Sixteen years ago this month at a windswept farm in Edgartown, filming began on The Mistover Tale. The movie is a retelling of Thomas Hardy’s tragic 19th-century novel The Return of the Native, and is set on off-season Martha’s Vineyard in the late 1970s. On Saturday afternoon at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center in Vineyard Haven the finished film will finally have its Island premiere at 4 p.m.
“We shot in 2000 to 2001, three weeks in October and November and then a week in January,” said director and star Harry Tappan Heher. This was followed by a couple of days of exterior shooting during the spring and summer of 2001, he added.
But before he could begin post-production, Mr. Heher was stricken by real-life tragedy: both of his parents were diagnosed with cancer and died within a year.
“I shelved the film for about 10 years,” he said. “I didn’t even look at it. I’d had enough darkness.”
Instead, Mr. Heher traveled to west Africa, worked in the film industry and settled in New York city. But eventually he returned to The Mistover Tale, which he had written while staying in a cabin on Martha's Vineyard more than 20 years ago.
Mr. Heher first encountered Thomas Hardy’s novel in high school. “It had such an enormous impact on me” because of its characters’ existential anguish, emotional conflict and isolation, he said. Moving to the Vineyard year-round for three years gave him a stronger appreciation for the natural themes of Hardy’s book, which is set amid the vast, primeval Egdon Heath in Wessex, England.
“The storm was its lover, and the wind its friend,” Hardy wrote in one of many passages devoted to the changing face of the heath, which some of his characters love and others seek to flee.
“There’s a feeling that these people are living in a wild area where life and death are all wrapped up and one does not exist without the other,” Mr. Heher said. “Our surroundings do affect us.”
“I wanted to take the essential emotional conflict and bring it to a modern context so people could enjoy that novel and enjoy that story and understand that it still applies today,” Mr. Heher continued.
Mr. Heher has adapted Hardy’s heath-dwellers, high and low, into Island characters many will recognize: the preppy washashore, establishment matron and dissatisfied youth longing for bigger places and brighter lights. And, of course, there are love triangles both romantic and familial.
The era is what Mr. Heher calls “pre-Clinton Vineyard, when it wasn’t famous, when it was still a very lonely place in the winter, and there’s some sex and drugs in there, people drinking a lot and doing a lot of drugs as escapism. There aren’t really any scenes of summertime beachy stuff.”
The matron, Mrs. Goodrich, is played by Island actor and director Lee Fierro, in her first dramatic film role since the Jaws series.
“Lee is amazing,” said Mr. Heher, who as Henry Goodrich disappoints his mother by moving to the Vineyard instead of pursuing a career off-Island. He stepped into the role at the last minute after the Screen Actors Guild stipulated a $20,000 bond before filming could start, forcing him to replace the two lead actors with non-SAG performers, Mr. Heher said.
Mrs. Goodrich is “horrified,” he continued. “This was her worst nightmare. He was going to do well and marry well and take care of her.”
Ms. Fierro “was really channeling her mother, who lived on Park avenue and was very disapproving of her choice to move to the Vineyard and go into acting,” he added.
Other Islanders appearing in the film include Katrina Nevin and her mother, Sarah Nevin.
The cinematographer, Michael McDonough, A.S.C., had previously shot Jennifer Lawrence’s breakout feature Winter’s Bone (2010).
By Christmas, Mr. Heher said, The Mistover Tale will be available for purchase online.
“Anyone who loves the Island but who’s not on the Island as often as they want to be can watch this and get a taste of old New England,” he said.
The Mistover Tale screens at 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 22 at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center, 79 Beach Road in Vineyard Haven.
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