A special screening of a documentary-in-progress about young Ernest Hemingway and his connection to northern Michigan will be held at 7 p.m. in Bay View’s Voorhies Hall on July 23, it was announced today by Dr. George Colburn, writer-producer of the documentary for Starbright Media Corporation of Petoskey.
The screening is free and open to the public, but attendees will be asked to fill out an evaluation form afterwards to help the producers with their further development of the documentary tentatively entitled “Young Hemingway: Finding His Muse in Northern Michigan.”
Colburn will introduce the 45-minute preview reel and will answer questions from the audience afterwards. The documentary is planned for theatrical release, Colburn said, and the final edit will likely produce a program of approximately 80 minutes.
A few weeks after Ernest Hemingway’s birth in 1899 his parents brought him to northern Michigan when they visited the site of a family cottage on Walloon Lake that was being built for their summer use. Young Ernest made the long trek to northern Michigan from the Chicago area with his adventuresome family every summer until he went to the Italian front in World War I in 1918 as a Red Cross ambulance driver. He then returned to the area in 1919 to recover from his serious war wounds, and to continue his quest to be a great writer.
The documentary, according to Colburn, was inspired by the publication in late 2011 of the first volume of 16 planned volumes of personal letters written by young Hemingway. The first volume covers the years 1907 – 1922 and offers many insights about his life that were not previously available to scholars, Colburn said.
In September of 1921, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson in Horton Bay and the couple then moved to Paris three months later. Stories about Northern Michigan were first published in Paris in 1923 and then to critical acclaim in the United States in 1925 under the title In Our Time.
Through the recently collected personal letters from this time period, the documentary explores the important link between northern Michigan and his early writings that led ultimately to the Nobel Prize in literature, according to Dr. Colburn.
Colburn, a historian well known nationally for his many television documentaries about Dwight D. Eisenhower, lives in Melrose Township, Charlevoix County. He moved his company’s operations to Petoskey from Washington, D.C. in 1997. He has been a part-time resident of the area since 1973. For more information for “Young Hemingway,” visit the project website, www.HemingwaysMichigan.com.
Several other local residents are involved in important aspects of the production, including the editing, music development, and narration, Colburn noted. These include editor/cameraman Colin Brougham, music composer Peter Kehoe and narrator Bob Elliott. Production work on the documentary began at Bay View in 2012 when Colburn interviewed numerous Hemingway scholars attending the biennial conference of the international Hemingway Society.
Fifteen local sponsors have provided funds for the documentary to-date: Meijer Foundation, Michigan Humanities Council, Boyne Resorts USA, Bay Harbor Foundation, Petoskey Area Visitors Bureau, Michigan Hemingway Society, Bay View Association, Wally Kidd Family Trust, Mary Jane Doer Trust, Charlevoix County History Preservation Society, the Perry Hotel, City Park Grill, Stafford Smith, Arlington Jewelers, First Community Bank and Petoskey Yesterday.
Since the project’s launch in 2012, Dr. Colburn and his production staff have gathered footage and interviews at various locations in northern Michigan, in Oak Park, IL, Hemingway’s birthplace and home from 1899 until 1918, at Pennsylvania State University, the home of the Hemingway Letters Project, and Washington, D.C. A video reel of documentary segments from these locations may be found on the project’s website.
This will be the first screening of major documentary segments in North America, Colburn said. An earlier screening took place on June 23 in Venice, Italy, at the international Hemingway Society conference, Colburn added. The Bay View screening will be more complete, he noted, as he and Colin Brougham, program editor, continue working on the program.
For more information, please call Starbright Media Corporation’s local office on 231.535.2440.
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