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Saturday, Jul. 05, 2008

Telling Turlock's Story: Film celebrates city's centennial

85-minute documentary covers city's birth, more

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TURLOCK -- In Hollywood, movie studios routinely screen multimillion-dollar blockbuster films for the media before they open in theaters.

But an advance DVD copy of "Turlock: A Historical Documentary"?

Fuhgeddaboudit.

"Only six people have seen it," claimed Chamber of Commerce President Sharon Silva. "You have no idea how many people have asked me (for a copy)."

Two of those six were charged with making the documentary: producer Michael Everett, a former Nashville, Tenn., recording engineer who married "a Turlock girl," and scriptwriter/history buff Scott Atherton, who manages the cemetery where town founder John Mitchell's mausoleum still stands.

Everett opened his state-of-the-art studio, called The Creation Lab, next to a feed mill two miles west of town.

He spent a year and a half -- and an extra $20,000 -- to create the 85-minute documentary. Turlock loaned $50,000 to the Centennial Committee to make the film.

"Once I got into the story, there's a lot to tell," Everett said. "I could have easily made a six-part Ken Burns thing with the material I had."

Half the budget was spent on a Cineflex high-definition camera, the same type used for the 11-part nature epic "Planet Earth" on the Discovery Channel. It uses a telephoto lens that can magnify images up to 84 times their actual size and is fitted inside a gyro-stabilized bubble that steadies the camera below a helicopter.

Everett used the camera for close-up shots breezing over alfalfa fields in Turlock and following a snowflake's journey from the top of the Sierra to the city's canals.

He helped write 14 original songs, most of them bluegrass and orchestration using fiddle, banjo and guitar.

The first 45 minutes of the movie cover the years before Turlock was incorporated in 1908.

A Yokut Indian, whose descendants lived in the Turlock area for thousands of years, talks about the California Gold Rush as "their Holocaust."

To represent Turlock's "Wild West" days, the moviemakers re-enacted a famous bar killing in 1885. Pete Nolan, a bartender with "a short fuse," shot a patron during a fight. A doctor diagnosed the wound as fatal and the man was left on the saloon's pool table (there were no hospitals in those days). It took nearly three days for the man to die, with Nolan all the while complaining he was losing business because of it.

Atherton, the historian who wrote "countless" drafts of the script, said Turlock had a dozen saloons for the then-population of 150 people.

"Every door led into a saloon on Front Street," a resident jokes in the documentary.

Atherton perused thousands of photos, documents and illustration to help piece together Turlock history. He found the story about the bar shooting in a Turlock High School teacher's master's thesis from the 1930s.

And how Turlock earned its name is another story. After Mitchell, the founder, declined to have his name used, the city postmaster asked to use the name "Sierra" and was turned down in Washington, D.C.

The postmaster's brother suggested Turlock after the name of a town in a serial novel he was reading in "Harper's Weekly" magazine.

Nearly 50 interviews with native Turlockers are woven through the film, describing the town's Swedish, Portuguese and Assyrian immigration in the early 1900s through the Wal-Mart controversy of late.

While Atherton describes Turlock as a perfect example of a "melting pot in America," he was struck by the town's history of intolerance to its Chinese, Japanese and Filipino workers.

"That theme always came back," Atherton said. "It wasn't so much that they were different, it was always competition. We've become so much more civilized."

While the film covers 200 years of history in the Turlock area, Everett knows that not everyone might agree with his version of the city's past.

"In a small town, people will say, 'Why isn't Uncle Bob in it?' " Everett said. "I can't please everyone."

Bee staff writer Merrill Balassone can be reached at mbalassone@modbee.com or 578-2337.