mouth, he fell to the ground.

- Well, it had to be murder, had to be.

- [Liz] These are the mountains I come from in Eastern Kentucky. The killing that happened here had a lasting effect on the lives of everyone who lived through it, and now that includes me. I've passed this place in the road many times in my work as a filmmaker, documenting life here. Over the years, I learned what had happened, but I wanted to go beneath the surface to find out why it happened. I wanted to explore this incident that reflects a dark side of where I live. What brought these two men, Hobart Ison with his gun and Hugh O'Connor with his camera, face to face in September of 1967? To Hobart Ison, Hugh O'Connor was a stranger with a camera. Here in this place, I became a neighbor, a wife and mother with a camera. As a filmmaker, I felt that O'Connor's death and my community's response to it had something to teach me. As someone who lives in the community I document, what can I learn from this story now that I have stood on both sides of the camera? I grew up in a place inundated with picture takers of the creeks, the hollows, the houses and the people of Appalachia. I didn't think much about it back then. After all, what did those images have to do with me? ♪ I have left the land of bondage ♪ ♪ With its earthly treasures ♪ ♪ I've journeyed to a place ♪ ♪ Where there is love on every hand ♪ What is the difference between how people see their own place and how others represent it? ♪ I'm camping in Canaan's happy land ♪ Who does get to tell the community story? And what are the storytellers' responsibilities? And what do these questions have to do with the murder that happened here? ♪ I'm camping, I'm camping in Canaan's happy land ♪ My parents moved to Hazard, Kentucky after World War II. I was born here in 1951. When I was growing up and saw Appalachia on national television, the images were of mining disasters, coal strikes or poor people. A friend of my dad's, a local lawyer, started speaking out about problems in the area. A British film crew came into Letcher County to make a documentary about him.

- [Narrator] Harry Caudill's an attorney. He lives with his wife and three children at Whitesburg in Eastern Kentucky, the center of America's poverty belt. Only recently has America woken up to the shock that the American dream had become a nightmare for many people. Americans did not recognize poverty in their own country, but Caudill did. For 10 years, he waged a lonely campaign to make others recognize it too. In 1962, he wrote a 300-page book called "Night Comes To The Cumberlands".

- Let me tell you a little bit about how "Night Comes To The Cumberlands" happened to be written. One day, Harry was out walking on a Sunday afternoon in the woods and he came back. He got to telling me about how the Appalachian people had come to be in the depressed state that they had reached, having descended into that from a very rural kind of existence. And so I got out my shorthand book and I said, "Hey, that sounds pretty good. Let me write that down." Nobody else had put together the whole story of how the people came there, how they had been exploited, how the corporations came there and put it all in historical context.

- This coal train is symbolic of much of the dilemma of Appalachia. Until very recently, the companies that mined the coal owned all the mining communities, the company towns, the streets, the houses, the hospitals. This created a population that was totally dependent. Abruptly, the company no longer needed its mining men. It needed mining machines. Millions, hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars worth of coal have gone out of these valleys, Appalachia's most valuable single resource.

- We kind of caught the nation's eye, I think. We had really huge unemployment in the coal fields, so that gradually, over a period of some years, the area ran out of resources. Houses just became in disrepair, and nobody was able to paint and fix up. And in general, people's clothes wore out and there was never enough food to go around. There was a lot of actual hunger that was really visible when you looked at the kids. The focus really started in the early '60s with the publication of Harry Caudill's "Night Comes To The Cumberlands". "The New York Times" sent down a reporter and a photographer to see if Harry knew what he was talking about. And they saw enough to convince them of the accuracy of Harry's writings and did a story that was spread across a "Sunday New York Times". President Johnson came along and formalized the Kennedy effort in what became known as the War on Poverty.

- [President Johnson] For the first time in our history, an America without hunger is a practical prospect.

- Of course, the War on Poverty then centers in on places where there is poverty. And Eastern Kentucky probably had the most of any rural area in the nation. That in turn meant that we had a lot of outside people coming in to see what our problems were. Almost every time you looked up, there was a newspaper reporter or a magazine reporter, or a television reporter or crew coming through.

