Jimmy In Saigon

Still from the film Jimmy In Saigon.

When the Vietnam War ended I was two years old and for most of my life there has been a continuous stream of Hollywood movies, documentaries, video games and books produced about that war. Though, it does seem that in recent years the United States media fascination, appetite and hangover from that war has waned as my parent's generation dies off. My generation, Generation X, was too young to be drafted into the war or remember much about it from first hand experience and many members of my generation were not even born, instead we experienced it vicariously through entertainment, school education and personal family histories.

The U.S. failure in Vietnam seemed to be the war that was always in the background somewhere at the edge of the dinner table or always on the screen through the eighties, nineties and 2000s haunting the American conscious. With that much saturation and consumption of a war I thought I had heard, read or seen every angle on Vietnam possible.

I was scrolling through documentaries one evening last week and decided to take a chance on an unfamiliar title. It was a quiet documentary reminiscent of the type that aired on the PBS Independent Lens series in the early 1990s. It was not flashy, punctuated with dramatic music at every turn of the plot or littered with quick jump cuts or drone shots that pollute modern documentaries with worn out style over substance. With my attention captured, I realized I had not heard every story out of Vietnam. I am not certain there is another unique story that has been told like the one laid out in the 2022 documentary, Jimmy in Saigon.

Filmmaker Peter McDowell returns to the late 1960s and early 70s to tell the story and delve into the mystery of his eldest brother, Jimmy, who he only knew in death and family silence.

Jimmy dropped out of college after his junior year, was drafted and survived his tour of duty in Vietnam. He made it back home, something sixty-thousand American soldiers did not. It was during his time in Vietnam that Jimmy changed and possibly accepted or discovered who he was. He returned to the United States, but instead of staying, a man who was lost returned to Saigon not as a soldier, but as a civilian. A man full of youthful idealism shed his suburban, upper middle class family in Champaign, Illinois to live immersed in South Vietnamese society.

But why?

He could have easily been a ghost at the edge of the dinner table or staring back at us from a war zone on a screen, but he is not. Through the process of storytelling we view Jimmy's early life through family home movies. We see his family snapshots too and ones he took during his life in Vietnam. He is very much alive in the film visually and through a voice actor reading his letters to friends and family. I got the impression that one day, Jimmy was going to write a sprawling novel based on his life and if not, then he was going to have some fun stories to tell.

 

Still from the film Jimmy In Saigon.

Though impossible to get the full picture of the person Jimmy was or may have become, the film fits together enough pieces to form a portrait of why this story and man is so unique and compelling. Through decades of passed time, a war, differing cultures, changing attitudes, some lingering prejudices and fragments of recollections by those who knew the young man in Saigon we understand what happened and who Jimmy was.

To answer the 'but why' it took opening old wounds of a delicate family history which reveals an even more delicate secret. Halfway through the film comes the big reveal and when it comes I give immense credit to the filmmaker for his honesty. His mother at one point says, “but to have all that come out now, um well, I don't know what I can do. I can't do anything. I do think, I'll probably die.”

This is a film not only about what we hide from others, but from ourselves.

Jimmy in Saigon is currently streaming for free on Tubi.

 

Of Course, Warhol

 

This week I watched the first two episodes of the HBO docuseries Bring Me The Beauties: A Model Cult. I am eager to see how they conclude the series in the third episode and what is left out as plenty has been left out in the first two episodes which have focused a little too much on the former model John Hoyt, a.k.a. Hoyt Richards, and his perspective on the cult Eternal Values run by Frederick von Mierers, a.k.a. Freddy Meyers from Brooklyn.

Mierers was a social climbing fraud who died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of forty-three in Manhattan. After plastic surgery and illness, he looked to have been much older like an orange candle that had been lit, allowed to melt for a time and blown out before becoming a puddle of wax. His cult combined aliens, healing gemstones, tanning beds, poor interior decorating choices, fraud, a god, astrology and sex, which all cults eventually devolve into, including Times Square hookers and dildos on Fifth Avenue. There was also a lake house on Lake Lure in the mountains of western North Carolina, which too, seemed to have been designed by unicorns on acid.

There is much poor taste and poor decision making on display in 1980s New York in this series than you would find in a small town gay bar in Kansas.

Frederick preyed on the gullible, young and allegedly intelligent people who graduated from Ivy League schools,  came from posh families and a few models of both sexes. They were preppy clones and undoubtedly each had copies of The Official Preppy Handbook from 1980 under their pillow. Frederick used the models and their connections to further recruit more members to worship his messages spread from piles of teal and pink throw pillows in the 1970s and 80s. The goal was money and power for himself, of course. And trips to Studio 54 too.

