Scott T. Griffin, who likes to be called Scott T., is an independent reality-television producer, so the equivalent action he took was to call his assistant, who was still asleep at that early hour, and instruct her to track Cameron down as quickly as she could. “Because about ten seconds after the idea struck, I started groaning,” he recalls. “I was sure I was too late to this. You gotta understand: This business, it operates like a warp-speed gold rush. Someone finds a nugget and then two hours later there’s sixty or ninety miners on the scene with pickaxes. And this thing, the more I thought about it in those ten seconds—this is what development people call a ‘loud’ idea. You’ve got your God shit, you’ve got your war vet stuff, you’ve got America. The material pitches itself—hell, it writes itself. So ten seconds later I’m groaning, I’m smacking the steering wheel, because I’m sure that Mark Burnett has already signed this guy to a thousand-year exclusive.”
But Burnett hadn’t, as Griffin learned several hours later when Tanya Harris responded to the effusive voicemail he’d left her. No one had. So Griffin instructed his assistant to book three plane tickets to Biloxi—one for her, one for him, and one for Griffin’s regular cameraman, Huntley Benyus, otherwise known as Honeybun. The assistant, a twenty-two-year-old Alaska native named Kaitlyn Douglas, had only been working for Griffin for three months, since graduating from Montana State University in the spring, but in those months she’d developed something of a crush on her boss, which she did not mind advertising. “I’m excited that I get to see your home,” she said to him. “I’ll pretend you’re taking me home to meet the parents.”
When Griffin, who was married at the time, batted down this comment, she responded mock-poutingly, “I’ll guess I’ll just be meeting your office’s parents, then.”
His “office’s parents,” as Douglas put it, is clumsy yet effective shorthand for the wellspring of Griffin’s creative energy, that being the South. The opportunity for him to visit and with any luck work in his native region was, indeed, a residual factor in Griffin’s interest. “The story was the story, okay? Wherever it might’ve happened,” he says. “But that it was in Mississippi—yeah, you can glance just about anywhere in this office to see how that would’ve been some icing for me.” Griffin, who is forty-four, fashionably long-bearded, doughy in a way that suggests over-consumption more than under-exertion, and most often seen wearing an obscurely soulful vintage concert T-shirt, has a habit of lubricating his speech with arbitrary squirts of laughter, as though to keep reminding his listener how absurd everything is—from the television industry to life itself. Any veil of earnestness is subject to constant piercing. This is a tic he may have picked up from his father, a longtime salesman for a Memphis liquor distributor who somehow managed, Griffin says, “to be total bullshit and zero bullshit at the same time,” or in other words the perfect salesman. Unlike his parents—both of them natives of Illinois—Griffin was born in the South, but only because his father was transferred there for work in the late 1960s. His Southernness, then, might also be said to be total bullshit and zero bullshit at the same time. He was raised in Germantown, a blandly prosperous suburb of Memphis, but as a teenager began aligning himself with the gnarlier terrain just across the border in Mississippi. “Germantown felt like capital-A Anywhere,” he says. “Mississippi, though—that was Somewhere.”
One cannot sketch Griffin’s career—or hope to understand any time spent in his office—without pausing to examine this distinction of his. His career began when he was an undergraduate at the University of Mississippi, majoring in Southern Studies. “I was deep, deep into the blues scene there, that raw hill-country drone stuff,” he explains. “But I couldn’t play an instrument, I was tone deaf, and to be honest I couldn’t dance worth a shit either. So I started toting a camera around.” The footage from that camera, casually gathered, found its way into a thirty-six-minute documentary film entitled Ain’t No Goddamn Picnic, which won the university’s William Ferris Student Documentary Award, helping to secure Griffin’s placement in the master’s program in Documentary Studies at Duke University. (It was also the seed for his television debut, a seven-episode series called American Juke Joint that ran on the Discovery Channel in 2005.) “The texture of the South was what really galvanized me as a filmmaker,” he says. “The visual texture, yeah, but the cultural texture too. It’s so rich, so craggy. You can focus that camera on anything and already you’ve got half a story. Already you’ve got tension. You see that in William Eggleston’s photos, right? That narrative flatness that isn’t really flat at all. It looks like nowhere but it’s just fucking bleeding somewhere.”
