Another Movie Filmed Here
“They built a battlefield out there,” said Norman Vincent Turner about a corn field that is on the farm that belongs to him and his sister, 
Jocelyn Turner Porter, “but you won’t recognize this farm (in the movie). They dug a big bunker – I call it a ditch, and the special effects people had smoke and fires all around. What you’ll see is two soldiers down in a ditch who were wounded, and they’re talking, and all around them are dead Confederate and Union soldiers, and finally some litter-bearers come and pick up the wounded and dead.” This is the first scene of ‘The Conspirator,’ and it depicts the Battle of Gettysburg.
“The movie is about Mary Schraff who was involved in the conspiracy to kill President Lincoln, and she was the first woman ever executed by the United States Government. That’s what this is all about,” said Turner. “They hung her – three men and her. That scene’s going to be filmed in Fort Pulaski.” Mary Schraff is played by Robin Wright Penn, who played Jenny in ‘Forest Gump”.
“They had at least 30 young and old men who had been hired to be dead soldiers on the battle field, and at least four people were from this county and maybe more,” said Turner.
After these extras were outfitted in Union and Confederate uniforms, the make-up crew applied realistic fake blood to them, simulating wounds to the body and bullet wounds to the head. “They had a five gallon bucket of fake blood,” said Jocelyn, “and they filled little bottles with it and they would go around and slosh it on the soldiers to keep the wounds looking fresh.”
“These extras laid out in the battlefield for five hours total,” said Turner. “They lay out for three hours, then they’d get a break, then they’d go back. There were three or four wounded and dead soldiers down in the ditch, and two of them had their feet up the ditch with their head at the bottom, and to me that would have been pretty tough,” he said.
There were two horses in the battlefield scene. One was a Standardbred whose former job had been as a race horse, but he dutifully played his new roll, standing loyally beside his dead soldier for those five hours. The other horse was a fake dead horse. “It looked real,” said Jocelyn, “and one guy was on it!”
“Two guys toted it out there,” said her brother, “so it didn’t weigh much.”
“Once during the filming of the battle scene, a Fed Ex truck came and rode right through the middle of it!” said Turner. “He was delivering something they wanted real bad. Then he turned, and went out, and they filmed again.”
Did the crew get angry? “No,” said Turner. “They just said, ‘Cut’. They’re used to doing stuff over and over. When the truck left they said, “Let’s do it again.”
Scenes were filmed over and over and from different angles, cameras were rolled down miniature railroad tracks, and the scenes could be viewed on monitors.
Turner and his sister were present for the entire filming event at their farm. They toted folding canvas chairs so they could watch wherever action was taking place. “They move you around,” said Jocelyn, remembering the crew’s directions of, ‘You can stay here, or you can line up here by this fence.’ We could take pictures when the movie crew was not filming,” she continued, “and there was a lot of not filming!”
Although they had been communicating with Robert Redford’s film crew for months, their first real contact came when Redford brought his crew to the farm for a site visit two months before filming. He brought 13 people with him, and they arrived in a Savannah Tour bus. “They were here to determine what they really want to do out here,” said Jocelyn. “They start telling you what they want to do, and you tell them what you don’t want them to do. Robert Redford and everyone were very nice.”
When Redford and his crew returned for filming, they set up a base camp to accommodate about 150 people. “They rented a vacant lot in nearby Spring Hill Farm, and there was an area for parking – they had to have a lot of parking, and they shuttled the crews back and forth with piles of 15 passenger vans,” said Turner. “There were trailers for the actors, makeup artists, hair dressers and costumes, and there’s a convoy of vehicles coming and going. They bring these people up just before they’re fixin’ to film a scene.”
“There was also a food tent, and they have a good layout of food which included prime rib and leg of lamb. Gourmet food was catered for everyone, and they fed 200 people over there on the first day of filming.
“They also had fast food at the filming sites because they couldn’t leave. They had sausage biscuits in the morning and all kinds of food: bananas, other fruit and cookies, and around noon they’d bring chicken sandwiches and hamburgers They also had salad plates, vegetable plates and fruit,” said Turner.