- This is the road, if you can call it that, that leads to the Pert Creek School in Letcher County, Kentucky. There are tens of thousands of roads like this, winding back along the creeks and hollows of 11 states. And beside these roads, the shacks of tar paper and pine which are the homes of a million permanently poor. That cabin down there belongs to Letcher West. George and Janie and Maggie West use this road to get to school. At this time of year, they never get there with dry feet. Down there is where Johnny Sandlin and his wife and 11 children try to stay warm all winter. Up there is the Bakers, and beyond the Bakers, up on the hill is the Pert Creek School. And up there on this one day is the only sign anywhere in this hollow that it is Christmas in Appalachia. ♪ Sleep in heavenly peace ♪ ♪ Sleep in heavenly peace ♪

- [Liz] Those kids CBS filmed on Pert Creek lived only a few miles away from me. I wonder how they felt about having their pictures on television. I wouldn't have liked it. Growing up in a county seat town, I was comfortable. My family was well off, nice house, good clothes, plenty to eat, family vacations. But growing up in the coal fields, I began to see people living very different lives.

- [Narrator] When Goldie Johnson speaks of Christmas, it is as if she lived in a country far removed from ours.

- I hope and wish that children could have what they used to have, and if not all they used to have, part anyway. Because little children, when it comes to children, I always could stand a grownup's disappointment and downfalls but children, I don't think they should have to suffer the way that they do.

- [Liz] Through the church I attended, I joined young people from other states in working with needy families. We read to children and painted and fixed up community buildings. I went to places in the area I'd never been before, into the houses like the ones presented in the poverty pictures on TV. While I was becoming more aware of these two contrasting worlds, my world was busy with cheerleading, riding around, listening to the radio, the yearbook. Around the time I was a candidate for Homecoming queen, there was talk about a filmmaker named Hugh O'Connor, who was killed by a man just down the road in Jeremiah, whose name was Hobart Ison.

- [Hassie] Hobart's family came in here and bought this land, and they, if you could say worshiped it, they did. They worked hard for it and it was all they had.

- They owned all of this. I believe they acquired this property in 1892 or 1898, and they had all that mountains all the way back through completely to the head of Spring Branch.

- [Hassie] That land meant more to him than money. He wouldn't sell a foot of it. He loved guns, he hunted. He went to Alaska, he'd go everywhere to hunt. He loved to hunt and fish and he liked to travel. And when he traveled, he'd send all different people cards. Being a bachelor, you know, he didn't have that many girlfriends.

- He had never married. In his early days, he had been about to marry and was jilted and he had built a home.

- When we first went there, we tried to rent from him a house that he had built many, many years earlier and furnished and then locked it up and left it. He didn't live in it. He didn't, wouldn't let anybody else live in it. It was just there.

- He was a very intelligent person and a great carpenter. He was respected and nobody bothered him, that what they knew what was his was his. And if there was a death, he was the first one on the hill with his tools to dig the grave and help, you know? If you went to Hobart or any of them and ask a favor, they would gladly do it but they didn't want you on that land without their permission.

- You know, you just didn't mess with his property. He didn't want you to do that. But it, the image problem was really, really, he said, I, "The reason it made me so mad was because I thought they was taking them pictures to make us look bad in this area." And that's one of the things that caused him to blow up.

- I can't imagine Hugh seeking out danger, but I don't think he would've been afraid to go anywhere in those years. And certainly, he wasn't. He went to, he, as front man on "Labyrinthe", he went to a variety of countries.

- The common experience of the human race in different parts of the world was one of the theme elements that we were attempting to express. Hugh was a front man in most of our research. He would go to various places and say, "Yes, I think we could shoot here," or "You don't, don't go there." You know, we tried Nepal. He went and got caught in the middle of a war and had to go from one end of India to the other. We directed a beautiful sequence in India on the Ganges. Hugh had the capacity to go out and talk. It was his great talent, people. He was a great raconteur, a really excellent storyteller. Well, he had instant rapport with most people. He brought people together. And that's why, what shocked me by the whole thing. I couldn't imagine him being insensitive enough to generate that kind of hostility.

