Jack Lofton – Memphis Flyer

The night The ’Vous won the Best Hometowner Feature Award at Indie Memphis 2022, director/producers Jeff Dailey and Jack Lofton missed the awards ceremony. The film had premiered that afternoon to a sold-out Playhouse on the Square, and the crew had trekked Downtown for a reception at The Rendezvous, the storied barbecue restaurant whose inner workings Dailey and Lofton spent seven years documenting. Figuring they had missed the awards ceremony, the duo headed to The Lamplighter, where my wife Laura Jean Hocking and I were hosting our annual filmmakers’ party. Naturally, the Indie Memphis awards ceremony went way over its allotted time, so Lofton was giving up and leaving the Lamp at the exact moment I was walking in the door. “We didn’t know where everybody was, so we were about to bail,” recalls Lofton.

“Where are you going? You won!” I half yelled at him.

It took a moment for the news to sink in, so I got to watch the realization that all their hard work had paid off play out on his face. It’s definitely a top-five Indie Memphis memory for me — and for Lofton, it’s number one. “Then Larry Karaszewski, the writer of Man on the Moon, walked in, and I said, ‘What are you doing here?’” Lofton continues. “He said, ‘Who the hell are you?’ And I said, ‘I’m the guy who made The Rendezvous documentary, The ’Vous,” And he’s like, ‘Oh my God! You won! Where the hell were you? I was supposed to give you the award!’ It was a great time. I respect him tremendously. He said some amazing things about the restaurant, and he called it [The ’Vous] ‘a beautiful American story.’”

Lofton and Dailey are both from Arkansas and have fond memories of eating at The Rendezvous while they were visiting Memphis with their families. “It was always for the farm convention,” says Lofton. “My dad was a farmer in Hughes, Arkansas, and we’d go to church in Memphis and eat at The Rendezvous.”

When they read a Commercial Appeal article about longtime Rendezvous servers “Big Robert” Stewart and Percy Norris retiring, Lofton and Dailey realized they had a story to tell. “It’s an institution, it’s about the people. What they’ve built there, the stories that they’ve lived, and these guys are stepping down, retiring, and passing the torch. We’ve got to get in there right now. So, within three days, we had — with Jeff and some of his friends and people that we knew — a full film crew down there.”

Filming would continue for years, with film crews acting as fly-on-the-wall observers for bustling nights on the restaurant floor, personal moments with the Vergos family, and endless stories about the history that happened in the restaurant. “We’re a seven-year overnight success,” says Lofton.

“A lot of the new films that are coming out these days, they don’t have the budget or the time to spend time with the participants, with their characters,” says Dailey. “What we wanted to do was immerse ourselves and get to know the people personally as well as professionally. Yeah, it’s a lot more challenging that way, but I think it’s a richer product in the end.”

Against the backdrop of famous diners and pivotal deals sealed over a plate of ribs was the everyday drama of a family business navigating change. “It’s an important story to tell when we were at the crossroads of a company during Covid and the retirement of some of our Rendezvous originals,” says Anna Vergos, whose grandfather founded the restaurant. “I’m proud to look back on this documentary and see how much growth we’ve all felt and continue to embrace.”

One of the film’s most compelling storylines regards Calvin, a novice busboy trying to get his foot in the door. “It just sort of wrote itself once we were down there,” says Lofton. “The story of the busboy, and how the institution works, and the family dynamics — it was all there.”

After a rapturous reception at Indie Memphis, The ’Vous completed a festival run that included a sold-out screening at DOC NYC, the biggest documentary festival in North America. This week, Memphis will get a chance to see The ’Vous when it kicks off its theatrical engagement at the Malco Paradiso.

“We were so fortunate that people across the spectrum of The Rendezvous, from waitstaff to the family to many others, opened their personal lives to us — you really can’t predict what’s going to happen when you dive into people’s lives! We’re just so grateful to them, and to the city of Memphis. It’s a place that we both love.”

The ’Vous is showing at Malco Paradiso through February 1st.

