About the Movie Maker
Joe
Terrence Gray was raised on a tobacco farm in southern Kentucky, educated
in the jungles of Vietnam (US Army, CMB, ’69) and at Yale University
(BA
’72). For more than thirty years since, he has been a writer-producer-director
of documentary and fiction films, a playwright and journalist in his home
state.
In 2004, Gray was hired to direct the International Bluegrass Music Museum video oral history project. To date, Gray has produced more than 180 interviews with “the pioneers of bluegrass music.”
In the photo to the right, Director of Photography Gray explains a lighting
effect to Maureen Mullinax at Allice Lloyd College in Pippa Passes Kentucky,
the seventh location in a 130 mile caravan across the Kentucky mountians
during a one-day taping for John Malpede’s “RKF in EKY” (in
edit), a community re-enactment of Robert Kennedy’s “poverty
tour” of Eastern Kentucky in
1968.
Long-form Documentary
In 2000, after five years of intense investigation
and video interviews on both sides of the Atlantic, his feature-length
documentary, Green Blood Red Tears, premiered to a sold-out crowd in Louisville.
Broadcast on Kentucky Educational Television (as have all his videos),
the video is used throughout the nation’s farm belt to caution mental
health workers about the dangers of stress (financial, social, and mental)
and the combination of antidepressant therapy following pesticide exposure.
Historical Drama
In 1990, his stage play, “Desperate
Fortune,” about
Aaron Burr’s
1806 trials for treason premiered at Horse Cave Theatre featuring Warren
Hammack as Burr and an outstanding cast of Equity actors.
At right, Jack Johnson (“J.J.”), one
of the original ensemble of Actors Theater Louisville, portrays frontier
journalist and Burr nemesis, John Wood.
Gray’s adaption of Gurney Norman’s
“Kinfolks” premiered as a radio play, Thanksgiving Day 1987
on WMMT-FM in Whitesburg, Kentucky.
Social Media
Gray first joined the community of artists in Whitesburg known as Appalshop in 1975 to collaborate on Ourselves and that Promise, a documentary about the artistic impulse featuring James Still, Robert Penn Warren, and the images of John James Audubon and photographer Billy Davis.
Other
films during his tenure at Appalshop include his “intimate” documentary
Lord and Father, a biography of his father, Joe Gray, Sr., and
the family of sharecroppers who through two generations raised Gray tobacco.
Film-maker Gray followed this work with the video documentaries, Profits
in Risk,
a tv investigation of the “syn-fuel” hoopla
and War, Taxes, and the Almighty Dollar, a primer on the political
economy of the permanent war state.