Director Really Out on a Limb

Auditioning humans is grueling enough, but director Jon Avnet and his crew found themselves auditioning trees--272 of them--for a central role in his forthcoming film, “The War.”

The Universal film tells the story of the children of two poor Georgia families in the ‘60s feuding over a fort built from refuse in the most perfect tree imaginable--an 800-year-old angel oak, 60 feet tall, with limbs that swoop down to the ground 100 feet on either side like open, inviting arms.

The children’s feud, in Avnet’s words, “is a war over junk and that becomes the perfect metaphor for what are we fighting for”--the “we” in this case being Americans who are waging a losing battle in Vietnam. Another key plot line centers on Vietnam veteran Jim Simmons (Kevin Costner), father of two of the children involved, grappling with that question and counseling his children (Elijah Wood and Lexi Randall) over the senselessness of fighting over things that don’t matter.

Aside from telling a compelling story in the film (which is to be released Nov. 11), what did matter to Avnet and associate producer Martin Huberty was laying claim to just the right tree--based on a drawing by Avnet’s wife, Barbara, which ran in an ad in the Atlanta Constitution with these words: “The Makers of ‘Fried Green Tomatoes’ Are Back in Georgia: Make Your Tree a Star.”

Letters and Polaroid snapshots poured in from Georgia, Mississippi, the Carolinas and Florida. “There were 90 gazillion resumes,” laughed Huberty. “People would take these pictures of trees in their back yard and put their wives and kids in them, like that would convince us to give them a part in the film.”

One of Huberty’s favorites: a tree that had grown around a metal lawn chair. Another favor ite was what some of the crew called the Charlie Brown tree: a 20-foot tall tree in the middle of a packed parking lot that looked like a stick with a green ball on top--”exactly those kind of trees you drew in the first grade.” It met at least one criterion: There wasn’t a building in sight--just 100 cars. Still, the selections were not exactly the arboreal ideal for the ultimate treefort that would inspire its inhabitants to defend it with life and limb.

The winner, ultimately, was a tree in Beaufort, S.C., actually located at the end of a Marine airbase runway with a road running around it. Avnet had been hesitant to even go see it, since he had wanted a tree near Senoia, Ga., where the movie was being filmed, and where “Fried Green Tomatoes,” his sleeper hit of 1991, had also been filmed. But the South Carolina Film Commission was insistent on Avnet’s flying to their state for a day.

Scout Linda Lee had stopped by a convenience store on the way to the airport to pick up Avnet when she told the clerk about her search. “He told her to drive down the road a mile and she’d find her tree--and there it was,” said Maida Morgan, another location scout.

It matched pictures of the angel oaks Avnet had seen in books, trees native to South Carolina that grow huge over the centuries because their branches twist so much they broke blades when sawed, says Huberty.

After sleeping in the tree three nights, Avnet had a fort designed by Kristi Zea that didn’t use a single nail but was mounted by planks in the four crotches of the tree. The road around the tree was ripped up and the earth was prepped to handle the heavy movie equipment, cranes and trampling by the crew.

“There were other trees that were larger, but there was such a sense of awe about this one,” notes Avnet. “When I was a kid and grew up in Brooklyn, we didn’t have trees like this . . . a world like this to live in. This film is literally about kids trying to build a house of their own.” And that, he says, is something worth defending.*