'I Saw the Light' now playing
The legacy of Hank Williams is rooted deep in the southern city of Shreveport.
It is after all a place where Williams lived, married, had a child and continued his music career with KWKH's Louisiana Hayride at Shreveport Memorial Municipal Auditorium.
Hollywood South in northwest Louisiana
The country singer's spirit was resurrected in northwest Louisiana in 2014 when a film crew came to town with a vision of making the city the backdrop to a biographical film depicting the country musician's life. Filming in the region brought an essence of authenticity to the biopic and created a connection between Williams and the actors.
"It‘s a special space to be in. You're around the sound of the language, you’re around the culture," said Elizabeth Olsen, the actress playing Hank Williams' ex-wife Audrey Williams. "All those things affect the blood of everything. You end up breathing it. Especially with a production's design and costume team, that was really important (for them) to be there, too."
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More than 35 locations were used in the northwest Louisiana area to recreate key places in Williams' life — from Shreveport to Bossier City to Elm Grove to Mooringsport to Oil City. Location manager Ed Lipscomb and his crew of film location scouts searched far and wide for the original, historic sites as well as find places to duplicate key places in Tennessee, Alabama and Ohio.
In the end, it took southern hospitality, vision and hard work to bring the local legend back for one last show.
It took three days of scouting before director Marc Abraham decided to shoot "I Saw the Light" in the Shreveport-Bossier city area.
"Once he got here, and we started showing him stuff he was blown away by the diversity, and what he could do here with this movie," said Lipscomb.
Filming in the original city also meant have easier access to the country singer's history and being able to walk in his shoes.
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Before and during filming, McNamara said the founders of Louisiana Hayride, Maggie and Alton Warwick, and musician James Burton and wife Louise — who still live in the area — were often consulted for accuracy and stories about Williams from when he performed on the radio show in 1940s and 1950s, said Lipscomb.
"I Saw the Light" focuses on the relationships Williams had with the women in his life more than it does his earlier life, she said.
"We don’t so much focus on the fact that he was a genius child or how he learned to play the guitar or how he went about writing a song, but we focus on the relationships that inspired the lyrics he wrote," said Olsen.
Songs like "Your Cheatin' Heart" and "I'm So Lonely I Could Cry" were inspired by some of those relationships.
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"Hank is the grandfather of country and rock music and inspired most of established musicians we’ve seen from Bob Dylan to Keith Richards," said Olsen. "They were most inspired by his lyrics and his honesty. He was the first person to write about the troubles of being a man and having emotions. It was all very simple and very easy to connect with."
Seeing photos of Hank and Audrey together and filming in places directly connected to their life was helpful to the actress to understand the couple, Olsen said.
"It was really nice to see personal photos they’d taken of each other," she said. "They were young people with not too much education who had a quick success. It’s a difficult thing to handle, especially when you're dealing with addictions."
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It also helped Olsen channel the essence of Audrey Williams, she said.
"When people talked about her, they hadn’t had good things to say, which I thought was unfair considering that she was trying to be a business woman in the late 1940s and early 1950s and dealing with an alcoholic husband," said Olsen. "So what I was trying to do in the film was support her and approach the character by kind of defending her."
"I Saw the Light" takes place in the 1940s and 1950s, so modern technology and styles were removed once a location was set. The production filmed between September and December, and location managers worked with the city of Shreveport officials to arrange that Christmas decorations weren't in the scenes. Even parking meters had to be uprooted.
"The other difficulty is finding these places that are still time capsules that haven’t been touched in 60 years," said Lipscomb.
More than 200 locations were considered before narrowing the list down to roughly 50 then to about 35, which is considered a lot for a production of its size, said Lipscomb.
Making the cut was an office at the Motor Hotel just outside of downtown Shreveport on Line Avenue, which became the lobby of a recording studio. The building had much of the classic qualities for a relatively easy transformation.
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They filmed a scene at Jacquelyn's Cafe on Louisiana Avenue and the Louisiana State building on Fairfield Avenue — which has original marble floors and stainless steel elevators — for the same visual qualities of the era.
"It’s just a time warp, it’s great," said Lipscomb.