Given the time period, the social climbing, Manhattan and the connection to Studio 54, I said to myself that Andy Warhol must have been connected to Frederick von Mierers in some way. As much as a star fucker and as connected as Warhol was to anyone with money, glamour and some sleazy people too, he had to have known Frederick in some capacity. I grabbed my copy of The Andy Warhol Diaries and began to search.

My copy of The Andy Warhol Diaries. June 2026.

It did not take long.

Wednesday, May 9, 1979

The Du Point twins came in and Brigid told them that Freddy von Mierers had called and put out of the word that he was going to send the police after them if they didn't return his two sweaters. They turned bright red, and she told them not to come around anymore since they steal. Dropped Rupert (cab $4).

It is interesting that he referred to him as "Freddy" and not Frederick. Freddy was his real name. Warhol was not dumb and I wonder if he knew all or part of Freddy's less than aristocratic background from Brooklyn? It is also possible that Warhol was friendly and familiar enough with him to call him Freddy and not by the more proper Frederick. Freddy was also knowledgeable enough to check Warhol's Factory in his search for the Du Pont twins who were socially connected to Warhol.

That was the only mention in Andy's diaries. He loved to gossip in them and to find only one mention of Frederick von Mierers would suggest that he was not close to him or was around him briefly. Warhol as odd as he may have been was not one to join a cult, but he did get into healing crystals in the mid 1980s. He mentioned them several times and referred to them as “Harmonics.”

On Tuesday, December 18, 1984 there was this one funny entry:

Ran into one of those kids from Harvard in the sixties, one of Edie's friends, I can't remember his name. And I showed him my crystals and told him about crystal power and he was just standing there with his mouth open. He said he couldn't believe that someone as smart as me would start believing in crystals after I made it all through the sixties and everything and laughed at all the hippie stuff and that this is just the recycle of it. But really it's not the same, and you do have to be positive, not negative.

Warhol did a lot of rationalizing and had peculiar habits, but at least he was not a cult leader in the 1980s. 

Cult leader Frederick von Mierers on Hard Copy.

For more on the Eternal Values cult you can watch the original early 1990s Hard Copy tabloid show report which is partially used in the HBO docuseries. Back at the time, everyone considered Hard Copy, A Current Affair, Inside Edition and all those other syndicated afternoon tabloid shows to have low journalistic standards. In retrospect, they produced hard-hitting reporting when compared to what passes for news today at the local and network level. 

The March 1990 story on the cult in Vanity Fair.

And you can read the original Vanity Fair story, East Side Alien, from March 1990 that was the first to expose the cult.

The Internet Is A Bad Neighborhood

 

On a recent road trip coming northward out of Sarasota we detoured to Jacksonville. After the time in Jacksonville we were in an awkward spot to get home to northern Georgia. If only using the interstates to travel it would have meant going out of the way westward on I-10 to I-75 or heading north on I-95 to I-16 in Savannah and then getting on I-75 in Macon. Logistically it made no sense. I decided the old fashioned way of studying a map and choosing back roads was the better option and would be more interesting. Off we went across the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia zigging and zagging through Waycross, Alma, Hazelhurst and many other towns. It was a fun drive, with no traffic and no stress. I would do it again and maybe change it a little to see new towns unseen.

I am still attempting to visit every one of the one hundred and fifty-nine counties in Georgia which is the second most to Texas in the number of counties. I do not have many left as I have visited well over a hundred of them. On this trip I added Bacon, Appling, Jeff Davis and Dodge counties to my total. I feel like I have been to more counties in this state than the politicians that claim to represent it.

 

On the drive I kept thinking about simpler and saner times. Country roads have a way of stripping away the man-made artifices, modern technology and information overload and the troubles of the world that really have no direct bearing on my life. The roads passed through the endless pines, the green fields, by the barns, over the creeks, rivers and swamps and by houses large and small. I like to think of the countryside as reality and cities as artificial bubbles.

The American flag at rest on Broad Street in Monroe, Georgia. Photo by me, April 2026.

When President Carter died in 2024 I watched his funeral. Some of my motivation was a sense of obligation since he was, like me, a son of Georgia, but mostly it was admiration that made me watch. Carter's presidency has felt like the end of simpler and saner times in part because it was the end of the 1970s and also because of the person he was, the son of a South Georgia farmer. His funeral was more than his own, it was the funeral of the last vestiges of simpler and saner times in America and decency too. I would like to think that one day this country will be sane again, but that would require both sides reversing their charge to the extreme ends of politics and returning to where some of us live in the middle. I have no hope of it happening. I love this country, am proud of it, but I think we are fucked by both sides who are too blinded by their smugness and self righteousness for the foreseeable future and perhaps the remainder of my life. It did not have to be this way.

 

"Nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselves to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time." - James Joyce writing about Dublin, Georgia on the opening page of Finnegans Wake. 

