BH: I got a request for a proposal out of the blue in my email from MO State Parks, asking if I’d be interested in doing a documentary about the First Kansas Colored Infantry. It was the first ever battle fought by African-American Union soldiers in the Civil War. I didn’t know anything about it at the time. I’d always thought the first was fought by the 54th as depicted in the movie Glory. But it wasn’t. Those were the first federal troops, but the first time African Americans fought for the Union was here in Missouri by this Kansas regiment. It struck me as rather a big deal, so I enlisted the help of a producer, who really didn’t think I had much of a chance of getting the project. But he said there’d be no harm in submitting a bid, so I finally decided to do so on the very last day before the deadline for the bid. In my proposal I said I’d focus on compelling stories of the people, or preferably focus on one soldier, rather than a group of them. That soldier would be George Washington, an escaped slave who joined the Army in Kansas. Narrowing the focus on one character always is more powerful. Documentaries tend to have a lot if interviews, pictures, photographs, and blue and red lines on a map. Interesting, but unless you’re a student of the Civil War, that might put you to sleep. I wanted this to be more like a real film. So I put the bid in on a Friday, not expecting I’d get it, and on Monday I got a call saying I’d won the bid. I hadn’t really considered the impact of getting a $25,000.00 budget and having to pay professionals. It was going to cost well beyond that. A producer friend told me, “Congratulations, and my condolences.”
NM: You ran into some weather and costume problems as well.
BH: It’s complicated to do a war film, especially a period piece, which relies heavily on the authenticity of the costumes. Uniforms, rifles, bayonets, all these things have to work. And for them to work you need people who can use them. They have to know how to use a 160-year-old rifle. They were exact replicas. For the soldiers, they were a bunch of high school students from Springfield. Coming up with enough people who would commit for $80.00 a head for two weekends. The first weekend was to be the battle weekend, and the second was to be at the Toothman farm, “Fort Africa.” We had to reverse that because of gratuitous rain, a monsoon actually. We had to get everyone to Prairie State Park, in the middle of nowhere, 20 miles from the Kansas border. The closest hotel is 45 minutes away, so we had to sleep those kids in the visitor’s center. We had to train them, get them into the uniforms. And I got a call 5 minutes before I headed out to the shoot, from Stormy Cox (who organized the Bushwhackers and helped with the Union cast) that we didn’t have enough hats. Luckily he had a buddy who had hats and an extra 4 uniforms, 1500 bucks. And the Fed-Ex deadline is about 10 minutes. I’m already stressed. I’m playing producer, director, cinematographer, scriptwriter. So I asked for 2 uniforms, bring the cost down to $1100.00, I mean, it’s all Monopoly money at this point. So those kids had to learn to load black powder into 1860-vintage rifles, they had to learn how to march. We had planned to do all that and the battle scenes that first weekend. If it hadn’t been for that monsoon, I don’t know what we would have done. So we shot the farm/Fort Africa scenes first, which allowed us to get the cast ready for the battle scenes.