- I remember him being gone for a couple of weeks at a time, going to very exotic places, sending me the most incredible postcards with interesting stamps from Ethiopia, India, China, Japan. I have very few souvenirs from my dad, but one of the things I do have is this fan here, which he brought back from Japan. My dad would come in and out of my life quite often. He'd be there and then he'd be gone for a few weeks or a few months and then pop in again. We were quite often on long summer days, and my friends would be away at camp and I'd think, "Oh, I wish Daddy would call today," and he would, it would just be so exciting. I remember him telling me great stories about a little girl who was about my age at the time, maybe 10 or 11, who had never seen a camera before. And then he showed her how it worked, and it was a Polaroid so he could take actual pictures and then show them to her, and she giggled and thought it was great. And you know, he let the girl take pictures of him. When my dad talked about doing shoots in Third World countries, it seemed to me that he had a real sensitivity to the people he was filming. As far as actually going to Kentucky, I think he was always there for the underdog and wanted to show that, you know, America the big, America the beautiful, but you know, perhaps it isn't all what we see.

- [Tom] If you look at Letcher County through the harsh view of a camera lens, it can be very stark. So there was a lot to be photographed and it was photographed.

- [Liz] America needed Appalachia's coal. The same system that brought prosperity to some impoverished others. Some filmmakers wanted to show that contrast to help bring about social change. Others mined the images, the way the companies had mined the coal.

- And I was working the day this mine shut down up here, closed down. I was working that day. And I was working the day this one shut down, and I was working day that one shut down down yonder. And they just had come up and put a notice up, "Mines are down," and that's all of it. They didn't give you nothing.

- I made $16 one week, six shifts, working 12 hours a shift.

- I was working in coal mines. The labor was cheap. They wanted 25 ton to each man they had. Sold the coal for $2.90 a ton at the ramp and I got $6 a day. Bring home, my home pay. Well, they cut Social Security out of that $6 a day.

- We wanted to go to many places in the, in this country where we thought people were being exploited. We thought one place that everybody knew about was Kentucky, where the miners we thought had been very badly treated. And we wanted to show this and show the contrast between the way their lives were unfolding for them and the original American dream. Was this the American dream?

- There had been a number of documentary films made showing the problems in the mountains. There were some who said, "They're telling the truth about us. I'm glad somebody's telling the truth about us," and others who said, "You're, you know, giving a bad image to Kentucky. You shouldn't reveal our poverty and our problems."

- After you've lived with something for a number of years, you maybe don't close your eyes to it, but you kind of block your mind to it. We just simply block out the fact that probably half the people in the county are living below poverty line.

- [Interviewer] How far did you go in school, Mrs. Stamper?

- Well, I never did even get out of the first.

- [Interviewer] Can you read or write at all?

- I can read, but I can't write.

- [Interviewer] What do you usually have for breakfast?

- Oh, gravy and eggs and bacon. That's what he has. None of the rest of us ever eats anything of the morning.

- [Interviewer] What do the rest of you have?

- Coffee. Coffee and cigarettes, that's all.

- I grew up at McRoberts in a camp house probably my dad bought for $1,500 and it was the greatest life that anybody could have ever lived. I would wish that anybody who ever lived could live the life that I lived growing up. My father worked in the mines and he wouldn't work anywhere else. He went to Berea College for a year and a half, I believe it was. We traded at the company store. I'm sure that just about everybody I knew and everybody anywhere was the same way. And it was just absolutely ludicrous to even consider that we were poverty stricken and that my neighbors were poverty stricken.

- The TV people filmed what impressed them, I guess. And most of it was not the fine houses in the Upper Bottom. People got a little bit upset at that because it, they thought it gave a, looked like everybody here was poor. And the fact was a majority of people were, but not everybody was.

- [Liz] When I was in high school, Bobby Kennedy was on the news, walking the streets of my hometown. Television cameras followed him to some of the poorest areas. Looking back now, I see that many factors, including social status, influence how people see the place they live and what they want others to see. Media images can bring out powerful and conflicting emotions. Were those who welcomed Kennedy hopeful that the media attention would improve their lives? Were those who objected to the images of poor people being shown on national television afraid they would be blamed for these conditions? Or were they afraid they would be considered poor too? ♪ You take a K and a E ♪ ♪ A N and a T ♪ ♪ A U and C-K-Y ♪ I found some of these films insulting. ♪ But it means paradise. ♪ When filmmakers focused only on the deprivation and didn't look past it to the lives of the people that are the real wealth of the culture. ♪ But I wasn't study no geography ♪ ♪ When I was sitting on my mammy's lap ♪

- I get calls all the time telling me that I'm a communist, or that I ought to be chased outta the county, and. I think the thing that people always are afraid of is change. People who ran the coal companies in behalf of the absentee corporations like to pretend that there were no environmental problems, that there was no unemployment, that the coal industry was thriving and that all coal miners were doing well. And anybody who came along who disputed the official truth was more or less automatically the enemy and a threat.