 

Dublin, Georgia. Photo by me, April 2026.

 

Dublin, Georgia. Photo by me, April 2026.

Dublin, Georgia. Photo by me, April 2026.

I recently stopped in Dublin, Georgia in Laurens County for the first time. I had a good dinner in their pleasant downtown. The restaurant was busy, people were out on the sidewalks in the evening and it was good to see another small Georgia town's downtown thriving. 

 

Monticello, Georgia. Photo by me, 2026.

Monticello, Georgia. Photo by me, 2026.

Later, before making the final leg home we stopped in the square of Monticello. It is another small Georgia town with a downtown that thrives. I have watched several sunsets in the past few years from that square on my way back from other places. The back roads seem to take me through there no matter from where I was coming. There is something so peaceful and calming about that square at sunset. The world feels okay there.

I have noticed this many times, but in small towns life still feels sane and normal for the most part. There is a great divide between small towns and the cities much like American politics. It is in cities and large suburbs where people ignore out of fear or complacency the crazy, the bad manners, incompetent drivers, dangers and the growing incivility of American life. Small towns are where the life and the country I knew growing up still exists in large part. It is weird for me to feel this way as it requires me to admit that I was wrong for decades of my life when I thought cities were better.

I wish American cities were cleaner, safer and more polite, but they are not and it should not be tolerated or accepted and yet it is. Is it apathy by the citizens, the local governments and police? Yes and it is up to them to take responsibility and solve those problems. In bad neighborhoods people say to look the other way and are told to mind their own business. Looking the other way is cowardly and shreds any sense of community which leads to bad neighborhoods. If taking care of one's community is not minding one's own business and is not in one's own best interest then nothing is.

Somewhere near Milledgeville, Georgia John Cougar Mellencamp's Small Town played on the radio. I sang along. I thought about my mother, she was a huge Mellencamp fan. The world was okay on that back road and in that reality. 

 

Me on the beach in Sarasota, Florida. April 2026.

 

With that written and after walking miles around a lake on Monday, I am putting my long form blog, Notes from Rabbit Tobacco Field, on indefinite hiatus. I am deep into writing my next novel and I do not have the spare mental capacity to keep writing long form posts for a blog. I have to concentrate on novel writing.

Another reason, is that I do not desire for my blog to become what I disliked about the men of the previous generation who talked back to the television news and complained about everything. I notice the men of my generation do it on Facebook or other social media and I find it negative and annoying. I do not want to contribute to that type of discourse on the internet nor waste my time consuming it.

Also, I have been pulling back my time from the internet in general. My use of the internet for any purpose has declined significantly over the last year. I spend very little time on the internet surfing or browsing as if I have seen the end of the web and it is suffocated with bots and AI. The web I started with in the mid 1990s that was human, cool, interesting, filled with originality, was mostly friendly and not so commercial is dead and has been for a long time. The greatest invention for the average person in my fifty plus years of living was ruined. It did not have to be this way. The internet became the ultimate bad neighborhood.

Finally, I like my privacy more than this blog. The internet's influence on society and the current politics are enough to make a person become a misanthrope and to be thankful for the gates that we have control over.

This website is not dying, but changing and will still serve as my primary outlet for my books. I will keep posting periodic updates about my next novel.

Thank you for reading,

Chris M. Vise

 

Dispatch: Accent In My Pocket

Sometimes the world is so flat it feels like you could slip free of Earth's gravity and slide off. Early February on the road. Photo by me, 2026.

 

The tail end of January and the beginning of February was two weeks on the road, sometimes dirt roads, of the south. It was the winter thaw for the mind collecting new sights, sounds, scents, tastes and discarding the mental plaque of the previous year. I wore my accent when needed, gave nods of indifference to strange politics of strangers and found myself shooting the shit in the middle of the road with locals. I wandered for hours through another history museum, watched water flow and listened to the birds in the trees. There was lots of bad coffee in gas station travel cups too. Some of the experience might end up in a book or maybe in a blog post. I thought a lot about the death of an old best friend between the mile markers and the hash marks on the speedometer. I wanted one more stupid teenage argument with him for the fun of it. This is how life and death go as the inseparable pair that they are.

Columbus, Georgia. Photo by me, February 2026.

I came home to bulbs waking up from winter and sat behind my desk. It was time to get back into the rhythm of writing my next novel.  

Golly gee. Tell me about them lyrics son. You are one pontificating rascal, that's what you are.

