The South generates all sorts of fascinating story material from the Mitchell epic to A Streetcar Named Desire.  The latest tale to emerge from the Spanish Moss is a film about the family of a Portland pastor, businessman, newspaper publisher and radio station owner.

Robert Pamplin, as they say in the South, is of the Georgia Pamplins.  If you have ever heard of a timber company called Georgia-Pacific, you know that this family's roots, like Scarlett's, come from plantations – in this case, plantations of trees. A good name for the family residence would be Million Pines, which sounds far more impressive than Twelve Oaks.

The Portland Pamplin is an interesting character, being (we hear) one of the few folks around who has two PhDs, at least one of them a divinity degree.  He owns a chain of paper mills that stretches from coast to coast, and on Sunday preaches from a great book called the Bible to his flock in his own church.  This last item should be taken literally.  He built it (we hear) with his own money.

Now he is building something else with his own money – a movie.  On the team at the moment are producer/director Gary Adams, who has done work for PBS, A&E, The Discovery Channel and The History Channel, and the legendary claymation Jedi master, Will Vinton, as creative and technical advisor.  Short of hiring Gus Van Sant, Pamplin could not have found better-known local talent to construct his one-hour family epic. 

No doubt these men, being ethical and responsible members of the artistic community, will see that the production isn't just a whitewashed tribute to the Pamplin family.  We all have read the books and seen the plays and movies.  Southern families are chock full of wonderfully dirty laundry.   All the shady business deals, illicit affairs, political influence and internal family hatreds.  All the cousins in private asylums and the mad aunts who live with the skeletons of their deceased husbands in the attic.  This is the deliciously sick, tormented weave and warp that rots and steams beneath the outwardly mannered and proper demeanor of the families of that region.  Insanity, alcoholism, blood feuds, bitterness, greed and revenge will no doubt infuse the film with screen-splitting passion and we will be swept away with emotion, eventually leaving the theatre as limp as a dishrag.

And, just imagine the final scene!  Robert Pamplin as portrayed by Jack Nicholson, sitting alone in his Victorian mansion, dressed as a full Colonel from Pickett's Brigade, poking with his blood-stained saber at the pile of ill-gotten cash in his chifforobe while giggling insanely.  It will stay with us as one of the great final cinematic images of all time.  And his last words.  Yes, his last words.  He glances up at the camera, for a moment the insanity in his eyes giving way to intelligent malice, and says,   "Ah have come to rely on the kindness of strangers."

Those words will rattle down the halls of literature for centuries to come.

In a story about this, the Business Journal of Portland suggested the docu-drama (actors are portraying the family characters)  might qualify for consideration for an OSCAR.  But even if it doesn’t, it will surely qualify as one of the most magnificent (and expensive) family flicks in American history.

Does anybody know if the American Film Institute has a category for tell-all Southern home movies?