When the world premiere of the film, "A Painted House" opens at Arkansas State University's Fowler Center on April 14 at 8 p.m., Monte Emery and his machines will be there. Those attending will have a chance to see vehicles and props which appeared in the movie, all supplied by Monte Emery, a Lake City resident who runs Emery R.V. Repair near Caraway. Visitors will have a chance to talk with Emery about his collection and about his film making experiences. (downloadable photos)

Proceeds from the screening and those attending a pre-premiere dinner will go to a new endowment for ASU's doctoral program in heritage studies. John Grisham, who wrote the book on which the movie is based, selected ASU to host the premiere because the program relates so well to the theme of the story. Emery credits his love of old things to his father, Melton Emery, who is also a collector of antique automobiles, machines, and farm equipment. Melton Emery also once lived in Caraway's restored 1909 train depot.

Emery's love for old things, perhaps inherited, runs so deeply that he and his wife, along with their two children, a boy of ten and a girl of five, bought the old Lake City Hotel, an impressive structure of some 5,400 square feet. It is the family's home, although Emery doesn't expect the restoration to be complete for years, "not 'til my kids are teenagers, probably," he laughs. Two tractors, two trailers, two trucks, four to five bales of cotton and some pick-sacks will be on display in and near the Fowler Center at ASU. Emery provided the "hero truck" and "hero tractor," the vehicles used by the film's heroes.

In "A Painted House," actor Scott Glenn plays Pappy Chandler, grandfather of Luke (actor Logan Lerman). Pappy's tractor is a John Deere 1942 B that was a gift to Emery's 10-year-old son Jake from Melton Emery, his grandfather. The tractor owned and used by the Latchers, neighbors of the Chandlers, is a 1949 Minneapolis Moline tractor. A 1950 Studebaker flatbed truck also appears in the film, as does a 1950 Ford pickup. 

Recent innovations in cotton production posed a particular set of challenges for the set designers and crew. Since the advent of the cotton module in the late 1980's and early 1990's, the traditional cotton trailers that farmers used to haul lint to the gin after picking have been displaced, often relegated to junkyards. Cotton bales have changed, too; new ginning techniques and equipment, like the high-density press, yield a bale of the same weight but with smaller dimensions than the burlap-wrapped bales of the 1950's with their metal buckles and ties. 

Again, Emery and his father helped out. "For the trailers," Emery says, "we had some old running gear, and the movie folks rebuilt six trailers from the beds up. We also worked with them on bales. We used blocks of Styrofoam for the core and used rolled cotton quilt batting to wrap those cores to get bulk. Of course, instead of weighing 500 pounds, these bales weigh between 20 and 25 pounds. They are definitely easier to move around. We've got about 16 of them, and we'll bring four or five for display." The display will also feature some pick sacks, too, the long burlap bags that pickers dragged between the rows to hold the cotton they picked in a day. Pickers often averaged between 300 and 500 pounds, the proverbial "bale a day." 

All equipment used in the film, whether fabricated or borrowed, was specially aged to look as authentic as possible. The attention to the minute details in the quest for authenticity impressed Emery. "They built that house from the ground up and aged it," he says. "They used all new wood, and new tin for the roof, and by the time they were done, the boards on the porch looked rotten and the roof was rusted." He especially noticed the work of Cindy LaJuness and director Alfonso Arau, who ordered 22 hand-woven fiber bed mats from Mexico, at $125 per mat, to replicate the bedrolls that the migrant Mexican workers would have used in the 1950's.

In addition to helping the film crew find props and vehicles, Emery was a sort of technical advisor and liaison for the 28 days of shooting. He worked closely with Tom Moore, the film's transportation captain, who became a good friend. Emery says, "I had a ball doing this movie, working with the transportation department. I oversaw the maintenance of these old vehicles; I pulled cotton trailers and kept the old vehicles going for the crew, and one of my jobs was to teach Scott Glenn (Pappy Chandler) how to drive a tractor. When the filming wrapped up, Scott Glenn gave me his director's chair with his name on it, and I'll probably display it at the Fowler Center." 

n summing up his experiences with the filming of "A Painted House," Emery says he wishes that more local people had gotten involved. "Seeing the filming makes you really appreciate what you've done, preserving this old stuff," he says, "and the absolute best thing was being around these people, not knowing what to expect, and finding that they were the nicest people I'd ever met in my life. The movie people were wonderful, just so many nice folks. They were real professionals who did their jobs, but they'd always shake hands with you. They were never too big for any of us local folks."

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