Somewhere I was in a bookstore and noticed in the prominent displays by the door a stack of poetry books with the bedraggled face of the hammy actor Matthew McConaughey. He is the actor/renaissance man who straight guys of my generation have crushes on and secretly wish they were. As you can tell by the sepia toned cover photo Matthew is a man with deep thoughts with his half open shirt and is surely in the running for a Pulitzer. Poems & Prayers is exactly the book that the world does not need, but it is what it gets. Traditional publishing is on a mission to destroy and humiliate itself in the most shameless ways. I hope he publishes a cook book next. Maybe something called Corn & Coca-Cola.

I read this Atlantic piece on Rod Dreher. It was interesting as the writer attempted to portray Dreher as some noble romantic fighting to save the soul of Western culture from Budapest, but instead he seemed miserable in a fantasy world of his own making. I have only read a few pieces by him over the years, though I have known about him for a long time, and Dreher is a peculiar one. The slipping in of the line by the brilliant and highly regarded atheist Richard Dawkins about him being a “cultural christian”, which I am familiar with, is intellectually dishonest with the usage of “declared” as if it were some major proclamation from on high (it wasn't) and it is very troubling for the use of “ally” (it is laughable to suggest he is, since Dreher is anti-science) and there is zero context given. I remember Dawkins saying that remark either in a debate or interview and it was not a grand gesture as it was a reference to how he was raised during his childhood without a choice on the matter. I respect and agree with Dawkins more than I ever could with Dreher. The tone of the article seemed to be a weird attempt to launder the ideas of Dreher and position him for future shadowy political influence in the United States.

Most of Carlton, Georgia. All five of these storefronts are occupied by this one antique store. Photo by me, February 2026.

One day well east of Athens in Madison County near the Elbert County line we stopped in the tiny community of Carlton clinging to life next to the train tracks. It is the kind of place you have to pull off the main road and intentionally seek out or you would never have a reason to pass through. Few people do as evidenced by the population change from 1900 to 2020 that was a loss of fourteen people in one hundred and twenty years down to two hundred and sixty-three. I find it charming that communities like this have managed to survive safe from Atlanta's sprawl. I remember when places like this were the norm in North Georgia outside of metro Atlanta in the 1980s.

Photo by me, February 2026.

This is the kind of place you have to dig, maybe get a little dusty and you will be rewarded. Two buildings down to the left next to the post office is a local branch of the Hell's Angels. I suppose they will not bother you if you do not bother them.

Photo by me, February 2026.

You do not know the smile and warm feeling I had when this jukebox played Don't Make My Brown Eyes Blue by Crystal Gayle. I skipped by like the small child I was in 1977 when my mother would play this record on our living room stereo which was near the same size as this jukebox. 

Photo by me, February 2026.

A cat strolled through on its rounds as I flipped through a copy of the photo book Warhol and Friends.

Photo by me, February 2026.

It was digging paradise where prices are rough ideas. 

Athens, Ga. Photo by me, February 2026.

 

Athens, Ga. Photo by me, February 2026.

Another day I attended a festival in downtown Athens and tried to shake loose a ghost. That old best friend of mine who recently died lived there in the early 1990s while he attended UGA. He went off to New York afterward to work in historic preservation. Athens of the '90s was a different place from the Athens of today, kind of like most of the state. It was one of the hot music scenes at the time like Seattle.

This is REM performing live in their hometown at the 40 Watt (pictured above) in 1992.

 

And so it goes... 

Me. February 2026.

on the road with an accent in my pocket chasing those sunny days.

2025 Review: Preppies In The Snow

Naughty and nice are not mutually exclusive. Photo by me, Greensboro, Georgia.

More people I have known died in 2025. Is that too blunt or too obvious? It is not a mystery that the older I become, the more it happens and that is the logical and detached way to approach it. The longer life lasts the more it resembles a classic BMW in need of repairs beyond the routine maintenance, but the backfire of death is no less of a surprise each time it is heard. Preppies in the snow put their hands up to cover their ears and wait.

Too many people have died too young. Dear Generation X, what are you doing ?

I read the obituaries and tried to reconcile the adult to the kid I knew. I am often surprised to read the twists and turns of what people became. People do change, or maybe I never knew some of them that well past the superficial observations in a red brick school in a country town. A boy pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, twirled his number two pencil and did multiplication on his fingers. A teenage girl leaned back in a rocking chair and laughed too hard on the wrong beat as she tried to grasp the conversation of adults. What did we learn?

Funerals are the wrinkles on the face of a life. Gray hairs in the mirror are the honest rebels stealing from the self-image that mistakenly thinks you could still pass for thirty. Forty? Not even. Whatever the kids are listening to and whatever slang they are inventing is whatever the kids are listening to and saying. Translators are not made for that duty. You still think 2006 was a week ago as you tune into 99X or River 97 and drum your fingers on the steering wheel to Everytime You Go Away by Paul Young. You squint at the red light that is poorly timed and notice that the restaurant that was there on the corner your entire life is now a vape shop and tattoo parlor serving burritos without a permit and when did they build that Dollar General? Only yesterday your child was six and you were late for soccer practice.