Nailing down the right place is treasured and adds to the audience's understanding of the story and characters. Hank and Audrey getting married at a gas station in 1944 is one of those moments.
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"The guy who owned the gas station was the justice of the peace," said Lipscomb. "In those days the justices did a lot of the weddings.They went there, closed it down, went inside, got married and left."
In 2014, the film scouts spotted a 1940s style gas station on Kings Highway in the historic Highland neighborhood in Shreveport. The business is still in operation but under the name Kriger Battery Company.
"We ended up closing down the business, cleared out the stock of batteries and brought in our stuff," said McNamara. "We made it rain, so we had all these condors sitting out there to make it look like it was raining. Took a lot to pull it off."
Williams lived in Shreveport with Audrey Williams in 1948, and it was where she would give birth to their son, Randall Hank Williams — or Hank Williams, Jr.
Williams also lived in another house in Bossier City.
"We actually found his house in Bossier but it was not in good place – a tree had fallen over the top and smashed the roof," said Lipscomb.
The crew were unable to secure the Williams' Shreveport home — a garage apartment — but found one in Bossier City to replicate the original.
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"When I saw the apartment I just knew right then it would be the apartment," said Lipscomb. "It was perfect and exactly what we needed for the script."
Abraham and the designers fell in love with it, as well, he said.
It took a stroke of luck to find the ideal place to play as the main house Hank and Audrey lived in, McNamara said.
"On top of being historically accurate you're also working with the writer and director and looking at it in a cinematic way," he said. "Marc imagined going down this gravel road encased with this tunnel of trees only for it to open up and there's the house and Audrey's on the porch."
Finding the exact specifications was a challenge, but after talking to local residents, they were tipped off to a house on Caddo Lake that would be the perfect historic house Abraham imagined.
"That was a tough one," said McNamara. "Sometimes it's a needle in a hay stack and we get lucky."
The initial draw to the city was the Shreveport Municipal Memorial Auditorium — the original home of the Louisiana Hayride. The Louisiana Hayride was reputable and a major live performance venue and radio show hosting musicians, like Elvis and Johnny Cash.
It was where Williams would perform after being fired from working at the Grand Ole Opry in 1952.
The auditorium was fluid in transforming into a small U.S.O. show venue.
"We filmed it very tight so you can't tell the scale or the scope of the theater itself," said McNamara.
It also doubled as the much larger Ryman Auditorium in Nashville that housed the Grand Ole Opry.
Not far from Municipal Auditorium — also in downtown Shreveport on Louisiana Avenue — the film crew transformed The Strand Theatre into the Canton Memorial Auditorium in Canton, Ohio. On New Year's Day in 1953, Williams was traveling from a show in Montgomery, Alabama to perform in Canton when the driver discovered him dead in the back of a Cadillac. Williams was 29.
In "I Saw the Light," the actors replay the moment when Williams' death was announced to the audience who in turn began singing "I Saw the Light" as they mourned the country singer.
"It’s a beautiful space, a beautiful theater," said Olsen. "That scene’s incredible. It’s a really emotional scene — really impactful."
"I Saw the Light" is an emotional and entertaining story about the short-lived life and career of a country music legend. Olsen, Lipscomb and McNamara said they didn't know very much about Williams' life, but gained an appreciation for the man and his music.
"He dealt with a lot of strange attention very quickly," said Olsen. "It was the first time you get to watch someone experience that and die from that basically. We live in a very odd time with intense amount of media attention and pressure and for someone in 1940s to feel that then — it’s pretty crazy how modern his story is (considering) how long ago it was."
If you watch
WHAT: I Saw the Light
WHEN: Opens in select theaters March 25; opens nationwide April 1
WHAT: Robinson Film Center premieres I Saw the Light
WHERE: 617 Texas Street, Shreveport
WHEN: Opens April 1
BOX OFFICE HOURS: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tues-Sun, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
INFO: (318) 459-4122 or robinsonfilmcenter.org/i-saw-the-light-coming-soon/
PHOTO GALLERIES:
Film locations for "I Saw the Light"
Post-production auction of props used in "I Saw the Light"
Other movies filmed in northwest Louisiana:
