Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [105]
“For me,” Blank says, “it was the cohesion of what they called the alternative movement, or the hippies, or the love children, the flower children. There was something definitely happening in American culture that had never happened before, and I got a sense there was an important movie to be made. Well, around the time I was completing the film,4 I was at the Ash Grove listening to Lightnin’ and Skip told me, ‘If you want to do a film on Lightnin’ Hopkins, I think I could get some money from my dad.’ And that’s exactly what he did, and his father came through with five thousand dollars in 1967. It was a lot of money.”5
To get started, Blank and Gerson got in touch with John Lomax Jr., whom they had heard was the “only white man” Lightnin’ trusted, and Blank sent him his short film on Dizzy Gillespie that he had finished in 1965 as a kind of sample of what he wanted to do. Lomax was impressed and agreed to help. He then arranged for Blank and Gerson to meet Lightnin’. “We approached Lightnin’,” Blank says, “with a 16mm projector in hand and a copy of the Gillespie film and we asked him if we could do a film on him and he said, ‘Uh …’ And we said, ‘We could show you some stuff I had done in the past, to give you an idea what I can do with musicians and film.’ So we showed the film on the wall of his dressing room at the Ash Grove in between sets. And he thought it was pretty interesting. And he said, ‘How much money you boys got for Po’ Lightnin’?’ And we told him we had five thousand dollars. And he replied, ‘That’ll do.’ Well, we said, ‘That’s all we have, and we need some of that for film stock and food and we got to get to Texas.’ So we knocked some figures around and he agreed to accepting about a third of it, or fifteen hundred dollars, and we offered him five hundred dollars in advance and then promised to give him another five hundred dollars half way through and then another five hundred dollars when we were all wrapped up. And he agreed, and John Lomax Jr. suggested that we give him the money in dollar bills, which sounds kind of weird now, but it looks like a lot of money when you see 500 one-dollar bills all stacked up together.”6
To make the film on Lightnin’, Blank borrowed a 16mm Éclair NPR camera, a tripod, and a Nagra II recorder and headed off to Houston. But the first day of filming was not very successful. “The very first day we showed up we were very eager to film,” Blank says, “and he was friendly and we hung around at his feet and tried to film everything he did. He had an apartment. I think there was a Naugahyde [vinyl] couch, a big chair, and then there was a little dining area beyond that. Somewhere there was a bedroom. I wouldn’t say he was that well off, but it wasn’t a slum, that’s for sure. It was a decent place. And a woman was there named Antoinette, whom he referred to as his wife. Antoinette was quiet and pretty and kind and generous. And we got some stuff with Lightnin’ sitting on the front porch overlooking the street. We tried to get him to sing some songs, but there was a telephone going in the background. This was 16mm so the film would only run for eleven minutes at a time. We’d run out of film and have to change the magazine. And it was pretty rough going, and we were all drinking with him because that’s what he wanted. And we weren’t very good at what we were doing, trying to get synchronous sound recordings.”7
Lightnin’ didn’t fully understand the filmmaking process, and at the end of the day, he thought he was done. “He announced to us that he had recorded ten songs that day,” Blank says, “and when he did an LP album, ten songs was all he ever did, and he wanted us to pay him the rest of the money we owed him and clear out and not come back. And we tried to plead with him to get him to change his mind, and