The end of a year always makes us consider time and where it went. The mind has difficulty with time's salamander slick and slippery nature.

 

Andrew McCarthy in 1987's Mannequin.

Damn the changes, damn the politics, damn the numbing disease of cheap nostalgia and damn it all to hell, but I am thankful that my waist size is still a thirty. Now the light is green, the radio plays Starship's Nothing's Gonna Stop Us and you want to believe it. You are convinced. Traffic flows like it did before millions moved here to ruin paradise and Andrew McCarthy sure was pretty in Mannequin. You strain your voice singing, “We can build this dream together.” You swear you did not once tell that minor piece of trivia in a Thomas Drive bar in Panama City that the lead singer, Mickey Thomas, was from Cairo, Georgia. That is Cairo pronounced like the syrup and not the city in Egypt.

My 2025 was like sitting down to eat at a favorite restaurant, eating my favorite foods and leaving full but not satisfied. I do not know what it was about this year, but it lacked novelty. There were new sights, sounds, places and aches in the joints. I was not bored; that seems to be a condition I never experience, but perhaps I became immune to the news, the messed-up weather, confused flowers and the next batch of woods toppled for luxury apartments over a Panda Express. Gas was cheaper and I spent an hour looking for the ear hair trimmer. The year was over before I knew it.

At fifty-two, I noticed my age like a phone notification that I could not swipe away. I felt a little slower, less nimble and it took me longer to recharge. It now took me two cups of coffee and a handful of Costco supplements before my brain began to percolate in my skull. Silence for the first hour of a day was a requirement or I became the grumpy old man who I never wanted to imitate.

Home Away From Home in Fort Lauderdale. Photo by me.

The secret “home away from home” in Fort Lauderdale was sold this year. It was a unique and special place for sixteen years. I will miss talking to the lizards on the patio, curious stray cats and morning coffee walks to Sebastian Street Beach. I doubt we will find another place like it.

Novel 4 (it really does have a title) came along nicely from January to December. It is something new, something current and has nothing to do with me. There are always so many miles in my year, on foot and by car and do not think that has not been an influence on me. Novel 4 is the first book I did not begin writing in Fort Lauderdale. I had a notebook of ripe ideas and then sentences formed in my head on a cold day on the square in Gainesville in January with a stomach full of barbecue. The characters Adam, Hastings and Evan were born without the need for painkillers.

Weirdest moment:

Standing on the shady side of a street in Warner Robins outside a restaurant. That middle Georgia heat and humidity had stolen the birdsong and my patience. A car creeped up to me and with the sun reflected on the windows and I could not see inside. A scratchy voice called, “Hey white boy.” I looked without looking and gripped my phone a little tighter. The voice called out again, “Hey white boy,” and again I ignored it. My eyes moved behind my sunglasses and I widened my stance. I was not a boy except for maybe in the way some southerners mean it. Three more times the voice called with the same words. Trouble and I was no fool. The car went into reverse and backed away with the possible intention of hiding the tag.

Favorite moment:

Watching the fog in Normaltown in February. Yes, it is more than just a lyric in the B52's Deadbeat Club. 2025 was still goo, shapeless, untethered and iridescent. I could have been in any moment in my life when winter was spooling off into a gray pile of yarn. Maybe I was drifting in the early 90s with a hole in the sleeve of my sweater and wearing a barn jacket and boots. There was a whiff of Polo from the green bottle in the air. A water tower was the appearing and disappearing UFO down the street. I was happy.

Worst moment:
Sitting in a Johns Creek Hospital room and waiting with my grip on the arms of a plastic chair. Helplessness bred in hospitals is the worst.

Best Festival:

Flannery O'Connor's grave. Photo by me, October 2025. 

I went to too many. It was a tie between Athfest and that one down in Milledgeville where I hunted down the grave of Flannery O'Connor. Death was on my mind at every turn this year or so it seemed.

My favorite movie:

Eddington. It satirized the times better than any other movie that tried. It was smart and the only movie that made me laugh out loud.

My favorite new to me music:

The White Birch album by Codeine. It may have come out in 1994, but I had not listened to it until this year. I found it by way of Slint and Shipping News.

 

Cheap nostalgia at $20. My actual Bon Jovi ticket from 1989.

