Somebody Moved My Mountain

I was a 9 year old boy and present for the filming of the Farmer on Tractor scene (my grandfather). I loved looking back at this old film and seeing so many familiar places and faces. Especially that of my grandfather and the family dog Cleo (look closely or you'll miss him. Shame that the critic winstonnc takes such a cynical look at this film. Perhaps if he had been included in the cast he would have taken a more favorable perspective of a man making a film with his friends as simply a creative outlet. After all King also painted a portrait of Queen Elizabeth and several other historical figures.

Joseph Wallace King, a one-armed portrait painter and jester at the court of the family of R.J. Reynolds, concocted this vanity project. King wrote, produced and directed this epic about a college boy who discovers his girl friend has been unfaithful and runs off to the North Carolina mountains to "find" himself. About all he "finds" are dozens of King's friends (some of who were rumored to have paid to be in the movie) and various notables from Winston-Salem NC in the mid 1970s. Ralph Scales, then president of Wake Forest University, turns up, as do Hamilton Horton, a popular politician, and scads of others. I originally reviewed the film for the local newspaper and wondered as the time how anyone as far off as Greensboro (a mere 30 miles away) would make heads or tails of it. The premiere was akin to a cross between a Hollywood gala and getting your vacation pictures back from the drug store.