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Green's folk hero/outlaw bears the name of Earl Skiller, a true mountain man and a masterful moonshiner. Skiller, born of a woman who practiced "witchy" craft, is hounded by lawmen who vow to catch him in the act of moonshining and bring him to jail. Lawmen taunt him until Skiller, pushed too far, chops off the head of Deputy Sheriff Mitchell Sanger.
Lawmen turn Skiller's home of Hame Tree Gap into a war zone, trying to move in on the outlaw, who, like Rudolph, knows the mountain terrain better than those wearing a badge.
Skiller tells his young protégé Logan Guffey, "Build a fire at night and study it and listen to the woods, and let them get in you where you can feel them and they can feel you, and ye'll begin to know things inside ye own head. And if ye learn what's in ye own head, ye'll know something about every man that walks."
In explaining the book title, Skiller reveals, "People think that rattlesnakes rattle and make noise all the time to give warning, but they don't, not even most of the time. The biggest warning is the silence around them."
During the two-year manhunt, Skiller kills seven more lawmen, saying, "They asked to be killed and I killed them."
Just like the tales of Rudolph sneaking into "civilization" and taking food and supplies (but leaving just compensation), Skiller's trips down the mountain mock the lawmen. Suspicious of the "justice" system, many of the mountain people befriend Skiller as they consider him more a folk hero than an outlaw.
Like Robin Hood and Jesse James and even William the Bravehart, this backwoods fugitive typifies a certain breed of manly honor.
Green, a native of Haywood County, said, "Earl, unlike many bootleggers, did not seek power at the customer's expense. He did not care to be a father to them, nor did he ask deference from his customers, especially those addicted to alcohol, nor sex from women who showed up needing a drink. He only wanted them to enjoy it.
As a poet puts down his lines and a fiddler saws off his tunes, so did Earl give people his best, to enjoy it and to be complemented only for the quality."
Without giving away the plot, let's just say that Skiller's last actions portray a true man of honor.
"The story has a sense of redemption; that's why I liked it," said Owensby, who is "a Southerner who does southern movies. I like to show the film industry that Southerners can be heroes, rather than retards."
Owensby's wife, Debra, a screenwriter, is working on the screenplay now with Green.
"We won't start filming until I've approved the script," the filmmaker said. "Their job is to write things till they cost a fortune. My job is to say, 'cut, cut, cut!'"
Owensby, who delights in challenging the "Hollywood way," produced 38 pictures in the past 28 years. While "Silence of the Snakes" will be filmed here in the mountains, editing will take place at his Shelby studio, which features a sprawling campus of eight sound stages and a 100,000-gallon film tank complete with underwater camera bays.
Featured on "60 Minutes," "David Letterman" and "Good Morning, America," Owensby was dubbed by "GQ" magazine as "Dixie DeMille." Beginning with his first film, "Challenge," he's produced such films as "Florida Straits," "Asimov's Probe," "Rottweiler," "Hit the Road Running" and the "Abyss," starring Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.
Even as a young boy, Owensby was fascinated by film and after seeing the "Sands of Iwo Jima" was determined to become a Marine. He did and so did Green.
"Lewis is a tremendous writer, and that's why we're reviving his book," Owensby said of Green's 1935 novel.
Green's writing style complements the rugged terrain of the mountains. The reader trudges through a heavy-misted forest of confusing side trails, struggling to map the rough paths together.
Some of those paths take the reader on the raucous drinking binges of one of the book's characters, Paul Fortune, that are so vividly written, you feel like you're gagging along with Fortune's dry heaves. Other paths reveal similar unsavory and drag-down depressing encounters. Along the way you get lost on a stumbling trail of Logan Guffey's many near-death encounters.
Just as you start wishing you had never gone there in the first place, the fog lifts and a new pathway opens, finally leading the reader clearly and quickly to the destination.
Owensby's action-packed movie-making skills will hopefully cut through Green's maze of trails and focus on the hunt for Earl Skiller. Production should begin by spring of next year, Owensby said.
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