Dd pd
SHELBY—When John
Brock was the general
manager of several Gaston
County newspapers in the six-
ties no one ever suspected he
~ would one day become a mo-
tion picture producer and
enter the world of make-
believe for a living.
The human skull with bad
teeth, grinning from the
bookcase, may be the first
tip-off. Or it may be the bird
cage, one of those Chinese
temple affairs made of tiny
dowels, with the songless
skeleton of some largish bird,
a parrot, perhaps, upon the
perch. :
Give or take a bowl of
plastic ivy, an orderly desk,
sensible books and an ar-
rangement of dried flowers,
the room where John Brock,
movie maker, sprawls in an
easy chair is not so much an
executive office as the room
of a little boy.
John Brock is 52, going on
11. He’s been a newspaper
editor and publisher, colum-
nist, historian, an author of
scholarly papers on folk
medicine and the battle of
Kings Mountain, an expert on
politics, a college professor,
president of a large
mechanical contracting firm
and a nationally-honored
Jaycee. Now, as president of
John Brock Productions,
Inc., and a partner of adven-
ture film maker Earl
Owensby, he’s in a
schoolboy’s heaven.
“I grew up in Charlotte,”
he says, ‘and a friend of
mine - he’s a brain surgeon
now - we used to experiment
with pyrotechnics. We were
into rockets before Wehrner
Von Braun. Now I can do it
legitimately.”
A stream of conversation
drifts in from a hallway; a
crew of young production
people are on their way back
to the sound stage, after
lunch. ‘““Y’ought to seen it,
man, it was beaufitul,”’ one is
saying. “It really tore that
house up - chips a wood, flyin’
-everyplace. You just gotta
see it. It was great!”
A blow-up slcene, in the
current production. ‘We
blow up stuff, sure’s the
world,” says John. “We blow
up cars, houses, people.” On
the sound stage nearby, a
barroom brawl is brewing,
one of many good fights one
JOHN BROCK
can expect in the upcoming
“Rutherford County Line”,
co-produced by Brock and
Owensby and due for release
in November.
What is that faint smell of
mothballs? ‘‘Earl bought
5,000 pounds of mothballs at
some salvage place, I think
they were in a truck that
wrecked, or something,”
John says. “You wouldn’t
believe what great explosions
they make. Earl’s got a girl
back there now working full
time, grinding up
mothballs.” We can expect
lots of fire, in ‘Rutherford
County Line”.
A fleet of police cars flank-
ed the building; several may
bite the dust before the bad
guy is dragged stumbling to
justice. Which, in this case, is
a chillingly real reproduction
of a modern prison execution
chamber.
Earl Owensby stars in this
one, as he does in many of his
films. This time he’s Ruther-
ford County sheriff Damon
Huskey, a real life high-
powered law man known to
reason with his fists.
But though college-trained
in drama, at Mars Hill Col-
lege and Wake Forest
University, John Brock rare-
ly acts. “I'm not an actor.
I’m not very talented,” Brock
says, adding that his wife,
Barbara, is the talented
member of the family. What
he likes is production. And
where. .he succeeds
phenomenally is in raising
money for production costs.
Over the last couple of years,
he’s raised almost $10 million
to finance films made here.
Largely low-budget -
“Rutherford County Line” is
to be held to $2 million - the
movies make money, Brock
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says. The largest part of the
income is from foreign
distribution to 93 countries,
where millions of viewers see
rolling Carolina countryside
where Owensby’s pictures
are filmed as a capsule of
America.
‘“We’re not into art,”’ Brock
says; ‘we're into entertain-
ment.” And entertainment,
to John Brock, has always
been magic. +
“My mother used to take us
to the old Broadway, on South
Tryon Street in Charlotte,”
he remembers. ‘‘They’d have
a stage show, with the movie.
It was the remnants of
vaudeville, and I loved it.”
It distressed him that he
couldn’t sing. So he had to try
something else. ‘I was eight
years old - maybe seven,
when we went to the circus. I
made up my mind I'd walk
the tight rope.” He went
home and strung up a piece of
old telephone wire between
two posts, about four feet off
the ground. “And I worked at
if,
He was beginning to get
pretty good at it, too, when he
got a sore throat and a fever,
when he was in the fourth
grade. The illness dragged
on; he lost mobility in his
legs, and his coordination.
The doctor put him in built-up
shoes. Later, his trouble was
diagnosed as a light case of
polio.
So there went the career on
the high-wire. But a doctor
his mother worked for had an
idea. If John would behave in
school, which had become
somewhat of a problem, he
would let him have an old
saxophone that had been ly-
ing around the house. John
behaved.
“I had my first lesson on
Tuesday and on Friday, I
played the Marine’s Hymn
for an assembly at Midwood
School.”” By the time he was
11, he was playing in a dance
band, for pay. And quietyly,
=
i
Brock In Schoolboy Heaven
he exercised, and in high
school and Junior College, he
payed football.
Wow, he sits in the dimlit
screening room, watching the
day’s rushes of “Rutherford
County Line”. The lawmen
are closing in on the bad guy;
repeater rifles go, ‘‘Pit. Pit-
pit, pit-pit-pit-pit.”’ A car that
should come roaring up
comes,
“HmmmmmMMMM"’.
“We'll fix the
sound-track,’”” John pro-
mises. ‘It’s too bland - we'll
make the car go ‘“WRRRR-
RAAAMMMM!’* And the
guns go “BATTABATTTA!”
Like the skull and bones in
his office, the slimy tombs
and skull throne and alligator
moats inside the cavernous
sets, the blood and even some
of the BOOOMMs, much of
this world of boyhood fantasy
is just that. Illusion. ‘‘It’s not
real. None of it’s real,” John
Brock says, on a tour of the
movie-makers’ domain.
And therein, perhaps, lies
its charm and its delight.
Wednesday, July 10, 1985-KINGS MOUNTAIN HERALD-Page 9B
‘““At my age, being injured was
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Besides coping with severe pain, I missed many
favorite activities. Luckily, my chiropractor helped
... his gentle, painless treatments left me
remarkably free of pain. Now, I can really
#%:_ .. enjoy the prime of my life!”
Traumatic or chronic back
pain, caused by misalignment
of spinal vertebrae, may be
relieved as a chiropractor gently
returns vertebrae to normal
ositions. Such treatments are usually
i painless, and can control or eliminate
back pain.
KINGS MOUNTAIN
CHIROPRACTIC CENTER
108 W. Mountain St.
DR. TERRY R. SELLERS
DR. V. MARK CARDELL
739-7489
...working toward
days without pain.
KINGS MOUNTAIN
HEARING CLINIC
located at
810 West King Street in Kings Mountain, N.C.
The Practice will include
—HEARING TESTS
—HEARING AID EVALUATIONS
—HEARING AID FITTINGS
—HEARING AID SERVICE and REPAIRS
—HEARING AID BATTERIES
Audiologists: Lamar Young, Ph.D.
- Kay Young, M.A.
Telephone: 739-1429
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