Published: February 21, 2009 10:14 pm      

Hank Williams film in pre-production

OAK HILL — New Year’s Eve revelers were still fast asleep when a baby blue Cadillac eased into a Pure Oil gas station, bearing the corpse of a prodigy who set the country music world aflame but let his own candle burn out before realizing the full scope of his genius.

That was 1953, and the man was none other than Hank Williams, whose music still digs deep into the human psyche and touches passions that run as far as the music scale itself.

Love, loneliness, joy, despair, workaday blues — if humans sense it, Williams wrote about it. After all, he had been there. Numerous trips.

Now, 56 years after his passing at age 29, a deputy sheriff in the legend’s home state of Alabama is moving closer to filming a movie about the troubadour, hoping to use it, in part, as a springboard to promote tourism in the Heart of Dixie.

Jeff Queen is still in the development and pre-production stages while working out budget details, and then he plans to start casting for what tentatively will be called “Lonesome Cowboy,” fitting in the sense that Williams’ band was known as “The Drifting Cowboys” and the singer certainly knew a thing or two about detachment.

No one can for sure say just where Williams died, but the last stop on his “Final Journey” was in this mountain town in West Virginia, a cold, rain-filled and generally dreary New Year’s Eve.

His chauffeur, Charles Carr, had stopped at the old Skyline Drive-In on the outskirts of Oak Hill and couldn’t rouse his famous passenger. From there he drove the short distance to the gas station, summoned help, and a legend was born.

“We want to tell the real story,” says Queen, who helps keep law and order in the same town that is home to his beloved Crimson Tide.

“Just like they did in ‘Walk the Line’ with Johnny Cash’s addictions. But we certainly don’t want to tabloidize anything. We just want to tell it from the heart as real as we can make it — the good, the bad, everything in between.”

Queen drew his inspiration from “Hank,” a biography written by Ralph Moore in Lineville, Ala., a stalwart fan, one of many who have made several excursions into southern West Virginia seeking support for a Williams museum.

A fledgling writer himself, Queen was introduced to Moore and learned of his book that deals to some extent with Williams’ aborted effort to reach Canton, Ohio, around that ill-fated holiday week for a comeback concert after falling out of grace with the Grand Ol’ Opry over his drinking.

“I thought, what a great story,” Queen recalled.

Queen viewed it as a timely opportunity to produce a movie, given that the Alabama Legislature is working toward a production incentives package.

“This is a great way to try and promote that package and really promote the state of Alabama,” he said.

No parts are set in stone, but Queen is seriously looking at the lead, and 22-year-old Christopher Malpass has passed muster in two departments — he bears a resemblance to the singer and can mimic his singing almost perfectly.

“Basically, this is an Alabama story,” Moore says. “And there’s 10 times more to that story than anyone ever thought there was. I feel like this movie can make it. Everybody knows Hank. Everybody loves Hank. Even the young kids.”

To keep the movie historically accurate, some filming must be done in southern West Virginia — in Bluefield, where Carr and Williams stopped at an all-night diner, and, of course, in Oak Hill.

That old Pure Oil station is gone, razed by its owner after the town leaders refused to enter into a lease. Moore and other fans, such as Bennie Gardner of Montgomery, Ala., wanted to see it converted into a museum, as did former state Sen. Shirley Love, D-Fayette, who finally succeeded, after a decade-long struggle, to get part of a highway leading into his hometown named after the singer.

“It’s very disappointing not to be able to have some of those locations available to us,” Queen acknowledged. “We’ll do what we can to get as close as possible to them.”

Working with a partner, Jason Kendall, Queen hopes to start production late in the year if all goes without a major hitch in the pre-production period.

“This is our first project, and we’re going to shoot for the stars,” he said. “We may land on the roof, but we’re going to shoot for the stars.”

— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com