There is no singular defining moment to a year, the same as there is no precise moment that defines a life. To follow a path in the woods, return a smile, accept an invitation, or jump from a window and roll to the ground, life equalizes the regrets and the joys. News readers, nervous funeral orators, biographers, politicians, historians, TikTok influencers and novelists will lie to you. Maybe, if I am going to lie, then it was the Bon Jovi concert at Lakewood in 1989 when I held a flickering lighter in the air like a torch held in my sixteen-year-old hand to I'll Be There For You, but I am drowsy from the decades of remembering those tight jeans and how he was not. A previous lesson learned and only reinforced. All of life goes into the dryer the same as all of it went into the washer. Moments are agitated, churned and rinsed in the same spins until it is a soup of consciousness. They lived, they died and some of it was good, better than it should have been and what more can anyone want besides more time?

What do you do with a used-up and expired year? Nothing really. You go to bed, wake up and open the next year. The Christmas tree comes down slower than it went up and goes back into the attic. The mind and the hand learn to write a different number. In a year, the preppies in the snow will come inside and gather around the fireplace again cradling whatever is the trendy drink.

 

Monticello, Georgia. Photo by me, September 2025.

2025 is the sunset on the hood of a car speeding faster than it used to; you cannot have it again. 2026 is a missed call from an unknown number.

Jump scare. Yours truly. I keep Rabbit Tobacco Field dim to avoid scaring myself. Mood lighting is your friend. December 2025.

Merry Christmas, happy holidays and have the best 2026 that you can.

And finally it is Preppies In The Snow. Ralph Lauren and Vidal Sassoon would be proud. Last Christmas by WHAM!

---

Addendum 

All dressed in black, he won't be coming back
Save your tears, you've got years and years
The pains of seventeen's
Unreal they're only dreams...

As I was putting this post to bed and proofreading I learned Chris Rea had died. He was not a household name, but there are not many of them in the days of niche entertainment and the absence of a shared cultural reality. If you are a Gen X kid/fortunate 70s child you would have heard Fool If You Think It's Over in the summer of 1978 on Top 40 Radio. I first heard it on Atlanta's Z-93 in my mother's Camaro and sliding around on the cold leather backseat of my father's Cadillac through the eighties on B98.5. We had a copy of it in our music collection. I filed the song away as a meaningful one of my childhood. I loved the song then and still do.

When I was writing Dweller On The Boundary it was one of the primary songs I used to manipulate myself into the emotional headspace needed to go there. My books always have a soundtrack. I listened to it on repeat along with Never Gonna Let You Go by Sergio Mendes (for the worst memories), Bread's If, Boz Scaggs' We're All Alone (probably one of the songs for my funeral - just sayin'), The Greatest Love of All by George Benson (the best version and it will make you cry), Sailing by Christopher Cross, King of Pain and Wrapped Around Your Finger from The Police, Steal Away by Robbie Dupree, Supertramp's The Logical Song, Gordon Lightfoot's If You Could Read My Mind and others before writing and during breaks. I abused the hell out of myself to write that book.

Thank you for the music and memories. Chris Rea was 74.

In The Heat of the Hazzard Vampire Darlings

The courthouse in Covington, Georgia. Photo by me, November 2025.

Is it Hazzard County or Mystic Falls or Sparta? This town was all three fictional places about moonshine, rebel flags, Daisy Duke cutoffs, Archie Bunker as a cop and teenage vampires in television shows, but the real place is Covington, Georgia; a town of fourteen thousand residents and filled with fine homes east of Atlanta in Newton County.

 

Get that selfie bro! People wait outside a tour company. Photo by me, November 2025.

The few times I have stopped in Covington and not simply passed through on the back roads to elsewhere I have been surprised at how busy the downtown is with sightseers. I had no idea people were that interested in taking tours of places where television shows and movies were filmed. I was unaware this many people were deeply connected to television shows and that they would track down the real life filming locations and pay for tours. Is it an odd psychological quirk for a hobby I suppose. I might could understand if it were Hollywood, but Covington? I might not understand, but maybe there is good reason for this.

Covington thrives on this piggyback tourist industry and there is even a museum about these television shows and films. Meanwhile, actual filming in Georgia for movies and television has taken a downturn as production companies flock to cheaper locations. The local film business has slowed so much that some of the studio buildings and land on the bypass were purchased in October by the city and will be converted for municipal uses.

One of the more popular shows filmed here was The Vampire Diaries from 2009 to 2017. Covington was the fictional town of Mystic Falls, which sounds like the name of a cheap wine or car air freshener with a musky scent. I can smell it now coming from a Tesla.

Someone I am kind of related to and was an actor was on the show several times as an extra. I have never seen an episode and do not recognize the names of any of the actors. I assume it must be about vampires writing their secrets in little notebooks that they hide under their coffin pillows. 

