Introduce Yourself : Keeping It Saucy: An Introduction by Adam J. Spencer

That is my head up there. Grannie always said God made a few perfectly shaped heads. The rest he covered with hair.

Stage 32 calls it the JFC, the July Filmmakers Club. My hillbilly brain keeps putting the G back where it belongs: JFG mayonnaise. I’ve quit fighting it.

Maybe that is appropriate. An introduction ought to tell you what is holding the whole thing together.

For me, right now, that thing is A PALE HOLLER.

I’m Adam J. Spencer, a screenwriter, novelist, and concept artist from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

A PALE HOLLER begins with the only known living mature American chestnut, standing at the bottom of one family’s holler. It survived the blight the way anything survives: it keeps a heart. This fall, it is choosing its next one.

Two veteran producers read it and responded strongly enough to send me back into the pages. That rewrite is done. The companion novel is finished as well and circulating with literary agents.

This is a film built through image, silence, sound, ecology, and grief. The locusts, cicadas to everyone outside the holler, matter. The moments when they stop matter more. The mountain is not atmosphere around the story. It is part of the mechanism.

Behind it are several other completed features: the contained sci-fi NO THRONE ROOM, the 1983 UAP conspiracy thriller KERES THRESHOLD, and the magical-realist family drama THE SAME HAND.

This weekend, I’d especially like to meet producers, managers, and executives drawn to elevated genre, regional specificity, and films that trust an audience to listen closely.

Say hello. I promise not to bring the mayonnaise.