Hugh O'Connor (filmmaker)
The death of Hugh O'Connor occurred on September 20, 1967. O'Connor, a Canadian television journalist, was filming a coal miner at his rented house in Jeremiah, Letcher County, Kentucky when Hobart Ison, the property owner, arrived, told O'Connor and his crew to leave, then shot and killed O'Connor. Journalists and filmmakers had descended upon Appalachia in the late 1960s to document the living conditions there, in relation to the War on Poverty. This offended many local residents, who objected to the stereotyping and criticism by outsiders, as well as their tendency to show only the poor of Appalachia.[1]
O'Connor and Ison came to represent the two sides of the conflict: outsiders who aimed to expose wrongs in the hopes of righting them and locals who resented the outsider presence and believed they were telling only one side of the story.[2]
Background
Ison
Hobart Ison was born in 1898. His family came to Kentucky in the late 19th century, and their wealth was tied to the land. In the 1920s, during the coal boom, Ison had several local businesses including a car dealership, but lost all his wealth except his inherited land in the Great Depression. He was frequently described by locals as eccentric. A lifelong bachelor, he had supposedly been engaged once but his fiancee called off the wedding. Ison had already built a home for them, and chose to leave it furnished but unoccupied for 30 years rather than live in it or rent it.[2]
He used money from the sale of some his land to a railroad company to build several rental cottages in 1947. By 1967 he was renting them out to mining families for $10 a month.[3]
O'Connor
Hugh O'Connor (born 1921 in Scotland) worked for the National Film Board of Canada and was acclaimed as one of the leading filmmakers in Canada.[4] He had earned a reputation for developing and using cutting-edge technology in his documentaries, such as the five-camera, five-screen film In the Labyrinth, which was one of the highlights of Montreal's Expo 67. The film split elements across the five screens and also combined them for a mosaic of a single image. The film inspired Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison to apply similar techniques to his film The Thomas Crown Affair. In the Labyrinth was also the earliest inspiration for the revolutionary IMAX film format.[5]
Apparently unaware of the hostility locals felt for outside journalists and filmmakers,[3] O'Connor came to Kentucky in 1967 to make a documentary called US, which had been commissioned by the United States Department of Commerce to be shown exclusively at HemisFair '68 in San Antonio, Texas. The documentary depicted life in the United States since pioneer days.[4]
Slaying
On September 20, 1967, O'Connor's film crew visited a group of rental homes owned by Ison. The crew was unaware they were rental properties, and obtained permission to film three residents. Each signed a release and was paid $10.[6] Ison was told of the activity and flew into a rage. Witnesses said Ison approached O'Connor and his crew as they filmed a coal miner with three cameras and told them to leave his property, then aimed his gun at them. The crew did not want to leave without their equipment. Ison then fired at them, first the cameras and then O'Connor, who died soon after.[4] According to a story in The New Yorker his last words were "Why'd you have to do that?"[7]
Trial and sentencing
Although many were shocked by the crime, local residents rallied to Ison's defense.[3] About 100 residents attended his bond hearing to support and offer assistance in paying the bond. According to a 2001 book:
"Locals defended Ison not because they approved of murder and not because of an innate, clannish suspiciousness of outsiders, but because they perceived the prying eyes of reporters to be an assault on manners, common decency, and the integrity of their communities."[8]
Unable to find an impartial jury in Letcher County, the trial was moved to Harlan County and held in March 1968. The prosecution was led by veteran Commonwealth's Attorney Daniel Boone Smith, who recalled that even in Harlan County it was assumed he would not push too hard for Ison's conviction, and many citizens approached him expressing sympathy for Ison. Boone saw his task as convincing jurors that O'Connor and his crew were respectable people who had been commissioned by the United States Government making a film about the entire United States in which the Kentucky shots would only be briefly featured.[6]
The defense tried to get surviving members of the crew to admit they were just in Kentucky to photograph poor people, asking if they had intended to photograph richer parts of the state, and asking how much money they had made off the film. Ison's lawyer used his closing statement to speak more about intrusiveness of the reporters than he did about his client's actions.[9] Nevertheless, the only legal issue was Ison's sanity, and a psychiatrist testifying for the defense identified Ison as a paranoid schizophrenic, but a prosecution psychiatrist contradicted this diagnosis.[6]
The trial resulted in a hung jury. Jurors later revealed that 11 jurors were in favor of conviction and the twelfth held out for acquittal.[1]
On March 24, 1969, a week before a second trial was to begin, Ison pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.[4] He was paroled after serving one year of his sentence, and died in 1978.[9] Apparently, O'Connor had called Ison's gun a "peashooter". Ison never expressed any remorse for O'Connor's death.[10]
Legacy
In 2000, the slaying was the subject of a documentary by Elizabeth Barret called Stranger with a Camera, which aired on the PBS series P.O.V..[2]
The weapon Ison used to kill O'Connor was a 1904 .38-calibre Smith & Wesson revolver. Oddly enough, the same gun was used in 2003 in the killing of a teenager by a housekeeper in a dispute over a housefire. The gun had been in a safety deposit box until the owner had removed it in 2000 in the hopes of selling it to Elizabeth Barret for her documentary.[7]
References
- ^ a b "Jury Split in Death Of Film Producer; Mistrial Declared". New York Times. 1968-06-01. p. 28.
- ^ a b c Salomon, Julie (2000-06-11). "He Turned His Camera on Appalachia, and One Man Wouldn't Stand For It". The New York Times. pp. E2.
- ^ a b c Snyder, Robert E.; Barret, Elizabeth (2001). "Review of Stranger with a Camera". The Journal of American History. 88 (3): 1219–1220. doi:10.2307/2700585.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|month=ignored (help) - ^ a b c d "Kentuckian Gets 10 Years in Jail For Killing Canada Filmmaker". New York Times. 1969-03-25. p. 30.
- ^ Atherton, Tony (2000-07-10). "When camera and gun collide". Ottawa Citizen. pp. D7.
- ^ a b c Calvin Trillin, "U.S. JOURNAL: JEREMIAH, KY. A STRANGER WITH A CAMERA.," The New Yorker, April 12, 1969, p. 178
- ^ a b Lin, William (2005-05-07). "Piece of history draws new blood". Globe and Mail. pp. A2.
- ^ Catherine McNicol Stock, Robert D. Johnston (2001). The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America. Cornell University Press. p. 270. ISBN 0801487714.
- ^ a b Rosenfeld, Megan (2000-07-11). "Killing in Kentucky: Out-of-Focus 'Camera'". The Washington Post. pp. C07.
- ^ Morfitt, Ian (2003-03-08). "The violent poetry of Appalachia". Globe and Mail. pp. R13.