Behind the Scenes with Larry Massett, producer of Hannibal: The Ghost of Mark Twain

Larry had these thoughts to share with us, about how Hannibal: The Ghost of Mark Twain came together:


It was the summer of 1983 (Scott Carrier thinks it was the summer of 1984, but his memory nowadays -- a diet of pork rinds and Diet Pepsi eventually takes a toll.) I'd been reading Twain's Life on the Mississippi and thought it would be a good idea to canoe the whole river with a tape recorder. A good idea, for sure; but who would pay for it?

There was a couple, Jennifer and Ted Stanley, who were always being credited as funders on All Things Considered at the time. Since they appeared to be real people, not an institution, I wrote them a letter. No independent producer had ever approached them before. In fact, they weren't sure what an independent producer was. Ted phoned Susan Stamberg and asked if I was okay; she said something very nice; a check came in the mail. The check was large enough to buy a canoe and an old Chevy van to haul the canoe, and a dog as well, possibly to guard the canoe. As an afterthought Scott and I bought tape recorders too -- the old Sony cassette models that ate C-cell batteries.

The canoe was a hightech Kevlar item meant for whitewater racing. It turned out to be alarmingly tippy on flat water. Any canoe carrying a six-month-old Siberian husky is liable to tip. Plus the barges on the Mississippi could not see the canoe or pretended not to see it, and while they might not have crushed us on purpose, there was every chance they were going to do so by accident. Did Mark Twain paddle a canoe? Of course not, he knew better.

We decided to use the canoe where it would do the most good, as a sort of wind vane on top of the Chevy. Somewhere Scott found a stencil for a Coca-Cola logo and painted it in big red letters on the side of the van. This was a stroke of genius. People loved Coca-Cola and were always happy to see a Coca-Cola truck. Sometimes, in small towns, they hoped we were coming to fix the Coke machine. There are a lot of broken Coke machines south of St. Louis but we refused to fix them. No matter; there are always town parks along the river where boat landings used to be and railroads used to stop, and people go there to sit and talk. And talk and talk and talk and they don't care if a stranger hauls out a tape recorder for no reason. I still think this is the best way to collect tape: randomly, for no reason, and in no hurry.

Hannibal was a decrepit and ghostly little town. People kept telling us about haunted houses and mysterious lights. I don't know why; ghosts never came up anywhere else. The pilot of the tugboat in Hannibal was bored and took a liking to us. His favorite pastime was to put the tug in a 360-degree spin and blast down the river while chugging Buds. "I am an alcoholic," he said. "Every now and then I go to AA to get in touch with reality. On the other hand," he added, popping another Bud as the boat whirled around, "screw reality." This is not on the tape, I hope. Anyway the place seemed haunted, and that is why I wrote that line about Claudette Colbert at the end. Scott never understood why he had to say it. I didn't either but it seemed to sum things up.

We spent the whole summer traveling the river. I came home with a mountain of tape ... and an empty wallet. The tape had to spend the winter in the closet while I worked on other projects to pay the rent. As time passed I began to dread the the letter that would surely come from the Stanleys, demanding to know what had happened to those Mississippi shows. One day the letter came. "We were wondering what happened to those Mississippi shows," it said. "Maybe you need some help to finish them. Will this do?" Enclosed was a huge check.

That is how funding was done in the golden age. Eventually there was a series on ATC, with pieces from Hannibal, from St. Louis, from Tomato, Arkansas (the smallest post office in the lower 48) and from a barge school. The director of the barge school -- actually a mosquito-infested soybean field where students pretended to lash together cement slabs representing barges -- paid a wonderful tribute to own business. "The great thing about this industry," he said, "is that we'll give a guy a second chance. Some industries, if you've had a little trouble, maybe a felony conviction or whatever, they're not going let you advance. We're not like that."

I'd be surprised if All Things Considered would run these pieces today. Even back in '84 or '85, Robert Siegel had a problem with them. He asked me to meet him in his office to discuss the Hannibal show.

"The way you use music," he said, "I can't tell what's real and what's not. Is that the sound of the tugboat or is it music?

Hmm ... he was right, I had added creepy synthesizer sounds here and there ... how to explain it?

"It's the style." I said "It's...." It's what? Think fast. "It's Neo-Gothic," I said.

"Neo-Gothic?"

"Exactly. Neo-Gothic."

"I see," he said. "Well, I agree with you. Or I would if I had any idea what you're talking about."