- [Liz] Many people blamed the VISTA volunteers and journalists for stirring up trouble. But people in Eastern Kentucky had strong feelings about their land and what was happening to it, and the region had a long history of labor organizing and social action.

- [Ann] One of the things that brought about the most emotional response was the destruction of people's land by the coal corporations as they undertook strip mining, which was just coming into the use of the really large machines. And they were just simply ripping the mountains apart. And time after time, and houses and wells were totally ruined. The VISTA workers and the Appalachian volunteers had not been working in the mountain counties but a matter of weeks when they discovered the local government had a vested interest in keeping things the way they were. These groups were enthusiastic, idealistic, and they saw that things could be much better for the mountain people. And they tried to help the mountain people to organize, but they were called the outside agitators.

- We certainly, I hope, don't have to put up with people coming here financed by tax money trying to promote Marxism or communism or any kind of subversive activities in Eastern Kentucky. I know I don't want to put up with it.

- Pike County public officials actually brought about the indictment of two Appalachian volunteers on charges of sedition. If you want to generalize, I would say that the merchants and the business people in the county seat towns felt threatened, and the owners of the coal companies felt threatened. But the mass population I don't think ever did really feel threatened because all said and done, there was a general understanding that we had severe problems. I mean, if you're hungry, you know you're hungry.

- What do you plan on doing for this winter? How do you expect to get by on that?

- Well, I don't know exactly.

- We did not use pictures of poor people in "The Eagle" because we did not want to put local people in embarrassing situations in front of their neighbors. If it happened that there was a strip mine slide or something like that and the house was poor, than that was a different issue, so we would use it. But just in terms of picturing poor people, we didn't. But I don't see with the other people who came in how they could have done anything else. I don't know what could have been done to show the problem. I mean, you can talk about it, but it doesn't really come through until you actually see it.

- [Liz] Can filmmakers show poverty without shaming the people we portray? I came to see that there was a complex relationship between social action and social embarrassment.

- They took a lot of pictures of poor people. They took one that I really resented. I knew the people and these children had hands full of dirt, eating it, like they were that hungry. Well, I knew the people and I knew they were well fed. They were on welfare, but they were well fed. But I really resented that type of thing, and as everybody else did.

- That misplaced attitude of save the Aborigines is as old as the hills. People who think that they are more sophisticated are going to come into the backward countries and make everything right. And that kind of thing had been going on in Eastern Kentucky where the people from the Northeast of the United States and elsewhere were coming down, filming the bad parts of Eastern Kentucky, not appreciating the good parts and wanting to publicize that kind of thing. And that's the backdrop of what happened with the Hobart Ison situation. He among the majority of the people in Eastern Kentucky were bothered about this kind of attitude that was being brought in, that we needed saving somewhat.

- I'm born and raised here, 62 years in these mountains. We've always made a living without OEO and without VISTAs. We don't need them. I've got some valuable land down here that men like him have just finished auguring my property I'm putting out fruit trees and things like that on. These people, they come in the restaurants they smell. You don't need to come in here to impress us with boots and fuzzy faces. No, my friend.

- [Person Off-Camera] Wrong place, boy, you're going to get in trouble.

- You're in the wrong damn place, believe you me.

- [Person Off-Camera] You better believe him.

- You come to us like human beings and we'll treat you like a human being.

- [Person Off-Camera] You're talking .

- You come to us like a damn bunch of beatniks and we'll treat you like beatniks.

- [Person Off-Camera] Yeah.

- Now my friend, you better believe it. You're treading on damn dangerous ground.

- About two weeks before he had told me that somebody was wanting to take the pictures and make him look bad of his houses 'cause his renters was doing so bad. Now, that's what he said.

- His houses were bad. They were bad. Anytime you rent houses, I believe he had 13 of these, he'd have a red one and a green one, rotated the colors. These houses were old and bad. They were his, is the way he looked at it.

