Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 30, 1995 TAG: 9506300016
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He'll tell you he's just got a bit part in the great big world of showbiz. True enough, at 27 and trying to see one of his screenplays through production for the first time, and with almost no budget, he's got plenty of learning to do. But don't let him fool you. He's got some savvy.
For one thing, he's got secret, insider showbiz knowledge, like what a "best boy" is. (It's an electrician's assistant).
And he's got a 25-words-or-less pitch for his first movie that's as well-crafted as anything an experienced Hollywood pitchman could come up with:
"`The King and Me,''' he'll click off, "is about a crooked stained-glass salesman that discovers God - and Elvis - are alive and well and living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan."
The pitch has helped, but not a lot. Stanley and the film's director, South Africa-born Stephen Schmidt, raised about $23,000, enough to get started. They've run up charge accounts for another $20,000. And they've had to improvise plenty along the way.
Halfway into production, their lighting equipment was stolen. After a little detective work, Schmidt had to go on a clandestine mission to meet a stranger at 5 a.m. in a less-than-desirable part of Manhattan and pay him a few hundred bucks to get it back.
They've finished filming but lack the money for editing. Yet Stanley seems unconcerned..
"He has this child-like wonder at watching his imagination come to life," Schmidt said. Others told Schmidt to keep the writer off the set, but Stanley's enthusiasm made him more of an asset than an encumbrance.
"He certainly has the goods," said Rena Down, one of Stanley's professors at NYU film school, where he received his bachelor's degree and is close to getting his master's in dramatic writing. Down said Stanley has the combination of talent and personality that will help him to break into the business and make him appealing once he's in.
Stanley may not yet be "in," but he's getting closer. Besides having "The King and Me" in production, his most recent screenplay was read at the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe as part of a monthly series regularly attended by movie industry people from all over. "Lords of Lightning" is about the rivalry between electrical pioneers Thomas Edison and Nikolai Tesla.
"I hadn't been that nervous since I played Scrooge in sixth grade at Huddleston Elementary," Stanley said afterward.
And now Gracie Films, the company founded by writer/director James L. Brooks - of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Terms of Endearment" and "The Simpsons" fame - has taken an interest in "The Objectors," a script of Stanley's about draft dodgers in Bedford County during the Civil War.
Not bad for a guy who chickened out on going to NYU the first time he was accepted. When he got in again the next year, he sold his '74 Buick and borrowed $1,000 from a credit union for a one-way plane ticket to the Big Apple.
"You know if he gets on that plane he's never coming back, don't you?" his sister Teresa asked his mother at the airport the day he left Roanoke in 1987.
Phyllis Stanley didn't worry about her son, though.
"He never really had been away from home," she said. "But someone showed him the subway map and he did it all his self."
Stanley comes home once a year. And last month Phyllis Stanley traveled to New York for the reading of "Lords of Lightning."
"I can't help but see my mother as my audience when I'm working on something new," Jeffrey Stanley said. "That's who I imagine sitting in the audience one day."
Stanley always knew he was a Southerner. He just had to go to New York City to figure out exactly what that meant.
Almost from the moment he arrived, he was on the defensive.
"One of the first guys I met heard my name and said, 'Stan-ley. Can I call you General Lee?'''
Now he's lost his drawl, but outside of that, he may be more Southern than ever.
On weekends he dons a black cowboy hat and hits the Cowgirl Hall of Fame restaurant, not so much for the pseudo-Western atmosphere as for the chicken-fried steak and catfish.
He reads William Faulkner novels and hunts for places that serve North Carolina-style pork barbecue.
And on Sunday mornings, he sometimes catches a service at the Abyssinia Baptist Church, followed by soul food at a place called Copeland's Reliable.
"Of course, what they call soul food here is basically just good old Southern cooking," he says. "Chicken smothered in gravy, homemade biscuits, sweet iced tea. I sometimes get bold and try the oxtail or the pig's feet."
When it comes to his writing, Stanley has definitely been more inspired by the South since he left it. While living in the South, he was too close to it to really appreciate it. Seeing it from a few states to the north, he's learned a new appreciation for it.
"When I wrote `The Objectors,' I knew it was good, because it came from my heart." He said he wasn't surprised when it won the 1994 Laurel Entertainment Award for Screenwriting Excellence.
Since then, he's written "Iron in the Dirt," a play about how the Smith Mountain Dam hydroelectric project decimated a small pocket of Appalachian culture. And "The Blue Ridge Stomp," a comedy about an old, white country singer and a black trucker who claims to be his illegitimate son. And most recently, he's been working on "July 3rd," a Civil War-era drama based on the letters of Singleton Shaon, a distant cousin of Stanley's who died at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863.
And then there's "The King and Me," a "morality play for the modern age" about Nick Whitworth, a Franklin County native living in New York City who's been suffering a crisis of faith ever since being dunked in a creek at his baptism. He finds redemption in a street preacher named Shades who looks an awful lot like Elvis Presley.
"Well, Nick is me," Stanley will confess without much pressure.
As a teen-ager, Stanley tells it, he went to church every Sunday until he was called to the front of the church to be saved. On his knees, surrounded by five men proclaiming that "Satan's got a hold of his heart," he blurted out, "I accept Christ."
He rarely went back to that church. And he became pretty cynical after that.
"I had no qualms about breaking the law for a few years," he said. "I felt like I was getting even." What he did, exactly, he says will "never cross my lips as long as I live." He does, however, admit to taking the Bhagavad-Gita - a sacred Hindu philosphical text - to Sunday school once or twice and reading the Satanic Bible in the school cafeteria on occasion, "just to horrify [everyone]." (His mother, by the way, never noticed this mean streak.)
Stanley has since regained his faith. He's decided that, as one character in "The Objectors" points out, the problem is not God; it's people. Now he's infectiously upbeat about everything.
Schmidt said no matter what has happened with the filming of "The King and Me," Stanley has remained positive.
Of course, Stanley doesn't have the money tied up in it that Schmidt does. Schmidt worries that the American Express people are going to hunt him down with dogs and spotlights before long. But with no money in the bank and post-production still ahead of them, Stanley's confidence has its own value.
"Every time something terrible happens, we get over it," Stanley said calmly. "So something'll happen."
by CNB