The 25th Indie Memphis Film Festival concluded last Monday with a film that made a case for the importance of the 1970 Blaxploitation wave, and a film that proved its point. Is That Black Enough For You? is the first movie by Elvis Mitchell, a former New York Times film critic and cinema scholar turned documentary director. Mitchell traced the history of Black representation in film from the era of silent “race” pictures and D.W. Griffith’s pro-KKK, proto-blockbuster Birth of a Nation through the foreshortened careers of Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge to the wave of low-budget, Black-led gangster, adventure, and fantasy films which started in the late 1960s and crested with The Wiz. Films like Superfly and Coffy, Mitchell argues in his voluminous voice-over narration, presented the kinds of rousing heroes that attracted film-goers while the New Hollywood movement presented visions of angst-filled antiheroes.

Blaxploitation films also introduced a new kind of music to films and the concept of the soundtrack album, which was often released before the movie itself in order to drum up interest. The prime example was Shaft, which featured an Academy Award-winning soundtrack by Isaac Hayes. Mitchell introduced the classic with Willie Hall, the Memphis drummer who recorded the immortal hi-hat rhythm that kicks off Hayes’ theme song. Mitchell revealed in Is That Black Enough For You? that Hayes had been inspired by Sergio Leone’s score for Once Upon a Time in the West, and the score he penned for Shaft still holds up, providing much of the detective film’s throbbing propulsion.

The winners of the competitive portion of the 2022 film festival were announced at a hilariously irreverent awards ceremony Saturday evening at Playhouse on the Square. After a two-year hiatus, Savannah Bearden returned to produce the awards, which were “hosted” by Birdy, the tiny red metal mockingbird which has served as the film festival’s mascot for years. But amidst the nonstop jokes and spoof videos, there were genuinely touching moments, such as when Craig Brewer surprised art director and cameraperson Sallie Sabbatini with the Indie Award, which is given to outstanding Memphis film artisans, and when former Executive Director Ryan Watt was ambushed with the Vision Award.

The Best Narrative Feature award went to Our Father, the Devil, an African immigrant story directed by Ellie Foumbi. Kit Zauhar’s Actual People won the Duncan Williams Best Screenplay Award. The Documentary Feature award went to Reed Harkness for Sam Now, a portrait of the director’s brother that has been in production for the entire 25 years that Indie Memphis has been in existence.

The Best Hometowner Feature award, which honors films made in Memphis, went to Jack Lofton’s The ’Vous, a moving portrait of the people who make The Rendezvous a world-famous icon of Memphis barbecue. (“We voted with our stomachs,” said jury member Larry Karaszewski.) The Best Hometowner Narrative Short went to “Nordo” by Kyle Taubken, about a wife anxiously waiting for her husband to return from Afghanistan. Lauren Ready earned her second Indie Memphis Hometowner Documentary award for her short film “What We’ll Never Know.”

In the Departures category, which includes experimental, genre, and out-of-the-box creations, This House by Miryam Charles won Best Feature. (This House also won the poster design contest.) “Maya at 24” by legendary Memphis doc director Lynne Sachs won the Shorts competition, and “Civic” by Dwayne LeBlanc took home the first trophy in a new Mid-Length subcategory.

Sounds, the festival’s long-running music film series, awarded Best Feature to Kumina Queen by Nyasha Laing. The music video awards were won by the stop-motion animated “Vacant Spaces” by Joe Baughman; “Don’t Come Home” by Emily Rooker triumphed in the crowded Hometowner category.

Best Narrative Short went to “Sugar Glass Bottle” by Neo Sora, and Best Documentary Short went to “The Body Is a House of Familiar Rooms” by Eloise Sherrid and Lauryn Welch.

Some of the Special Awards date back to the origin of the festival in 1998, such as the Soul of Southern Film Award, which was taken by Ira McKinley and Bhawin Suchak’s documentary Outta The Muck. The Ron Tibbett Excellence in Filmmaking Award went to Me Little Me by Elizabeth Ayiku. The Craig Brewer Emerging Filmmaker Award went to Eric Younger’s Very Rare.

The IndieGrants program, which awards $15,000 in cash and donations to create short films, picked Anna Cai’s “Bluff City Chinese” and A.D. Smith’s “R.E.G.G.I.N.” out of 46 proposals submitted by Memphis filmmakers.