From the camp horror classic The Creature from the Black Lagoon to True Lies, many films have indelible connections to Florida. This guide to Florida cinema and locations reveals that the Sunshine State has been an integral part not only of America's film history but also of its cultural history.
University of Florida Press' Florida on Film (ISBN: 978-0-8130-3045-6), written by Susan Doll and David Morrow, will publish June 3 and will be available bookstores statewide for $19.95 or by calling (800) 226-3822.
Ulee's Gold
"A lot of people connect to this story. It's not because they're beekeepers. They've all been in families."
--Victor Nunez, to the Tampa Tribune's Bob Ross
The Story: Florida widower Ulee Jackson raises two grandchildren and nurses a drug-addicted daughter-in-law while his son serves a prison sentence for robbery. Relying on the steadfast values of his rural heritage, Ulee heals himself and his family, maintains his beekeeping business, and contends with two of his son's violent associates.
The Film: In some ways, Ulee's Gold represented a departure for writer-director Victor Nunez. The film had a budget of $2.7 million, small by Hollywood standards but at least three times the funding he had worked with on previous projects. It also featured Peter Fonda, a major star of an earlier generation who has become a respected character actor. Nunez typically worked with talented unknowns or actors whose stars were just beginning to rise. Despite these changes, Ulee's Gold retains the hallmarks of all Nunez films--a Florida setting with a strong sense of place, a focus on intriguing characters, and a slow dramatic pace that captures complex aspects of life by concentrating on small moments.
The film tells the story of a taciturn third-generation beekeeper in northern Florida named Ulee Jackson. The sole survivor of his platoon in Vietnam, he bears both physical and emotional scars from his wartime experience. In more recent years he has seen his wife die, his son go to prison for robbery, and his daughter-in-law run off to lose herself in drug addiction. Battered into a shell by the events of his life, Ulee struggles to raise his two granddaughters but is emotionally unable to connect with the needy young girls. Instead he immerses himself in his work, steadfastly facing endless obstacles and long hours day after day. The solitary, meticulous work of tending his hives requires patience, persistence, and self-reliance--qualities that he's learned from his forebears and that he's obviously clung to all his life. Those same traditional traits have been abandoned by his son and daughter-in-law, who were seduced into trouble by a fast and easy modern culture. The oldest granddaughter, a rebellious teen in short skirts and heavy eye makeup who prefers the company of high school boys to that of her family, seems headed in the same direction. The younger girl, just entering adolescence, clings to her innocence by a thread. For Ulee, the apiary seems the only place his philosophy of life can survive.
At the request of his son, Ulee reluctantly tracks down his wayward daughter-in-law only to run into a pair of his son's criminal associates intent on finding the loot from the trio's last robbery. Ulee brings the woman home and forces her through a painful withdrawal while contending with the two threatening criminals. Drawing on the traditional values that had seemed to fail him, he leads the family through its darkest crisis and in doing so rekindles their hope and renews their faith in the family heritage.
These events distract Ulee from his business at a critical time--the few weeks during April and May when the tupelo gum trees blossom along the banks of Florida's Apalachicola River. The bees ignore all other blooms in favor of the trees' pale green flowers and use the nectar to produce one of the finest honeys in the world, with a delicate, flowery taste and a pale amber color slightly tinged with green. Timing is critical to a pure tupelo harvest. Beekeepers must clean their hives out as the blooming season begins and collect the honey just as it ends. Nunez filmed Ulee's Gold during tupelo season on the land of the Lanier family, third-generation beekeepers who served as consultants on the film.
The role of beekeeper Ulee Jackson was a major departure for actor Peter Fonda, who is best known as an icon of the hippie generation. He had broken into films in the early 1960s in one of the light Tammy comedies starring Sandra Dee. Within a few years he moved away from such Hollywood studio fare to star in a pair of Roger Corman exploitation films about bikers and drugs. Through these films he began to work with Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, and Dennis Hopper, who soon come to represent a new Hollywood--edgy, hip filmmakers who embraced the youth movement of the period and turned their backs on the studio-driven movie industry of the preceding three decades. In 1969 Fonda produced, cowrote, and starred in one of the most prominent, influential films of the era, Easy Rider. A low-budget independent effort released through Columbia Pictures, Easy Rider codified the ideals, disillusionment, and rebellion of America's disaffected youth to a driving rock {ap}n' roll soundtrack. Fonda's role as the drug-smuggling biker ironically nicknamed Captain America became an icon of the counterculture movement, and the film's success induced many studio executives to embrace this new generation of filmmakers. Fonda steadily appeared in one or two films a year over the next three decades, usually in parts that played off his seemingly indelible image as a counterculture warrior. The 1997 role of Ulee Jackson was the absolute antithesis of this well-established image. Critics heaped praise on Fonda's subtle but expressive performance, frequently comparing it to the work of his well-known father, Henry. {fig 6.11 near here}
Ulee's Gold ends with a scene of the Jackson family reunited, with all five of them gathered around a table in the prison visiting room. Despite the dire setting, the family is whole, happy, and optimistic about their future together. When Ulee's son asks him how the bees are faring, his stoic response parallels both the plight and the salvation of his family--and of all families: "The mites are choking them. The insecticide's killing them. The drought's starving them. They're fine."
Wewahitchka: Northeastern Florida along the Apalachicola River is a major center for commercial honey harvesting. The area is known especially for the prized tupelo honey its bees produce in the spring from the blossoms of the tupelo gum trees that line the river. L. L. Lanier and Sons Tupelo Honey, the firm whose lands and bees were used in Ulee's Gold, has been in continuous operation since 1890 and is today run by the son and grandsons of founder Lavernor Laveon Lanier. Those interested in a taste of the sweet labors of their bees can visit their operation in Wewahitchka in the Florida Panhandle or order a jar over the Internet.
Other movies filmed here | Click to watch video clips
› Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
› Operation Petticoat (1959)
› Some Like It Hot (1959)
› Follow That Dream (1962)
› Scarface (1983)
› Cocoon (1985)
› Parenthood (1989)
› Cape Fear (1991)
› Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994)
› True Lies (1997)