 

As I walked I was near one of the major filming locations for the series. Teenage girls with heads down stared at themselves on their phones. They blocked the sidewalk and I patiently waited until finally I had to say excuse me like an adult should. The girls were the dreaded phone zombies and not vampires in broad daylight at the corner of College Avenue and East Street. Not to pick on teenagers, but people of all ages too often have lost the basic courtesy that when in public you have to share it with others, that the world does not revolve around you and the faux image of yourself that you present via a smart phone. Real life in public is not your personal television show, a TikTok post or a YouTube channel.

The filming location of Lockwood Mansion. Photo by me, November 2025.

The filming location of Lockwood Mansion. Photo by me, November 2025.

This is Lockwood Mansion, the television den of the Lockwood family of vampires. People were creepily possessive about their spot outside the gates to get their perfect and amazing photos. As is my style, I walked through them, took a few cell phone photos and stayed ten seconds. I felt rather silly about the whole moment, but it was a nice house. 

The county courthouse in Covington as seen in the opening credits of the tv show In The Heat of the Night.

In the 1980s my mother watched In The Heat of the Night so I saw many episodes of that show. Covington served as Sparta, Mississippi. I was not exactly the target demographic for the show, it was okay. Carroll O'Connor was a big name actor, but I never said to myself that one day I was going to track down the shooting locations and take a selfie. And so I did not in 2025.

The General Lee and the Duke Boys being chased around the courthouse square in Covington.

I did watch The Dukes of Hazzard when it premiered in 1979 and for a couple of seasons after until I lost interest. My closest friend at the time, a boy I have written about in my books as the character Robin, could do a perfect “yeehaw” just like Bo Duke. I was jealous. I was six years old so what did I know? How many car chases with a couple of good ole' boys can one watch? Sing it Waylon. Most of my classmates were obsessed with the show, had model versions of the General Lee car, tee shirts, bedroom posters and talked about the show into high school. This was about the same time that Cooter, actor Ben Jones, became a Georgia Congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1988. Among the more impressionable minds of some of my classmates, some are still die hard fans as they refuse to outgrow their childhood tastes well into middle age.

Only the first five episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard were filmed in Covington, Conyers and Atlanta in the fall of 1978. The show thereafter was filmed in California and it never looked the same as the real locations in Georgia. The red clay dirt, dense woods and rural landscapes just cannot be replaced by dusty California. During its seven seasons on CBS, the show was in the top ten for three seasons and peaked at number two in 1980 to 1981. I can still remember how big that show was and how it seemed for a time the show that every kid talked about on the school bus and playground.

A stuntman lands a plane on the courthouse square of Covington as locals watched as extras in a Hal Needham directed film.

A film that seemed to be in perpetual repeat on HBO in the early 1980s was The Cannonball Run (1981). I saw it in the theater and then had it on in the background many times as a kid while I played with my Hotwheels. I did not know it at the time nor would I have cared then either, but parts of the movie were filmed in Covington. In the scene above a stuntman lands a plane that is supposed to be piloted by Burt Reynolds on the courthouse square. The reason for the unexpected landing was that Burt and Dom DeLuise had run out of beer. 

The film is a comedy car chase that would certainly be less humorous if made today. The Rod McKuen joke, which was quite funny, would not be understood today by younger generations as you had to be alive in that period to fully understand and much of the other humor might also be unappreciated. The bloopers that ran at the end of the film were great. I miss Dom DeLuise's laugh. I miss Burt Reynolds too. 

I remember the late 1970s and early 80s as a very loose, humorous time. Some of my belief resides in the fact I was a kid, but you also see it reflected in the entertainment of the era. It is easy to be misled by people with ulterior motives into believing, especially if you were not there, that the past was some miserable experience. Nor was it perfect either, but people were far less hung up, concerned and socially neutered with bullshit. Compared to the blunt and adversarial categorizations of today, people's sense of place in the world and how to relate to others was more nuanced and also more sophisticated. If you transported anyone under the age of forty today back to 1981 they would be utterly lost as to how to behave, communicate or function; even pumping gas, using a telephone or getting along with people would be problems. People did actually try to get along in public back then at least where I came from. The two greatest losses in my lifetime might be the loss of authentic humor and observing coping skills be supplanted by entitlement. Both of those losses are cross generational.

Twenty minutes east of Covington between there and Madison is Hard Labor Creek State Park. The park was the primary filming location (a few scenes were shot in Atlanta) for the 1980 Paramount Pictures film Little Darlings. The film starred Tatum O'Neal, Kristi McNichol and Matt Dillon. The movie is set at a summer camp and is about two girls, one from a wealthy family and the other from the wrong side of the tracks, who bet to see which one can be the first to lose their virginity. Gasp! Imagine a film like that in 2025, it would offend the sensibilities of the left and the right and would be a box office smash hit as everyone went in secret to watch it.