“Robert Redford really likes fruit,” said Jocelyn. “That’s the only thing I ever saw him eat.”
“When the filming shut down, they could go over to the base camp to eat,” said Turner, “and then that night, when it was 9:30 or 10:00, they brought all this food over. They had fish and all kinds of things, and coffee and drinks, and they brought it later the second night because we were there all night long.”
The battle scene was filmed during the day, and about 10:30 that night they filmed two stunt riders, who looked just like the actors, on horses galloping down a wooded road and up to the two story farmhouse. The house is supposed to be The Schraff Tavern, and one of the riders is supposed to be John Wilkes Booth. Somebody was to come running down the front porch with a carbine rifle and hand it to Booth.
The first time they practiced it, the stunt riders galloped the horses wide open to the house and stopped the horses, and the man on the porch immediately ran straight up to the horses and scared them. The horse wranglers calmed the horses, and the scene was modified so that the man on the porch approached the horses at a fast walk.
When the scene was perfected, after the carbine rifle was handed to the stunt rider, the second part of the scene was added –the riders were changed and the real actors got on the horses, but they are just sitting there talking.
The horses actually live in Savannah at Norwood Stable. Their names are Cody, who is a ten year old gelding, and Mandy, who is a 7 year old mare. The horses were used during both days of filming, as-well-as during other scenes that were filmed in Savannah. Linda Brown, part owner of the stable, says that the horses are now definitely pretty blasé’ about being movie horses. “I’m proud of them,” she said.
The next scene moves inside the two story farmhouse which was built around 1900. The scene takes place in a bedroom where one of the conspirators is captured while in bed. The film company brought in period furniture, but the quilt on the bed belonged to Jocelyn and Turner’s aunt. When practicing for the scene, the actor was snatched out of the bed about ten times, which is evidently normal procedure.
The next day’s filming took place on some land about two miles away. “They wanted a road that had a curve in it for an ambush scene, and they spent the day in the rain filming that,” said Turner.
“It was a cold day with cold food,” said Brown, who had six horses to be used in the filming that day. “It took the major part of the day – a 12 hour shift off and on. At one point we were on our knees, on the ground holding the horses with lead ropes – but out of sight. We had to do that because the actors on the horses couldn’t make the horses stand still.”
Cody was used again as the mount for John Wilkes Booth as Booth waited for Lincoln’s carriage to come down the road. “There had been a huge hole dug which housed a camera and was covered with plexiglass, and Cody was a trooper and galloped right by it,” said Brown. “I was proud of him. At the end of filming, everyone wanted to buy him, but his owner, Debbie Merkert said, ‘No Way!’”
That night the crew returned to the farm to film the capture of John Wilkes Booth. “It had rained all day long, and about 7:30 that night it quit, which was a miracle,” said Turner. “They built a movie set barn to capture and kill John Wilkes Booth in. They had 30 Union soldiers dressed up as the cavalry soldiers who had come to capture him.”
They were filming inside the barn, and the soldiers needed to stand there in groups like they had just walked up in case the camera on the inside caught a glimpse of them. They stood there for four hours the first time, until they took a break, and then about three hours, and one poor guy finally had to give it up.
“The barn was set on fire to force Booth out, and of course no one is in the building at that time,” said Turner. “The fire was a firewall. They put these pipes in with holes in them and gas lines in front of a structure, and I was wondering why they left big cracks between the boards – well, it makes a fabulous scene with the flames coming through them! That building was roaring, and then they cut it off and put it out.”
That was the end of the fire, and the end of the filming. “They started the filming that night at 9:00, and I went home at 5:30 in the morning,” said Turner. “And I left at 4:20,” said Jocelyn.
Although the filming was over, there was still a tremendous amount of work to be done before the farm would be returned to its original state. It took a lot of manual labor for things to be torn down and put back. Equipment had to be disassembled and packed, holes filled in, and fences returned to their original places.
“They filmed for two days, and they were here for 25!” said Turner. “And I’d say making a movie is pretty much like ‘Hurry up and wait’.”
Turner and Jocelyn were at their farm for the entire time the filming was in process they said, and they obviously enjoyed every minute of it.
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