Filmmaker Craig Brewer hosts the “Real to Reel” series at the Brooks Museum of Art tonight and says he will take the audience on a tour of how he came to make his first completed feature, The Poor & Hungry.
Brewer will open the program with a newly cut five-minute trailer of his aborted first feature, Melody’s Surviving. That pre-Poor & Hungry work, which features Brewer, wife Jodi, and siblings-in-law Erin and Seth Hagee, was a partial inspiration for his later breakthrough film Hustle & Flow. The footage for Melody’s Surviving, shot on 16mm film, was never developed and had sat in a box in his shed for the past 10 years, Brewer says.
Recently developed, the raw footage has been edited into a five-minute sequence by Erin Hagee and Brewer collaborator Morgan Jon Fox.
Also on the program will be footage Brewer shot of Wanda Wilson’s 50th birthday celebration at the P&H Café, some brief selections from Mike McCarthy, the local filmmaker who directly inspired Brewer and used Jodi Brewer in his films, and early color footage from a first stab at the ultimately black-and-white Poor & Hungry.
