Joseph Eppes Turner (’ 76 JD) of Greensboro has
been elected a vice president of the N.C. Bar Association. Turner is a chief District Court judge for
North Carolina and president-elect of the N.C. Association of District Court Judges.
■ obituaries
Rebecca Stutts Connor (’ 76 AB), 55, of Kings
Mountain; Aug. 18, 2007. Connor bred Arabian horses. Joan Gibbons Gallagher (’ 76 BSBA), 65, of
Severn, Md.; Jan. 30, 2008. Sharon Jenkins
Jones (’ 76 MEd), 53, of Germantown, Md.; Jan. 28,
2008. Jones was a teacher at Riverview Elementary
School in Murfreesboro. William Malloy Smith
(’ 76), 54, of Charleston, S.C.; July 19, 2008. Smith
started Synergy Search, an IT and engineering executive search firm in Charleston. He was chairman of
the board of trustees of the Charleston Collegiate
School and with Sertoma Club of Charleston. He was
a deacon at his church.
’ 77 Jerry Braswell (’ 77 JD) of Goldsboro has
received the Governor’s Old North State
Award for community service. Braswell’s
courtroom ranked first in the state in the disposition
of criminal cases, meeting his commitment to
decrease the jail population and saving taxpayers
nearly $800,000 in one year. Braswell is senior resident Superior Court judge for Wayne County and
served as a member of the N.C. House, 97th District
(1993-2000).
Moving Pictures
In the movie Die Hard, Bruce Willis’ character a long line of patient people,” Stuart says, not- Still, “It’s a serious film
gets into an argument with his ex-wife, real- ing with a touch of irony that he is named after about race and history,”
izes he is wrong, but is caught up in a hostage a Confederate general. “We kept talking for two Tyson says and, taking a profile
crisis before he can make amends. Jeb Stuart years, and finally all the others had thrown in good-natured gibe at his col-
’ 78 put him in that predicament. the towel.” laborator, adds, “There are no car chases.”
“I only had six weeks,” says the screenwriter, Stuart turned out to be the perfect partner Tyson does appear in a cameo as a juror, sharing
remembering his struggle to find an action film for the project. Blood Done Sign My Name is a the box with his father, his sister Julie, brother
in the Roderick Thorp novel Nothing Lasts For- tense story about a young black man, Henry Verne and his sisters-in-law Carrie and Susan.
ever. “I was driving, and I had had an argument Marrow, who was shot by white store owners in The filmmakers also followed the lead of
with my wife, and I was thinking, well, she was Oxford on May 11, 1970. The story is told Tyson, the local historian, and involved the com-right. I shouldn’t have left. I got boxed in behind through Tyson’s eyes as he digs into history, munity in the filming. They chose Shelby
an open truck with refrigerators, and because the real sites in Oxford had
this box went up in the air and landed changed so much since 1970 that
in front of me. I had to slam on filming there would have been visually
brakes — fortunately, it was empty, less accurate. But Shelby has its own
but suddenly I knew what the movie history that floats in the background.
would be about.” “You ride into Shelby on Dixon
BLOOD DONE SIGN MY NAME
Stuart, who also earned a master’s Avenue,” Tyson says, and explains the
degree in communication from UNC in background of the street’s namesake.
1983, followed action films to Holly- “Thomas Dixon’s book The Clansman
wood success after he heard an agent turned into the white supremacist film
tell his Stanford University screenwrit- Birth of a Nation.”
ing class that action sells everywhere. To address history and any other
The first time Stuart saw the inside of concerns, Stuart and Tyson held meet-a studio script office, he was stunned ings with the community, included
by the endless shelves of unfilmed local people in the film, and Tyson
scripts — not unsolicited scripts, but returned to teach a series of classes
projects the studio had initiated. “If at the high school in the fall.
there are 150 scripts, they’ll make While the movie scheduled to
four of them,” he says. “The idea that Director Jeb Stuart ’ 78 used his background as a screenwriter to translate Tim Tyson’s come out next year will be a different
I have had 10 or 12 films in my book, Blood Done Sign My Name, to the big screen. experience, fans of the book will likely
career with those odds is major.” find much that is familiar.
Besides Die Hard, his credits include the block- “One of the first things I tell young writers,”
busters The Fugitive and Another 48 Hours. Stuart says, “is not to just go to reality. You
His success also allows him to step out of have to craft the dialogue. Tim’s book is very
the genre. Stuart spent last summer in Shelby, dense, and that has no place in a drama. At the
shooting the script he had created for Blood same time, I tried to take some of Tim’s won-
Done Sign My Name, the history and memoir by derful prose and put it into the mouths of my
writer and history professor Tim Tyson about a characters.” Stuart pauses to laugh. “I grew up
1970 racial murder in Oxford, N.C. The book in the South, and I’ve been known to write a
was chosen for the UNC Summer Reading Pro- few good lines of dialogue.
gram in 2005, and a friend gave Stuart a copy “At the end of the day,” Stuart concludes, “I
about that time. Stuart, like Tyson, is the son of tried to be a good steward of the book and to
a North Carolina minister. The book hit home. “I work with what moved me. The toughest audi-asked my father about the events in the book,” ence was when I sent the screenplay off to Tim
Stuart says, “and he said that it was one of the and I hadn’t heard from him for 24 hours. Then
most difficult times of his life. I decided that he called me and said he had cried.”
this was a film I wanted to make.” — Susan Simone
That might seem like a fairytale: Famous
Hollywood writer taps academic on the shoulder, offering exposure to millions of movie fans.
But Tyson is hardly an academic pining for
fame. Stuart’s heart sank when he finally got
Tyson to a meeting and found out the book
already had been optioned. “I said, I come from
painful and buried, including the story of his
father, Vernon Tyson, a white minister struggling to move his congregation to accept integration. For Tim Tyson, the burden of honesty
and fairness is critical to his book. Stuart felt
the same sense of responsibility.
But while Tyson’s book is fascinating, it is
written to be accurate more than dramatic. During writing the screenplay and the shoot, Stuart
became the professor and Tyson the student. “I
have pages to tell details,” Tyson says. “In a
movie, you show it in a few seconds. It’s a different language.” Explaining the impact of
movie plot on his book, Tyson says: “The movie
and the book are not the same thing. The book
is a memoir, and I am central. The movie is not
about Tim Tyson. It is an ensemble movie about
four families: the Chavez family, who are black
aristocracy; the Tyson family, with my father at
the center; the McCoy family, who own the pool
hall in the rougher side of the African-American
community; and the Teels, who commit the
murder.”
The Review’s past coverage of Blood Done
Sign My Name includes a Books department
feature, “Every Time a Door Opened, Somebody
Was Kicked in the Butt,” in the May/June 2005
issue, available online to GAA members at
alumni.unc.edu/archive.
