‘Indiana Jones’ star talks about Carson McCullers and coming to Columbus

Moviegoers may recognize her as Indiana Jones’ love interest Marion Ravenwood in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or the sequel “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” or as Katy in “Animal House,” or as Jenny Hayden in “Starman.”

Or they may not recognize actress Karen Allen at all, when she comes to Columbus this weekend to mark native author Carson McCullers’ 100th birthday and premiere the film she made of McCullers’ short story “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud.”

They may not recognize her from her earlier roles because she’s a blonde now, and waiting to see whether she needs to stay that way a little longer.

She dyed her hair to star in the movie “A Year by the Sea,” based on the book by Joan Anderson, who recounts retreating to a Cape Cod cottage to re-evaluate her life after her children move away. The 2016 movie is making the rounds at film festivals now, and another may follow.

“We’re talking about the possibility of doing the sequel to this particular film, so I didn’t want to take it back to its normal color and then have to bleach it back again,” Allen said of her hair. “I love being blond because honestly people don’t recognize me very much.”

Her identity will be no mystery Sunday as she introduces the film drawn from McCullers’ story at Columbus’ RiverCenter for the Performing Arts, 900 Broadway. The event starts at 4 p.m. Admission is free, and no tickets or reservations are necessary.

Besides the short film, the program includes monologues from an actress portraying McCullers; “Carson’s Favorite Music,” curated and conducted by Dr. Paul Hostetter of the Schwob School of Music and performed by the Columbus State University Philharmonic Orchestra; and a dramatic excerpt of McCullers’ “The Member of the Wedding” by playwright and poet Scott Wilkerson, directed by Dr. Larry Dooley.

That’s the first half of the celebration, after which guests may have cake and champagne in the lobby before Allen takes the stage to talk about the short film. She also will discuss the movie at noon Monday in University Hall on the CSU main campus off University Avenue. That event is free, too.

She has at least one more engagement on her Columbus calendar: Visiting an aunt and uncle here she hasn’t seen in years. They live in a retirement home.

“I saw them maybe, oh gosh, I’m going to say maybe 15 years ago at a family wedding,” Allen said. “They don’t travel anymore, and I’ve never been to Columbus … so I’m going to have lunch with them on Saturday.”

An early influence

She first read McCullers in high school, starting with the author’s most well-known work, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” the setting for which clearly is Columbus, though a 1968 film based on the book was shot in Selma, Ala. The movie stars Alan Arkin and Sondra Locke.

“I think I may have also seen the film when I was very young, and was very moved by the film,” Allen said. “And then I read later, as a young actor, ‘The Member of the Wedding’ – you know, the play – and ‘The Ballad of the Sad Café.’ … I just got very fascinated by her work, and then, probably by the time I was in my early 20s, I was pretty much just trying to read whatever she’d written I could get my hands on, so I kind of dove into the short stories.”

The story she chose for the film she produced and directed is very short, portraying a brief encounter between a paperboy and an old man in a downtown diner.

Jeffrey DeMunn, who plays the old man, has had many supporting roles in TV shows and movies, including “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” but fans of AMC’s “The Walking Dead” will recognize him as Dale Horvath, though his character was killed off several episodes ago.

What drew Allen to “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud”?

“You know I was just really reading through the short stories, and I came upon it, and it just had a really strong impact on me,” she said. “What specifically made me attach so much to this particular story? I’m not certain, except back in my early 20s and now through my life, I’ve become really a student of Buddhism. And the story itself is kind of a beautiful little Buddhist story, in a sense. So I think I was maybe very intrigued by that, because I felt I very rarely read in American literature things that were so seemingly tuned into that kind of philosophical thinking.”

The old man tells the paperboy how he lost a woman he loved dearly. He says he decided he lost her because he did not know how to love and needed to learn, so he should not have started by trying to love a woman. He had to start by loving something simple, such as a tree, a rock, or a cloud.

Of men who start by loving women, he says: “They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder it is so miserable?”

The lesson

The story illustrates that love comes from within, Allen said: “The lesson that he learns and the wisdom that he gains in the course of telling the story to the boy … is that love actually is inside of us and that it’s a skill, really. It’s not something someone can take away from you. It’s something that you have inside of yourself.”

That is akin to Buddhist philosophy, she said.

The daughter of an FBI agent and a school teacher, she had no hometown growing up because the family moved each time her father was reassigned. But she had a church, because her parents were Presbyterians.

“I grew up in a Presbyterian church,” she said. “The concept that God even is outside of us was a concept I think I very much had grown up with, and I think that when I got into Buddhism, the concept that God is inside of you was a kind of beautiful new concept to me, and somehow this story communicated that to me. I hadn’t quite encountered that before.”

She’s 65 now, and hasn’t encountered much of the South, either, except as a setting in films and literature. She has done some work in North Carolina, and when she was just a toddler her dad worked in Tennessee, in Knoxville and Chattanooga.

The real thing

“I’m very drawn to Southern literature, I have to say, and I always have been,” she said. “In fact the only other script I’ve ever written was based on a Walker Percy novel called ‘The Second Coming.’ … I feel like I almost know the South more through literature than I do through the real experience of being there.”

Columbus will be the real experience.

Though she still takes on acting roles, Allen is drawn more to directing now because of the range of material available. Acting confines a performer to the role; producers and directors can pick any work they want to present.

But the workload’s heavier, and more lengthy. The film “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud” is only about 30 minutes long. By the time she’s done taking it to festivals and other showings, she will have invested three years in the project, she said: “That’s a major commitment, whereas when I direct a play, I might be involved with it for between three to five months.”

She wanted to invest that time in “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud,” a story she read when she was 19 and never forgot, and long wanted to introduce to others.

“It’s hard to not want to share it with people, and honestly, throughout my life, let’s say I’ve known this story for 45 years, I have almost never met anybody who had read it,” she said. “And I think I just want people to have the experience of her as a writer, and the beauty and the depth of her writing…. I feel like in some almost mystical way, I am the caretaker of this story, like I’m meant to bring it to people.”

This story was originally published February 17, 2017 at 3:51 PM with the headline "‘Indiana Jones’ star talks about Carson McCullers and coming to Columbus."