- I rented off him there for I'd say six, seven, eight or 10, 10 years. I'd take his rent to him every single month and he'd come to the porch and get it. He'd reach out and get it, he'd say, "Thank you, sweetheart." But he wasn't no man to be fool with.

- They had finished their work, they were leaving the county. And as they drove down Highway 7, they happened to see a row of small, very poor houses that had been built almost on the right-of-way. And on the porch there was a coal miner who'd just come out of the mines. He was sitting there with the, probably with some of his family, and he was still covered with coal dust. He hadn't gotten cleaned up, you know? And it was a great, as they say, photo opportunity. They stopped and asked if they could take his picture. And he said, "Sure."

- I come in from work one evening, sitting there on the porch and had the baby in my lap. And Hugh O'Connor or another man come around, wanting to take my picture. Now, I'd give him a permission for it. So, he went back to the camera and started taking the pictures. Some of the neighbors there told me that Judy left the store there. Hobart didn't know nothing about this, you see. She jumped in her car and went over, told Hobart, said, "They over yonder, they taking pictures of your property and naked children."

- I was in the garden. I had some lettuce and I was picking lettuce for supper and I heard this awful noise across the creek.

- [Mason] I seen Hobart then pull up at the well box and then got out of his car.

- He got out of the car right there and came over to where they was at.

- And we were in the process of packing up when Hobart appeared and started yelling, "Get off my property," and gave a shot in the air.

- I thought they were saying, "Mad dog, mad dog." And I could just imagine a mad dog over there. I knew those children were there. And then I heard shots and I thought, well, I hope they killed it.

- I was around the camera, trying to get it off the tripod, which was a little complicated because it was a three-camera rig. And I noticed that Hobart was aiming at us and the gun, he gave a shot.

- And he must have shot about four or five times into the camera because some of the bullets were lodged in the camera.

- Hugh O'Connor picked up the battery case and walking towards the car, he was on my right, just about a step ahead of me. And.

- The filmmakers kept moving their equipment toward their cars across the road while trying to tell the man that they were leaving. One of them said that the man must be shooting blanks. "Get off my property," he kept screaming. Hugh O'Connor, who was lugging a heavy battery across the highway, turned to say that they were going. The man held the pistol in both hands and pulled the trigger.

- That man drug his camera back across the road and Hobart laid the pistol up on his arm and shot him then.

- And I looked at him and I saw blood spurting out of his, this side of the chest. And next moment, he fell down and blood came out of his mouth.

- [Liz] Mason, did they argue?

- Mm-mm, no sir. No sir, I was sitting right there watching it.

- This one particular day, it was in September, middle of September, and I had come home from school. I was 14 at the time. My dad was shot only a day after my little brother's 10th birthday. I remember sitting with him on his bed and he was trying to be so strong. He was this little guy and he was going, "Why did it have to happen?" It was hard for him. I tried to be like a big sister and to say, "It's gonna be okay, you know, I'm here for you," but it wasn't same as him. We could never bring Dad back.

- [Liz] I don't remember exactly how I felt when I first heard about the murder. I can't recall if I was shocked or angry at Hobart Ison, or even sympathetic to him. I can recall I didn't want the rest of the world to think of us as hillbillies, to see us as ignorant, backward or violent. But when Hobart Ison killed Hugh O'Connor, I knew that is exactly what the outside world would see. And yet, Hobart was part of my community. While I didn't feel the same way he did, I could understand where his rage was coming from. After I graduated from college, I took a summer job in a training program at the Appalachian Film Workshop in Whitesburg, not far from where I grew up. Appalshop, as we call it, gave young people a chance to learn filmmaking. When I walked in the door, a film had just come back from the lab. As they screened the film, I felt like I was seeing a part of my own place for the first time and hearing singing I'd never really listened to before. ♪ ♪ This place I was from had more of a hold on me than I had realized. These films were showing my place back to me in a way that was entirely different from the TV programs of CBS and Charles Kuralt. Those earlier programs served a purpose, but they weren't the whole story.

- One thing that interests me about quilts the most is the time involved in it.

- No, time, you don't get the time.

- Homemade . Now, some of you now better be learning how to make it 'cause this is my life.

