oak hill – A veteran actor of stage and screen – and one of Fayette County’s own – will offer a glimpse into his career next week.
Labeled “An evening of entertainment with acclaimed actor Michael Martin,” the free event will give those in attendance a look at the career of the multi-talented Martin. The Mount Hope resident will show five short films of his work and take questions from audience members in between. Martin is a Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) actor known professionally as Michael Meredith, and the program is offered to West Virginia State Parks, colleges and universities, craft breweries, theaters, film festivals and dinner theater presentations.
The event will be from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 19, at the Fayette County Public Library Administration Building. Martin is a member of the Oak Hill Public Library’s board of directors.
Those present will get the opportunity to view four short films in their entirety, as well as a reel of some of Martin’s best work performed over a lengthy career.
Martin has acted in major motion pictures such as “The Silence of the Lambs” (as a featured extra), the West Virginia-based and Fayette County-filmed “Matewan,” “Chasers,” “Moving Mountains” and the Daniel Boyd-directed trio “Chillers,” “Strangest Dreams” and “Paradise Park,” as well as numerous short films. He is also long known for his portrayal of Ebenezer Scrooge in local productions of “A Christmas Carol,” including his days at the Princess Theatre in Mount Hope.
In his career, he has also acted in several stage roles for Theatre West Virginia, performed commercials and industrials, and is known for touring productions of “An Evening with Mark Twain” and “Poe, In His Own Words,” the latter based on the life of Edgar Allan Poe.
He is in rehearsals to reprise the role of Scrooge at the Raleigh Playhouse and Theatre in Beckley for a Theatre West Virginia production of “A Christmas Carol” Dec. 13-15. Martin, 76, said he started portraying Scrooge at the age of 29.
“Christmas doesn’t seem like Christmas if I don’t ‘bah’ and ‘humbug’ a little,” he said.
Among the short films featuring Martin in a starring role to be shown on Nov. 19 will be “Down in Number 5,” a 2010 Student Academy Award winner as best narrative short film. It was written by Kim Spurlock and Mai Spurlock Sykes and directed by Kim Spurlock for the New York University School of Film.
Also shown will be “Applebaum,” “The Stranger in the Crowd” and “An Etiology of Fatigue.”
Most short films seen at film festivals are student films, Martin explained. “During the years that have recently passed, I have done a gang of short films,” he said. “A short film is no less a film than a feature length film; it’s just different.” Of the four short films that will be shown on Nov. 19, two of them were entirely made in West Virginia (“Down in Number 5” and “The Stranger in the Crowd”). The other two were made at Ohio University in Athens.
Martin’s grandson, Andrew Martin, appeared in the cast of “Down in Number 5” with him.
While there is no set standard for the length of a short film, Martin says it is generally accepted that most run in the 15-minute range. One of the films he will show next week is 27 minutes in duration.
Martin’s personal film reel that will be aired contains “five minutes of what I consider the very best work I’ve ever done on film. Some of that is short film; some of that is feature.”
Martin is also a former mayor of Mount Hope and for years was the public address announcer at Municipal Stadium in Mount Hope. He and his wife, Nancy, whom he met while she was acting in a play titled “The Member of the Wedding” at the Princess Theatre for the Curtain Callers, still reside in Mount Hope.
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Martin is glad that he has remained active in both film and stage work in recent years.
“At this stage of the game, film is a whole lot easier,” he says. “In film, if you don’t like what you just did, you get an opportunity to do it again, as long as there’s some time remaining.”
The satisfaction of accomplishing solid stage work is also compelling, according to Martin.
“At Theatre West Virginia, we put a brand new musical (“Paradise Park: The Musical”) on the stage – that nobody had ever touched before, ever seen before – and we did it in 11 rehearsals (music and acting),” said Martin. “That’s crazy.”
Martin, who was born and raised in Mount Hope, remains a committed union film actor. “The union looks after me; the union protects me.”
He said he has no film projects on the horizon, but he would “absolutely” still accept a role if one becomes available.
He has fond memories of much of his film work, including “The Silence of the Lambs” in the early 1990s.
“You do something like ‘The Silence of the Lambs,’ you’re going on location, and one of the first people you run into on location is Jodie Foster, who has just won an Academy Award (best actress for “The Accused” in 1989) the year before,” he said.
“That was a thrill; and I didn’t have a line in the film.” He did, however, work in at least one scene with Foster in the movie.
Martin said he was “impressed” by Foster’s dedication to her craft, and the fact that she never displayed negative temperament even while shooting a scene that took much longer than expected. Foster also won the Academy Award for best actress in “The Silence of the Lambs” in 1992, as well as being nominated for three other Oscars.
Of “Matewan,” which was filmed in Thurmond, Martin said, “It absolutely is a great movie.”
He recalled numerous residents of the region showing up to watch filming in Fayette County in the mid-1980s. While mentioning now-prominent actors such as Chris Cooper, David Strathairn and Mary McDonnell who were in the cast, Martin had kind words for James Earl Jones, who portrayed the character Few Clothes Johnson in the John Sayles-directed film. “As long as there was a grandmother in the crowd who wanted to say hello to him and have their picture taken with him, he stayed,” he said. “He was a very, very nice gentleman.” Martin said he was able to spend some time with Jones during an afternoon at Grandview.
In Martin’s time during the “Matewan” filming, while on location in Thurmond, he said, “On this particular day, we were finished with lunch.” The director paired actors up in groups to prepare for an upcoming scene, and Martin was teamed up with a man who “happened to be Danny Boyd, but I didn’t know that. For the rest of the day we were together, and we talked.”
Boyd gauged Martin’s interest in doing West Virginia-based movies, and that later led to his appearance in three Boyd films beginning with “Chillers.” Martin was the only actor who acted in the “Paradise Park” movie and later acted in the TWV musical based on that film.
“Most of the theater I had done here in West Virginia, I had done in this part of the state,” Martin recalled. He later started working with Kanawha Valley actors and actresses and “really expanded my view and my outlook, really.” One of the actors he worked with during the Boyd movies was the late Neale Clark, a Fayette countian who was his roommate while shooting “Paradise Park” in Kanawha County, and appeared in “Matewan.”
“Neale and I had been doing theater together for years here in Mount Hope,” Martin said. “Neale was a good friend.”
Martin added, “I have done ‘Hatfields and McCoys’ for a very long time, and in recent years, I have assumed the role of Randall McCoy, the patriarch of the McCoy family, and enjoy that role very much ….” He hopes he will be invited back for that or other future roles with Theatre West Virginia.
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