Top Left: The title sequence. The character who Tatum O'Neal played was supposed to live at The Swan House in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta. Top Right: The kids are loading up on a parking deck outside the old AJC newspaper HQ in Downtown Atlanta. Second Left: McNichol arrives in Downtown Atlanta. Second Right: Actor Nicolas Coster stands with the now demolished Omni Coliseum behind him and the Omni International which would become the world HQ of CNN known as CNN Center from 1985 until 2023. Bottom: McNichol in Downtown Atlanta. 

I must have watched this film a few dozen times on HBO on repeat as a child. I knew I shared something with McNichol, but I was not sure what at the time. She did some of her best acting in this film.

Camp Little Wolf at Hard Labor Creek State Park. Little Darlings 1980.

There was trouble caused by McNichol during filming of Little Darlings which might have been a glimpse of things ahead for her later in life. 

People Magazine cover March 31, 1980.

In a profile of McNichol in People Magazine during the promotion of the film it was revealed what had happened.

"The movie's crew, as it happened, preferred Tatum's quiet but polite reserve to Kristy's more impatient and sometimes disdainful moods. In one moment of boredom, Kristy gunned her car into nearby Madison, Ga. and, jumping the curb, tore a large "donut" into the grass on the town green. Confronted by angry police, the embarrassed production company later apologized (as did Kristy personally). "I'm just relieved that if my daughter has to be a rebel, she's ruining grass instead of taking drugs," says Carollyn." A Pad of Her Own in People Magazine March 31, 1980 by Karen G. Jakovich 

 

In 1979, when the movie was filmed, I can believe that a seventeen-year-old McNichol could have gotten away without trouble for doing doughnuts in the middle of sleepy Madison. She was rich and famous, American culture was less celebrity obsessed and not as connected with twenty-four hour news and the inescapable internet. Today, Madison caters to an upscale clientele and news of any sort spreads within minutes on social media and there would be videos from twenty different angles. A mention of the incident in 1980 in People Magazine did not even raise an eyebrow at the time.

McNichol, most known at the time for her role as Buddy in the 1970s television series Family, was no stranger to Georgia. She filmed the 1978 made-for-TV movie, Summer of My German Soldier in Crawfordville and Madison. Her 1981 film costarring Dennis Quaid and Mark Hamill, The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia was shot on location in northwest Georgia and Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

Jimmy Carter as Georgia Governor in the 1970s.

It also probably did not hurt that Georgia was beginning to emerge as a welcome place for filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s. Burt Reynolds deserved some of the credit behind the push to film movies in the state. He had starred in Deliverance (1972) filmed in the Georgia mountains and advocated for more movies to be made here. Credit also belongs to then Governor Jimmy Carter who had the foresight to create the Georgia Film Office in 1973. 

During this time, Georgia was used for Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Smokey and the Bandit II (1980), Sharky's Machine (1981), The Cannonball Run (1981), Swamp Girl (1971), Together For Days (1972), The Greatest Gift (1974), Buster & Billie starring a very hot Jan-Michael Vincent (1974), The Longest Yard (1974), Conrack (1974), Cockfighter (1974), Poor Pretty Eddie (1975), Return to Macon County (1975), Moonrunners (1975), Squirm (1976), Gator (1976), Greased Lightning (1977), The Farmer (1977), Scalpel (1977), The Great Bank Hoax (1978), Our Winning Season (1978), John Huston's Wise Blood (1979), Moon In Taurus (1980), City of the Living Dead (1980), The Long Riders (1980), Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (1980), Cannibal Apocalypse (1980), Breaking Away the television series starring the adorable Shaun Cassidy filmed in Athens (1980), Madhouse (1981), The Four Seasons (1981), Coward of the County (1981), Six Pack which was partly filmed where I grew up in Georgia (1982), The Sender (1982), The Slayer (1982), Murder In Coweta County (1983), The Slugger's Wife (1985), Summer Rental (1985), A Killing Affair (1986), As Summers Die (1986), Manhunter (1986), Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), The Mosquito Coast starring Harrison Ford and River Phoenix and partially filmed near where I grew up (1986), Foxfire (1987), Made in Heaven (1987), Funland (1987), From A Whisper to a Scream (1987), Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988), Your Mother Wears Combat Boots (1989), Driving Miss Daisy (1989) among others.

 

Movies and television shows would continue to be made in Georgia in the 1990s. It would be after 2000 when production exploded that Georgia became the Hollywood of the South. In 2016 Georgia had more feature films made here than California. Though Georgia's entertainment industry has begun to wane again in recent years.

Kristi McNichol canoes with Matt Dillon in Little Darlings.

I doubt Little Darlings is part of the film location tour circuit, but the park and its lake where Camp Little Wolf was located still exists. You can get a selfie by the lake, maybe hotwire a bus and sing along to One Way or Another by Blondie.