A clip-and-save guide to our starring roles

by Jack Neely

This week may be your last chance to see Tom DiCillo's Box of Moonlight at the Terrace. For us it's worth seeing just because we so rarely get to see Knoxville on the big screen. This is, in fact, the first time Knoxville has gotten a job in a big movie since Ayres Hall had a walk-on role in Ingrid Bergman's 1970 bomb, A Walk in the Spring Rain—which, come to think of it, has about the same plot as Box of Moonlight but without the weird sense of humor: A sophisticated big-city husband (or wife), feeling that Youth has fled, goes south for a sabbatical and, though devoted to his (or her) spouse, has an affair with a natural, uninhibited mountain woman (or man)—but, revived, returns to faithful wife (or husband) in the end. Knoxville appears to be developing a reputation as a location for movies about that special "kountry" kind of adultery that's as refreshing as a mountain stream.

Anyway, if you've been to see Box of Moonlight, you likely heard whispering behind you. For me, that was a little frustrating, just because what was being whispered was mostly inaccurate. "That's Meade's Quarry!" they'd say. Or, "That's gotta be West Hills!" Or, "That must be Clinton Highway!"

Sometimes I just wanted to stand up and say, "You're completely wrong, and I've got the assistant location manager right here to prove it."

That would be Jeff Talman, the longtime 4th and Gill neighborhood activist who heads Talman Productions. At the end of Box of Moonlight, his name appears pretty high in the credits. When DiCillo came to town two years ago with this script, Talman found the places to shoot it. He estimates he drove 4,000 miles between Campbell and Monroe Counties, just scouting.

The green-hilled country landscapes are gorgeous, but it's the city-limits scenes that get people whispering. They aren't necessarily flattering. Fortunately for our reputation, Box of Moonlight isn't about Knoxville, but a smaller fictional community called Drip Rock. It's a place that's had some wear—as Talman says, "a town that had a great future behind it." The script called for several bleak scenes of esthetic decay. "Cheesy was the operative word," Talman says. "We weren't looking for anything too nice."

All four quarters of Knoxville appear in the movie. (Only downtown and UT were left out altogether, presumably because neither were plausible as part of Drip Rock.)

The early motel scenes were taken at the Quality Inn on Kingston Pike, near West Town. Talman says the DiCillo script called for "a gray and faceless place"; re-oriented with a porta-sign entrance in the back, it fit the bill perfectly. In some scenes, stark I-40 is visible in the background.

As the workers' bus pulls into the town and turns left, you see, appropriately, the old Park Theater on Magnolia and Knox Jewelry & Loan (legible, but presumably a place named for a proprietor named Knox, since this is supposedly in Drip Rock).

The two water scenes were shot farthest from town; the first, Splatchee Lake, was on private property on a corner of Norris Lake on the Anderson/Campbell County border; Talman had to improve an old TVA access road with gravel and pruning to allow the trucks through. The diving scenes were shot nearly 100 miles to the south at a deep quarry near Greenback along the Blount/Loudon/Monroe County border.

The Zeus windshield-wiper plant's construction site, is actually an environmentally friendly pesticide plant being built by the Nisus Corp. near Rockford. The tow scene was shot on Nails Creek Road off Martin Mill Road near the Knox/Blount County border. The Kid's trailer was a considerable distance away, in Northeast Knoxville on Jones Road off Washington Pike. Talman says it was an actual trailer they found on the site.

The rental-car scenes were filmed in an old service station on Asheville Highway in East Knoxville; a KUB office is visible in the background. Some viewers were convinced the wacky directional sign was real, but it wasn't; the crew mounted it on a railroad underpass on Rutledge Pike.

A later motel-strip scene features a motel and restaurant on 411 near Maryville. The Jesus sighting was near a farmer's market in East Knox County, about a mile from Helma's. The fast-food chains shown rolling by at night were on Broadway just north of 640 in Fountain City.

The chair aflame was on North Central at Caldwell. If you watch very carefully, you'll see a guy lying shirtless on the hood of his car; Talman says they paid him a sawbuck to do that.

The most easily identifiable scene, the fight at the bar parking lot, was at Bambi's strip club on Alcoa Highway, conspicuous in its original pink. "We scouted Bambi's maybe more than we needed to," Talman admits. There, the pugnacious, flame-phobic Wick is played by Dermot Mulroney, who wasn't as famous then as he's been since he starred opposite Julia Roberts in My Best Friend's Wedding. They shot until dawn to get it right.

The interior Chicago scenes were shot inside a small house in Sequoyah Hills on Taliluna near Southgate. In the final scene, a combination of an aerial view of residential New York and ground scenes of Taliluna somehow combine to become suburban Chicago. John Turturro romps with his kid around a hillier backyard than you'll find in most Chicago suburbs, but it somehow works anyway.

If you see Box of Moonlight at the Terrace this week, take this column. You may find an opportunity to show it to the folks whispering behind you.