More Works by Joe Gray
Green Blood Red Tears (87 minutes)
Award
winning filmmaker Joe Terrence Gray searches for an explanation to the
sudden death of his nephew, James Gray Goodman, a 42 year old farmer
in southern Kentucky. The result is a thorough examination of the historic
economic, socio-religious, and biochemical causes which combine to make
farming the most suicide-prone occupation in the world. Interviews with
family and neighbors, psychologist Val Farmer, economic historian John
Kenneth Galbraith, rural sociologists Judith and William Hefferman, populist
Jim Hightower, and doctors Bob Davies, David Overstreet, Warren Porter,
Lorann Stallones, Bernard Weiss and others are woven togther to describe
an invisible murderer.
Lord & Father (45 minutes)
Lord
and Father documents the conflicting viewpoints of father and son over
profitability and morality in the operation of a Kentucky tobacco farm.
Integrated into this portrait of the filmmaker's father and the tenant
family that works his land is an overview of the economic history of
tobacco growing in the United States and of sharecropping, the social
system allied with it. The film spotlights the bonds of duty, love, guilt,
and economic interdependence that tie these families together. The issues
come to a head when a cancer-related death strikes the tenant family
and the value of human life versus the necessity of making a living becomes
personalized.
World Premieres (620 pages, paperback)
During
Warren Hammack's 25 years of leadership as artistic director at Horse
Cave Theatre, 17 world premieres were produced. This collection of 14
of those scripts is documentation of an exciting and prolific period
in Kentucky's literary, artistic and theatrical history. Playwrights
whose work appears in the book are Billy Edd Wheeler, Jim Wayne Miller,
Sallie Bingham, Liz Bussey Fentress, Nancy Gall-Clayton, Betty Peterson,
Jim Peyton, Larry Pike, Joe Terrence Gray, John Howell, Ron Meilech and
Frank Schaefer.