Friends:
I’ve just completed a project that I began over forty years ago. In 1975 I went back home to Indianapolis with a 16mm film camera and sound recorder to see something that I hadn’t ever seen before and wanted to record before it was too late – my father Vince Farrell making a gravestone. Vince spent his life in the business that my grandfather started in the 1880s. He was 79 and I was 28 when I first saw him make a gravestone through the viewfinder of that motion picture camera.
That first trip turned into another trip a year later and eventually 30,000 feet of film shot (about 14 hours) and three times as much audio tape recordings as well as other visuals like family photos, his gravestone photos and drawings and historic images of Indianapolis, etc. And it turned out to be about a lot more than just how to make a gravestone.
When my own family started to expand beyond Katherine and me, I put all this away with the idea that I would get back to it sometime fairly soon. Eventually three kids arrived, my career with public television took off and other life events took precedence, but this unfinished film was always in the back of my mind nagging me to return my attention to it. When the pandemic hit, I realized that it was now or perhaps never.
So this fall I had all of the original film digitized and taught myself to edit on the computer. I’ve just finished Chapter Three, the last part and posted it to the website I built to showcase the film. Just click on the link below…
The StoneMan is a craftsman’s life story in three acts, and it runs about three hours long. It requires patience, empathy and perseverance. It is a non-fiction biography of novel length. It has humor and pathos and a great main character!
I think that Pop’s life story – the challenging times he lived through, the choices he made, the hand that was dealt him and the values that guided him – has much to offer us in these days of divisive twitter posts and easy sound bites.
Let me know if you agree?
There are a couple of ways to watch: Each complete chapter has its own page and I’ve also broken the film down into nine shorter segments. The website is “responsive” which means that you can view the film on a phone, tablet or computer assuming an internet connection.