Family's a key part of local woman's historical film

In the early 1990s, when New Marshfield resident Amy Abercrombie was going through the belongings of her late mother, she discovered the manuscript of an unpublished novel written by her grandmother, author Rebecca Hooper Eastman.

 

She read it and was so enchanted by the tale that she not only had it published – she turned it into a movie.

“It was the story – it was just so good!” recalls Abercrombie, a retired teacher. “If you read the book, you just think, ‘What a great movie this would be!’ The only way I knew to do it was to do it myself, and it took me 10 years to get up the nerve.”

Though her only cinematic experience to that point had been creating a show on publicaccess television, over the course of many years Abercrombie took film courses at Ohio University, wrote a screenplay and rounded up friends and family members to act in the movie. She finally began cranking the camera in Athens County in summer 2008, under director Steve Fetsch, a documentary filmmaker and OU graduate student.

The resulting film, “The Other House,” confirms her appraisal of the story’s merits. It’s an absorbing family saga set in late 19th-centu ry New England; while notably short on bigname stars, CGI and exploding helicopters, it makes up for the lack with extra helpings of intrigue, romance, comedy and what we used to call the drama of human life.

The film’s world premiere took place June 26 in Walpole, N.H. – earning a write-up in the Keene (N.H.) Sentinel. It will premiere locally Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. at ARTS/ West, with a reception to follow both nights.

The plot genre is Higher Soap Opera, by which no insult is meant; the same might be said of Jane Austen. The main character, beautiful 19-year-old Ruth Holden, has fled her family home in Augusta, Ga., to stay with relatives in Walpole, N.H., after a man back home has been killed in a duel over her charms.

While staying at the home of her married sister, Martha, Ruth falls in love with dashing Boston architect Eliot Windsor, though a man back in Augusta has sworn his love to her. At her sister’s farm, Ruth is surrounded by a cast of New Englanders including quirky aunts and uncles, plenty of kids and the menacing Alonzo Hooper, a large and very nasty fellow who lives in the “other house” near the home of Martha and her idealistic husband Franklin.

The plot thickens when Ruth learns Eliot may have stolen a prize-winning design from a deceased friend – who happens to come from a family in Georgia.

Ruth’s hometown suitor, Jefferson de Antignac, arrives, bent on romance. He’s followed by Monty Blair, who’s the hard-drinking brother of Windsor’s late architect friend, and bent on revenge. (One of the movie’s best lines, from Jefferson: “When the Blairs drink, they start talking about shooting.”) To tell more would ruin the ending, but believe it, there’s more. It appears the character of Ruth was based on a real Ruth Holden, a remarkable woman who served as a military nurse in World War I. Rebecca Hooper Eastman – who died in 1937, and appears in the book as Ruth’s niece Rumply – must have known Holden, or known of her, as a child.

“My grandmother’s writing about her childhood, and I’m sure that some of the events (in the book) really happened,” Abercrombie said.

The movie – still awaiting its final edit when The NEWS screened it – has the roughness in lighting and sound that goes with any indie film. What’s remarkable is how good it does look and sound, on a microscopic budget of some $20,000.

The camera work is intelligent, the sets and period costumes are convincing, and the acting, rarely less than capable, is at times quite good (though the cast grapples, to varying levels of success, with the treacherous New England accent). Some of the outdoor visuals (filmed in Athens County) are lyrically beautiful, like a scene of barefoot children picking their way across a creek.

The project faced even more than the usual indie-film obstacles; the actress first chosen to play Ruth, for example, dropped out after three weeks, and the role was taken on by Abercrombie’s daughter, Rebecca Holden Perkins.

This meant Perkins – rather older than 19, and slightly pregnant to boot – faced the challenge of portraying a gorgeous young thing with half the swains of Augusta swooning beneath her balcony. Somehow, by dint of sheer vivacity, she makes it work.

The movie overflows with domesticity – big family meals, living-room entertainment sessions with every kid singing a song or reciting a verse – and it effectively conveys both the sense of conscious family tradition that’s a big part of its message, and the high-minded, evangelical streak that runs through New England.

Franklin Hooper, for example – played by Abercrombie’s son (and former Athens NEWS employee) Will Perkins – gives impassioned, impromptu speeches about the museum that’s his life’s great work, while his wife Martha – played with quiet authenticity by Sherri Biegeleisen – plays the piano and pores over the Transcendentalists.

In one scene where Martha is darning laundry, Abercrombie noted, “she’s supposed to be reading Emerson at the same time, but I didn’t know how to show that.”

The casting of family members wasn’t nepotism, by the way – it was historical accuracy. The film deals with the Hooper family, Abercrombie said, and “I thought it was neat to have some Hooper descendents in it.”

She praised her cast and crew, singling out Fetsch, an award-winning filmmaker who wouldn’t accept a paycheck.

“He’s a creative genius,” Abercrombie said.

“Without him and a couple of other people, it wouldn’t have been anything like what it is. I really have to give him the credit.”