Lights! Camera! Arkansas!: From Broncho Billy to Billy Bob Thornton

(Clint Eastwood's Bronco Billy updated both the character and the spelling.) Freeman Owens (Pine Bluff) was a World War I pilot and aerial photographer who pioneered "slow-motion cameras, synchronized sound, early 3-D technology, wide-angle lenses, home-movie projectors, plastic lenses, and the A.C. Nielsen rating system" (p. 4). Spirited excursions into backwater tributaries like Charles B. Pierce (Hampton; The Legend of Boggy Creek, The Town That Dreaded Sundown)-, the Louis Jordan (Brinkley) jump western Look-Out Sister (a good double bill with Kingsland-born Johnny Cash's psycho-noir debut in Five Minutes to Live)-, Jay Russell's (North Little Rock) engaging End of the Line, starring Levon Helm and co-produced by Mary Steenburgen (Newport); blaxploitation visionary Rudy Ray Moore (Fort Smith-his Dolemite takes its name from dolomite, a limestone-like mineral found in the Ozarks); and folk art filmmaker Phil Chambliss (Locust Bayou) earn the authors extra points.