In the Name of Love: A Texas Tragedy

Shot under the title "After Laurette," "In the Name of Love: A Texas Tragedy" is a movie-of-the-week based on the fatal romance of Ralph Hand III, Mississippi's "Delta Prince," and his ex-wife Olivia Browning, which made headlines in November 1989. Poor girl falls in love with rich boy whose family protests, turns fatal in the end. So what makes it significant on Cult Oddities? Well, aside from the fact that it's a kinda campy movie of the week, I worked on it!

(...but unfortunately, this is the best photo I got.)

I was living in the then-tiny Texas town of Aubrey and early the morning of June 7th, my boyfriend Dennis (yep, I'm a gay dude -- duh!) woke me up to tell me there were big trucks moving into a nearby empty lot and they were setting up cameras at a house behind ours. Then he handed me this letter:

Next thing you know, they're bringing in a junk car, erecting a shabby picket fence in the front (the junky fence that they put the bottles on was already there), setting up lights and screens outside of the windows and making a ton of noise. Of course, for Dennis this was a brush of Hollywood and he was thrilled about it. I sorta was too... at first. He wanted to videotape the happenings, which might have been okay if we'd had a modern camcorder... or a cellphone. Unfortunately, this was 1995 and the only camera I had required a VCR to record on. And both the camera and the VCR required a power supply. From somewhere Dennis procured a 50 foot extension cord and set off to set up a video camera in the back yard. Unfortunately, for the first 25 minutes the camera was too far away to capture much except his family, who'd all flocked and set up chairs to gawk at the proceedings. Small town, big deal. The director came over to see what we were doing and seemed kind of nice... again, at first.

Eventually Dennis talked the lady seen in the photo above with Richard Crenna (for the life of me, I can't think of her name) into using a plug at her house, which was a little closer. The video was better but since I didn't know what the hell they were shooting, it was mainly just people walking around talking -- and being bound by a cord limits what you can capture. But the camera rolled for hours....

As the evening dragged on,