After fleeing New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, actor-writer Barlow Jacobs took refuge at his childhood home in Lookout Mountain, Tenn. There he watched and waited with the rest of the world as the horrors unfolded. Returning to Louisiana about a month later, he found his house had been destroyed -- not by water damage but by a falling tree. Relatively homeless and broke, he contemplated his next move. A family friend noted that there would be a growing need for insurance claims adjusters throughout the storm-ravaged region. So Jacobs traveled to Texas for training to obtain a temporary adjuster's license. "It was one of the most bizarre weeks of my life," he recalls. "Two hundred people, everything from two-toothed welders to disbarred lawyers. The room was just filled with characters."
The "writer part" of Jacobs went into high gear. He notes, "I had another friend who went with me, and I was making him take notes on the actual [course], 'cause I couldn't write fast enough about all the things that were surrounding me." Once he earned the temporary adjuster's license, Jacobs called his friend, film director Zack Godshall, and told him, "Listen, I've got a movie that we need to make, and I'm going down to Florida, and I'm going to do all the research, and then I'm going to come to New Orleans, where we'll write a script and make a movie."
Such bursts of creative enthusiasm can often fade quickly. But that was not the case with Jacobs. This month, the film project he proposed to Godshall, called Low and Behold, debuts at the Sundance Film Festival, with Jacobs credited as co-writer, producer, and star.
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Jacobs wound up living in a South Florida bungalow with five other adjusters, putting in 20-hour days and seven-day weeks. The three-month job was lucrative, and he socked away most of what he earned, to help finance his film. Meanwhile he was doing on-the-job research. Many of the experiences the movie's protagonist, Turner Stull, undergoes as a novice claims adjuster in New Orleans were lifted directly from Jacobs' workdays in Florida. "I didn't know how to frame something that was [as large as Katrina] into a story, and when I did the claim adjustment training, it kind of all crystallized: This will be the way that we navigate ourselves throughout the city. A claim adjuster is a guy who's driving all over the place and is also a 'foreigner'-someone who's coming down to look into this world."
That Jacobs was not an outsider to the region helped him immensely once the script was finished and he and Godshall began scouting locations in and around New Orleans. Jacobs was extremely sensitive to the emotions of Katrina survivors. He feels that he couldn't have made the film if he'd come into the city, carpetbagger-style, after the disaster. He made a point, also, of hiring Louisiana residents as crew.
The script follows the career of Turner (Jacobs), a diffident young adjuster who goes to New Orleans and moves in with his self-important Uncle Stully (Robert Longstreet). Turner is befriended by an exuberant local character named Nixon (Eddie Rouse), who is searching for his missing dog. Nixon repeatedly invites himself along on Turner's work route. Though it deals with tragedy, the film contains a surprising number of comic moments-especially between Turner and Nixon. Jacobs feels that humor in post-Katrina New Orleans is more than relief; he calls it "redemptive."
To augment the scripted narrative, Jacobs and Godshall wanted to incorporate improvised and documentary-style footage into the final cut. As they scouted for locations during a two-month preproduction period, they found storm survivors who were willing not only to allow their property to be photographed but also to tell their Katrina stories on camera. "I think the big reason they were open to it," Jacobs says, "is that even eight months after the storm, there was this fear that everyone was going to forget what happened. Any footage getting out there was better than no footage getting out there."
For his director of photography on the 36-day shoot, Jacobs hired award-winning Daryn De Luco, known largely for his documentary work. De Luco's use of the latest Panasonic HD digital camera-small and unobtrusive-put the locals at ease, Jacobs says: "It looks like something they could have in their house, and it didn't feel like a movie to them. It just felt like, 'Oh, this is Christmas 1986.'" Jacobs faced the challenge of performing opposite nonactors in several improvised scenes. One of the advantages of shooting digitally was that De Luco could keep the camera running at length. The untrained performers, Jacobs notes, succeeded beautifully. "I'd had the training to be a claim adjuster; I knew what to do," he says. "They had had a claim adjuster come to their house; they knew what the deal was. And so we just kind of went into these improv scenes with these people and let what happened happen. And what we found in the editing room was that that was always the more powerful material, because it was real."
To Be a Producer
Taking on the multiple roles of co-writer, actor, and producer tested the mettle of the young man from Lookout Mountain. But unlike the reticent Turner, Jacobs-articulate and well-traveled-possessed the confidence to make things work. Jacobs describes his Tennessee mountain home as a magical place, brimming with legend. It instilled him with a love of narrative. As a youngster, he played at making movies with friends, but he was never "a drama kid." After high school, he lived in South Africa, doing relief work in squatter camps. He came back to the United States to study creative writing and classical civilization at the University of Mississippi.
After college he continued to develop his writing talents and finally became interested in acting. For a time, he and a college buddy shared a trailer on St. Helena Island, off the coast of South Carolina (a place saturated by the African-tinged Gullah culture). He became involved with a group that staged plays on the island.
Later he moved to New Orleans, a city he'd always found fascinating. There he developed connections with a circle of filmmakers, including Craig Zobel and David Gordon Green. Jacobs wrote a short film, called Monkey Bars, in which he portrays a petting-zoo worker with delusions of grandeur. He took on acting roles in others' features before embarking on Low and Behold. Among them was Zobel's Great World of Sound (another film debuting at Sundance this year). Jacobs felt prepared for the creative and authoritative aspects of producing, but he was surprised and nearly overwhelmed by the administrative detail involved: things such as contracts, insurance, budgeting, and obtaining actor releases. He believes that inexperienced producers tend not to think about such details during preproduction and production. "It's in postproduction where it really bites you, especially if the film does go on to Sundance or something, or you're trying to sell your film. A distributor is going to want to see all that paperwork and know that they're not going to get sued."
Eventually he'd like to try directing, but for the time being Jacobs is moving ahead with his screenwriting and acting careers. He shot a role in Michael Almereyda's New Orleans, Mon Amour. A film he co-wrote with Zobel, Turkey in the Straw, is in preproduction. And he's working on a Western, which he hopes will be shot in Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile he's catching his breath-but just barely. Low and Behold was only officially finished Jan. 2, mere days before its Sundance launch. Postproduction proved frantic; but because of the film's subject matter, Jacobs believed that it was essential that Low and Behold debut this year. He doesn't think the film suffered in the rush to make deadline. "We were doing strong work-in the moment... fresh, real, and truthful," he says. "I think when you spend too much time in the editing room, you can almost edit all the honesty out of it."