I have collected  quite a lot of information since shooting IT'S GRITS from 1975 through 1979 and it's release in 1981, beginning with the reviews and newspaper articles which occured with each showing of the documentary in cities where I was invited to show the film and speak about the making of it.  When I completed the film I had no idea it would take off and become the sensation it became. Partly this was due to people not having seen a film using a hand-held, spontaneous, "first person" storytelling camera style - where I, as documentary filmmaker, shot everyone with a wide angle zoom lens and selected subjects  by initiating unrehearsed encounters, interacted in conversation with them from behind the camera and advanced those conversations with my own understanding of the South, it's people, their affability and latent sense of humor, and the fact that a common thread ran through and connected everyone,black or white, rich or poor, iconic celebrity or "everyman".

Once I had had my first encounter at my favorite diner that triggered the idea for a film about grits, and soon after I began shooting, I realized that what began as an idea for a ten minute short would grow into a lengthy Southern chronicle, whose final length I would not know until after I decided to end the shooting of it. And what quickened that realization was the knowledge that I had tapped into a main tap-root of Southern culture, and that this root would take me as far as I wanted to travel and without regard to time.

On the basis of the realization that the subject of grits leads to a taproot of Southern culture and its people, and that this folk heritage foodway is deeply rooted in the mythic quality of what it is to "Be Southern", I created MORE GRITS as an expanded resource link to my film, IT's GRITS! on my website. Here you will find an archive of information that is formed and continues to be formed by the record of my beginning the conversation about grits in film and the extending of that metaphor into a spontaneous amalgum of information about the subject of grits. Where links are helpful, I will include them.

Finally, I invite the reader to respond with any offerings they might want to add, whether stories, personal anecdotes, images or facts about the state of the art and the history of grits.

Send to  info@stanwoodward.com   and we will sort through and add to this site your contributions to this growing and fun body of knowledge and information about GRITS!, with credit to it each contributor.

My hope is that this page will become a veritable grist mill of content about the most beloved and most humble of Southern foods - GRITS!

                                                                                            - Stan Woodward                                                                                                The Filmmaker