“Windy Acres” actors with a great mailbox designed by Roger Danchik

Jay Craven is either a moviemaker, a mentor to film students or mad. More than likely he is all three at once blended together with a few weighty bags of Vermont idiosyncrasies. His credits are impressive and include three full-length films - THE YEAR THAT TREMBLED (2002), A STRANGER IN THE KINGDOM (1999,) and WHERE THE RIVERS FLOW NORTH (1993) - all made with limited budgets. Yet all three movies were critically acclaimed with casts that include a group of well-known performers such as Henry Gibson, Martin Mull, Jonathan Brandis, Martin Sheen, Rip Torn, Tantoo Cardinal, and Michael J. Fox.

This impressive filmography would seem to make Craven a “Hollywood Professional” with sunglasses and a cell phone head set. Nothing could be further from the truth. He is so anti-Hollywood that he lives and produces in an area where cell phones simply do not work. Any true Hollywood type immediately starts to deflate as soon as his cell phone ceases to ring.

Hollywood Professionals want to make a “splash”, usually defined as making big money and getting lots of notice - so that others will return phone calls and he can ignore. Therefore the Hollywood penchant for producing “safe” updated classics and spectacular movies with special effects up the wazoo. It is similar to the large sets and spectacular effects that are current in professional theatrical production. A producer can pay for the spectacular effects and get exactly what he buys. He also has pay and yet, trust in talent and vision, which are still undefined and uncontrollable commodities. Jay Craven (and your humble author) happens to believe that it is this indefinable talent, plus vision and desire that create fine movies. It has undeniably been proven that big money never guarantees good art.

Only a madman would make a TV show in a rural location, with a mostly student/volunteer crew, without working cell phones and where a two hour drive is known as “running out to the store.” It is hard enough to make a TV Sitcom with a union crew, let alone a bunch of hyper-intelligent, hyperactive, hyper-fervent young movie students who are receiving the best OJT training possible.

Yet, that is exactly what Craven does. He spent last summer writing, directing and producing a TV sitcom, “Windy Acres,” and is preparing to film a more challenging movie, Disappearances, next spring. All this happens in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, where according to locals there are blizzards ten months of the year, two or three months of winter and the rest is black fly spring if you’re lucky.

The Northeast Kingdom has nothing in common with the settled civilization of Burlington. This area of Vermont is peculiar, beautiful and self-defined. Working there is similar to entering the Twilight Zone and it is difficult to believe that you are still geographically attached to the rest of the United States. A few examples: In the Northeast Kingdom the police are helpful and polite, many people still do not lock their doors and any store/neighbor is at least a half hour drive no matter where you start (not counting moose accidents). Since the Northeast Kingdom is extremely rural and the residents tend to one-word conversations, cows not only outnumber residents, but they often out-talk them. In no other part of the United States would my 1985 Bronco be considered a flashy new car. To enlarge six drawings to poster size for the shoot, it was easier to find an itinerant artist to paint larger posters then to find a Xerox machine that could enlarge them.

The Northeast Kingdom tries to ignore the laws of science. It is the center of dowsing in the United State as well as having a large Buddhist center. My innkeeper grows a layered public labyrinth for anyone to stumble through in order to dry-clean their karma and wax their chakras. GPS systems are useless and cannot find the orbiting satellites, since “we don’t allow those up here.” The reality of trying to make a movie in the Northeast Kingdom is similar to Noah building a wooden sailing ship in the middle of the desert. It’s seems impossible, you can’t find supplies, your friends will laugh at you, but in the end you might be on to something.

The something is “Windy Acres,” a six episode series for Vermont cable TV. As you might expect from a man who frequently travels and stays in New York and LA, but lives and works in Vermont, the subject of the show is about New Yorkers adapting to life on a Vermont dairy farm.

The humor in “Windy Acres is the adaptations of a New York family to life and the conditions of rural dairy Vermont. A stressed out female New Yorker (Seana Kofoed) with two very urban daughters (played with great gobs of snot by Ariel Kiley and Felicia Hammer) meets a handsome Vermont dairyman (Rusty Dewees) for love and life changing. This is an American romance, a formula as old as this country’s first theatre when it presented a true-blue Yankee instead of a European aristocrat.
The plots of romantic entertainments are rarely complicated. In some way or another, boy has to meet girl, there is an undeniable attraction and they fall in love. What is interesting about these real life issues are the details and the complications. He likes her, she hates him, she’s engaged, he thinks he’s gay and so on and so on as complex as are human feelings.

Our flatlander female New Yorkers must adapt to the life of a true Vermont dairyman. The key words being, “true Vermont.” As this is a series made partially for Vermont public TV, everything had to read accurately to a Vermont audience - including the dairy, the houses, the situations, the cows, the stores, the food, the cats, the trucks, the mud, the cow painted dining room table, the manure, the spring loaded attachable milking stool, the plastic hay covering, the satellite dishes (known caustically as the Vermont State Flower) and the endless expanses of partially landscaped tires. This is not an entertainment that could be made in Hollywood. The humor and charm come from the perhaps exaggerated, but realistic details of the characters and situation.

The reality of this show is greatly helped by the lead actors. The dairyman, Rusty Dewees, has red hair, lots of muscles, a kind of country charm and a genuine sense of the difficulties and ridiculousnesses of life. Besides simply being talented and handsome, he is a true Vermonter and would rather be chopping wood, lifting calves or truck mud racing instead of having double Martinis in an upholstered bar. Where Rusty is large, gentle and mellow, Seana Kofoed, who plays the displaced New York mother of two, is a dynamic rapier of movement, brains and iron-willed determination. This is not a charming simply country romance, this is a duel between two bright adults looking for better lives.

Jay Craven writes, crafts and directs his own visions in his own way. He involves other artists and actors who are also mad enough to work for minimums and the creative opportunity. So, why shouldn’t he be solipsistically mad and trust his inner vision. It is an artistic hubristic madness, but critics from Aristotle on have equated madness with genius. Jay Craven is definitely mad, he definitely mentors young filmmakers and he definitely makes good movies, perhaps Hollywood might end up coming to the Green Mountains.


Special preview of the opening episode on Saturday, October 16th at Champlain College in Burlington! Get a sneak peek at the series, meet members of the cast and crew, and celebrate the inception of this unique Vermont media enterprise! Call 802-592-3190 for ticketing information.