- [Liz] The story of the murder cast a shadow over our work. Hobart Ison had killed a man who came on his land with a camera. Now we were the ones with the cameras. Back then, there were a few people at Appalshop who felt that Hobart Ison had stood his ground and in doing that, was even a kind of hero. We didn't know exactly what had happened that day at Jeremiah, but we assumed Hugh O'Connor and his crew had made mistakes. We certainly weren't giving them the benefit of the doubt. In the years that followed, a lot of visitors came to our film workshop but it was a surprise when a member of Hugh O'Connor's crew walked into Appalshop, returning to confront his memories of the murder. That was a turning point for me. It personalized what happened. The next step was to try to understand Hugh and think about Hugh in a different way.

- After the killing, the night after the killing, to have us be harassed in our hotels and have people driving around screaming and yelling at us, we were always treated as if we had done something wrong. Many members of the community were loving and supportive and tried to help us, but other members of the community just were to me, they didn't have the courage to stand up and say what Hobart had done was wrong.

- The next morning about the first thing you could do and the only thing you could do was go up there and try to get him out and go his bond. I went his bond and I guess a, there was a few more went his bond, but there was a whole courthouse full of people up there wanting to go his bond at that time.

- Streams of people came to visit Ison in the Letcher County jail before he was released on bond. Women from around Jeremiah baked him cakes. When his trial came up, it proved impossible to find a jury.

- It was a matter of him being what the culture was, I believe. Anyhow, he came in to the office for us to represent him, and of course we began selecting the jurors and the jurors began voicing their favor of Hobart Ison. And the case was transferred to Harlan County, where the Commonwealth Attorney was Daniel Boone Smith. He could sure put you in jail. It was not going to be any easy task.

- I wanted to come down to the trial but they said, "No, you mustn't. It's better not to have too many people coming down from New York. That will only antagonize people." And I said, "I can be very quiet and not known." And they said, "Everybody knows everything there. It's a fishbowl."

- Questions were asked to try and depict us as being hippies and communists and people who were very different with different value systems than the people that were listening to the trial in Eastern Kentucky. On the other hand, Mr. Caudill tried to help us and Daniel Boone Smith, who was the attorney for the Commonwealth, tried to make people understand that we were just regular people working, doing our jobs, but I don't think they succeeded very well.

- On the witness stand, the surviving filmmakers managed to avoid admitting to Ison's lawyers that it was the appalling poverty of his tenants that had interested them. They talked about being attracted by expressive family groups and by the convenience of not having to move their equipment far from the road. The defense asked if they were planning to take pictures of the bluegrass as well as Appalachia. Were they going to make a lot of money from the film? How many millions of viewers would see the pictures of poor Eastern Kentucky people? Except for the underlying issue of Eastern Kentucky versus outsiders, the only issue seriously in contention was Ison's sanity.

- Hobart said, "I am not going to plead temporary insanity. I'm not crazy. I shot the man for what he was doing." He obviously was disrespecting Hobart. He was disrespecting his property rights. He was encroaching upon his integrity. He was setting up in Hobart's mind the circumstance of ridicule for what was being filmed. Whether there, the film crew's intent, the director's intent at that time was all bad, I don't know. I believe they made a very serious mistake, and apparently being ignorant about the strong attitude of Eastern Kentuckians that would not be encroached upon.

- A camera is like a gun. It's threatening, you know? And the more we get into the kind of late 20th century, the more threatening it becomes because it's invasive. It is exploitive in terms of mass media. And it is not always true. It's, it can be editorially manipulated into anything the maker wants to say about someplace.

- The camera doesn't lie. It doesn't photograph something that isn't there. It is never the whole story.

- The media really had an obligation to come in and photograph and show what decades of neglect and decades of abuse of the land and abuse of the people and so on can do. We were in an extremely bad circumstance. The people generally in Eastern Kentucky were in a terrible circumstance. And the nation really needed to know, and we needed the help of the nation. And I don't think that any apology should be made.

- [Ronald] It doesn't matter whether they intended to ridicule, it's how it came out to the people who were being filmed. And even if the people who were being filmed didn't recognize it because they didn't feel the sense of pride that Hobart Ison did, that still does not justify it or authorize it. No, nobody has ever tried to whitewash Hobart Ison. But it is very clear that what went on that day was not all Hobart Ison's fault.

- [Liz] How do you feel, Mason, about the idea of the American dream?

- Well, the way I feel about it, I had to work for everything I got. And I had a pretty good life. I worked cheap, but I still got by.

