Alabama recently played host to film crews as the cities of Greenville and Montgomery saw college students from across central Alabama cast as extras in Son of the South, a Spike Lee produced film based on NewSouth author Bob Zellner’s memoir The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement.
Director Barry Alexander Brown, a Montgomery native and longtime film editor for Spike Lee, chose Greenville’s Court Square Cafe to film a lunch counter sit-in scene for the upcoming film. Film crews then moved on for a day of shooting in Montgomery and will be completing filming during the summer of 2010. Son of the South is set for release in 2011.
The Wrong Side of Murder Creek chronicles Zellner’s lifetime of civil rights activism, from his childhood as the son and grandson of Klansmen to field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In the early 1960s he joined ranks with the black students who were sitting-in, marching, fighting, and sometimes dying to challenge the southern “way of life” he had been raised on but rejected.
Zellner received the 2009 Lillian Smith Book Award for The Wrong Side of Murder Creek.
Read more about the local filming in the Greenville Advocate.
The Wrong Side of Murder Creek is available directly from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite local or online book retailer.