THE WOODWARD STUDIO LIMITED
 
Stan Woodward, Producer

NEW RELEASES:

Tax exempt donations are being sought and can be made to The Mac Arnold Documentary Film Fund at the Greenville Community Foundation by corporate and private patrons and supporters of Mac Arnold and the band.  Each donation will receive appropriate credit in the documentary (which is being produced to be shown over public television statewide and nationally) and special benefits, depending on size of the gift.

... production overview ...

From a farm in rural Greenville County came a young blues musician with his eyes on Chicago and a bus ticket to try and get work in the blues clubs there in the mid 60's. His classy base and gritty blues style grown out of his roots in the piedmont blues of South Carolina brought him to the attention of Muddy Waters. Mac Arnold became Muddy's bass player and support vocalist and, along with drummer and composer, Francis Clay, added his unique backbone beat and soul to the legendary Muddy Waters mid- 1960's Chicago blues band. With a modest seed grant from the South Carolina Arts Commission and project assistance from the Community Foundation of Greenville, Stan Woodward followed Mac Arnold and the Plate Full O' Blues band for a year following release of their first CD. The documentary puts the viewer in the front row seat as spontaneous camera-work follows each step of Mac's return to performing the "down home country blues" after a 25 year hiatus.

"This documentary provides a "you-are-there" experience as the viewer experiences what filmmaker Woodward describes as a "first-person spontaneous camera" style of shooting. This places the viewer right there with Mac and the band as we follow their effort to put Mac back into the national and international blues world spotlight ... maintaining Mac's insistence upon  staying connected and rooted to his South Carolina farming roots and the local fan-base developed through performances at local clubs and statewide blues festivals ."           

- Stan Woodward, Producer 

BURGOO! A Taste of Old Kentucky

Our BURGOO! documentary is made possible by a modest seed grant from the Kentucky Arts Commission's Folklife program. It enables us to move into our large volume of footage collected while doing the fieldwork for the documentary, Southern Stews: A Taste of the South and add additional footage that captures the deeply rooted traditions in Central and Western Kentucky. This includes visits to the Kentucky Folklife Festival in Frankfort, the annual Burgoo Festival held in nearby Laurenceburg, the Hillbilly Daze festival in Millville, and the Catholic Parish Picnics in and around Owensboro in Western Kentucky. This documentary is being made in partnership with the Men's Cooking Team at St. Mary Magdalene Catholic Church (our community sponsor) in Owensboro, where we spent two years shooting spectacular footage documenting the annual Parish Picnic that feeds 3,000 folks a combination of their private recipe burgoo and  mountains of BBQ mutton and chicken.) Footage from this great tradition was used to open and close the Southern Stews documentary.)

BRUNSWICK STEW:

Georgia Named Her; Georgia Claims Her

This one hour documentary which was broadcast this summer over Georgia Public Broadcasting was made available for sale by the sponsors of the fall 2005 Brunswick Stewbilee festival in Brunswick, Georgia. This latest work by Stan Woodward was made possible by a grant from the Georgia Arts Council to Golden Isles Arts and Humanities Association with broad community support from the town of Brunswick. The documentary puts the people of Georgia in touch with the authentic folk heritage roots and traditions that explain why Brunswick stew is found on the menu with BBQ and dearly revered in BBQ houses across the Peach State. The film premiered at a community screening in Brunswick, GA - home of the annual Brunswick Stewbilee Festival and Cookoff.

Stan's work as a documentary video artist concentrates on Southern culture and folklife, and specializes in folk heritage foodways and traditions - many of which in their current forms have lost their connection to the roots of their origins. Stan's capture of  practitioners of folk heritage foodways traditions in rural communities throughout the South began with the documentary, It's Grits! - a 16mm black and white documentary begun in 1975 that has become a Southern film classic. ( 2004 NEA Film Preservation Grant enables digital restoration of the film and the creation of an authored DVD of the film. Go to It's Grits to learn more.) His latest work is Barbecue and Homecooking: Foods That Make You Smile, produced for the SC National Heritage Corridor, and the Rgion 3 Discovery Center.

Stan pursued work in media arts and distance learning education when film was overtaken by the video medium, returning to serious filmmaking in the early 90's with the advent of palmcorders, handy-cams and low-light professional video cameras. Starting with Brunswick Stew: A Virginia Treasure, and Lord Have Mercy: Olger's Store Stan began documenting the occurances of a variety of Southern stews cooked in black iron pots by stew masters using local, ancestral recipes with "secret ingredients" in rural communities throughout the South.  This led to his association with McKissick Museum's (University of South Carolina) Folklife Resource Center.  McKissick Museum based a millenial folklife exhibit entitled  "Southern Stews" on Stan's extensive collection of rural stew-making in the vernacular culture throughout the South. This resulted in three documentaries that grew out of that exhibit: Southern Stews: A Taste of the South, Carolina Hash: A Taste of South Carolina, and The Sheep Stew of Dundas: A Gastronomical Delight. The Woodward Studio's archive of footage documenting folk heritage foodways in the South made up much of the exhibit.  Drawing from that archive, Stan has just completed his latest Southern folklife documentary, BRUNSWICK STEW: Georgia Named Her; Georgia Claims Her.

Call: 1-864-284-6422              Fax: 1-864-284-6423

Email: info@stanwoodward.com