- Joined
- Feb 23, 2013
- Location
- East Texas
Due to a request on another thread for additional pictures taken on the set of the 1986 miniseries, North and South, Book II - Love and War, based on John Jakes turgid melodrama, here are more of the photos shot during the filming of the major battle scenes. Though much of it was apparently filmed in and around Charleston, S.C., the large battles were filmed on a ranch outside Natchez, Miss. in October of 1985. As usual for projects like this, ever since the successful filming of The Blue and the Gray four years earlier, a call went out for reenactors to come and participate. I went for a week, and was present at the filming of what were really grand-scale reenactments of several different battles that were used as background footage. Unfortunately, far too little of what we did for the production company was actually used, and much of it merely as background for more vapid dialogue!
Since this was battle footage we were filming, the cast members involved were reduced to the principal male leads, Patrick Swayze ( above, center as General Orry Main ) and Lewis Smith ( above, left as Cousin Charles Main ) for the South and James Read ( General George Hazard ) and Parker Stevenson ( Brother Billy Hazard ) for the North. The picture above was from my friend artilleryman and gun owner Roy Beckett, who is standing at the right of Swayze; but I took the ones below during a promotional photo shoot one afternoon on the Siege of Petersburg set; they certainly weren't posing for ME - rather, I positioned myself with my dinky Kodak Disc camera to one side of the many press photographers. In one shot Parker Stevenson is posing with the boy actor who played the Berdan's Sharpshooters' drummer who is killed in the story.
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