- [Liz] What do you think their film was portraying?

- I don't think they was trying to portray nothing. No, I don't. I think it was for a good cause. But I thought they'd get some factories in here, you see, to where people could get different jobs besides working in the coal mines, because that's all there was then, is coal mines.

- In the trial, the defense summation was not about Hobart. The defense summation was about a community of people who lived in Eastern Kentucky in the mountains. The summation was about how they had come to live there and how they depended upon each other as family and as kin, how they needed to protect and nourish each other through a lot of hard times. And that they felt that there had been some people who had been coming in in the last months or years and making fun of their value system and making fun of their families and making fun of their history. And I was touched by that. I think Hobart Ison should have just been thrown in the slammer, but this was a poem about Eastern Kentucky that was beautiful.

- [Liz] Hobart Ison came from a community that rallied behind him even when he killed someone. I had to recognize that the ties that bind communities together are not always positive. Suspicion of those who are different, defining yourself in opposition to others, these can tie a community together, but can also lead to violence.

- After the first trial, we go to the second and that probably under the circumstances he should have been found not guilty. But we were not suffering from any delusions. When Daniel Boone Smith agreed with a plea bargain of 10 years for Hobart and eligible for parole after one, we convinced Hobart to do that. And he went to prison and when the year was almost up, he contacted me and asked me to, he wrote a letter and essentially asked me to get him out.

- But, you know, the, a strange thing, I never thought Hobart felt guilty about it. He, to him, he had done a favor is the way I always thought, you know? I was close to Hobart, he always called me girl. I kind of liked that, you know? And he'd say, "Now, girl, I had to do that. I had to do that. What would he have done to me? And all, you know, picture-wise and all of that?"

- "Well, I wouldn't say that man is mean," the clerk said. "I don't guess he ever harmed anybody in his life. They were very nice people. I think it was strictly a case of misunderstanding. I think that old man thought that they were laughing and making fun of him, and it was more than he could take. I know this, a person isolated in these hills, they often grow old and eccentric, which I think they have a right to do." "But he didn't have a right to kill," the other woman said. "Well, no," the clerk said, "But us hillbillies, we don't bother nobody. We go out of our way to help people. We don't want nobody pushing us around. Now, that's the code of the hills. And he felt like, that old man felt like he was being pushed around. You know, it's like I told those men, I wouldn't have gone on that old man's land to pick me a mess of wild greens without I'd asked him." They said, "We didn't know all this." I said, "I bet you know it now. I bet you know it now."

- Love Hobart, be a friend to Hobart. Be kin to Hobart, but have the courage to tell Hobart what you did was wrong and you're gonna have to pay for it and go to jail. And then the opposite side of that is it's not just a reaction to Hobart, but you have to understand the way we feel that after our friend is killed, they're still kind of screaming for blood like they want the rest of us to get out and if we come back, we're gonna get it. It just is a, it's just, that's really just very upsetting. You know, if we all killed strangers, I don't even want to finish the thought.

- It's been very good for me, very therapeutic in some ways, to really try and understand what was going on in Hobart Ison's head and how he felt he was being ridiculed. I've thought a lot about it over the last year since we were first in touch. And I think in many ways it's given me more comfort. A good friend of mine was talking to me and she said, "It's almost as if there's a chapter in your book which is now complete." And I think that's very, very true, that there's some resolution to my understanding and perhaps to my grief as well. And there's certainly forgiveness, which I hadn't really thought of before, but I think that there's, you know, it was a horrible thing to have happened. But Hobart Ison was a man of his times and of his culture and of his place but didn't work out well for my dad.

- [Liz] Sitting there with Ann, I was the stranger with the camera. She had come to a place of resolution, but I have not. I live every day with the implications of what happened. This is my community. My life is here. As a filmmaker, I have the responsibility to see my community for what it is, to tell the story no matter how difficult. As someone who lives here, I have an instinct to protect my community from those who would harm it. What are the responsibilities of any of us who take the images of other people and put them to our own uses? Hobart Ison was wrong to kill Hugh O'Connor, but saying that is not enough for me. It is the filmmaker's job, my job, to tell fairly what I see, to be true to the experiences of both Hugh O'Connor and Hobart Ison, and in the end, to trust that that is enough.