During the decade-long interlude between Duke and Discovery, Griffin says, he devoted himself “to being a pretentious asshole.” (Cue the spurt of laughter.) “I fancied myself the Jean Rouch of the South, or at least aspired to be the Jean Rouch of the South,” he says, referring to the French filmmaker and anthropologist considered the father of documentary ethnofiction and a pioneer of cinéma-vérité. Griffin’s laugh is never more frequent nor derisive than when he’s describing the bohemian languor of these formative years, yet it’s also not a subject he easily extinguishes. His ambition, back then, was to create Art, and while few people, least of all Griffin himself, would affix that label to his oeuvre—World’s Rowdiest Bars (producer, 2006–07, Spike TV); Moonshine Confidential (co-executive producer, 2008, Discovery); Lot Lizards (producer, 2010, Spike TV); Hoss Trammell: Airplane Repo Man (executive producer, 2012–14, History Channel)—he nurtures a view of himself as an artist in exile, albeit economic exile. “When you’re in your twenties, you know, pretension comes easy,” he explains. “Everything’s about the art. Everything’s about never surrendering. Then you hit your thirties and look around and most of your art posse, they’ve dropped out. The guy everyone thought was such hot shit, the one destined to be the next Les Blank—that guy’s got a kid in diapers and drives around in a van that says Dan the Dog Fence Man. And you pity that dude. Then you hit your forties and somehow things get reversed. Dan the Dog Fence Man, he’s got a pool and three honor students and a condo down in Alys Beach. He’s the one pitying the guy who’s maxing out credit cards to make some twenty-six-minute short that only seven people at a Nebraska film fest will ever see. So with me, where I am—” With a subtle wince he pauses here, as though to brace himself for sincerity. “I feel like I found the medium zone, you know? I’m making reality TV, yeah—let’s be honest, sometimes I’m making crap TV—but I’m still holding a camera. And in my own way, in my own less-than-crappy moments, I’m telling some kind of truth. Whatever the aesthetic was, whatever film meant to me—I’m still bound to that.”
Truth, art, and the South: These undergirded the talking points that Griffin deployed on Cameron and Tanya Harris when he flew to Biloxi to meet with them. What Griffin was seeking from Cameron was the latter’s signature on an exclusive option for Griffin to produce something about Cameron’s recovery and its aftermath—“and that’s as clear as it was in my mind,” Griffin says, “just something: a one-hour doc, a series, I didn’t know.” During the two-hour meeting he told Cameron and Tanya that his upbringing in the South meant he wouldn’t “Honey Boo Boo them,” or play their Southernness for laughs or exotic zing. And that he was different from the other “sleazehounds” who might come around bearing similar option contracts—that his background was as an artist, not an exploiter, not a money guy, not a quick-hit producer, thereby equipping him with a sensitivity that was rare in the television ecosystem. (“I’m a non-sociopathic human being,” he told them. “Do you know how many of us there are in the TV biz? Seven of us. Seven, okay? We find one more and we can have a volleyball game.”) And that unlike other producers who believed in maintaining a rigid distance between talent and producer—refusing even to divulge personal contact information so as to insulate themselves from later blowback—he believed in a more collaborative relationship. “This is your story,” he told Cameron. “No
t mine. Yours. I respect the shit out of that, okay?”
And as for truth?
“Thing is, man, we don’t know what exactly happened,” Cameron said at one point. They were gathered in the Harrises’ living room: Cameron and Tanya, Griffin and Douglas. Tanya had served everyone Gatorade in red Solo cups. “My doctor, she’s as confused as anyone,” Cameron went on. “All the tests she’s run, they ain’t adding up. We had a priest here the other day”—Griffin noticed the way Cameron deferred to Tanya even when making a mild factual point such as this one—“and he’s thinking it’s a miracle, you know. Like, full on. God’s hand and shit. So it’s just like, I don’t know…this happened.” He cranked a leg upward. “This just…it happened, you know? And no one knows why.”
Flexing his fingertips together as he leaned forward, Griffin asked, “But you want to know why, right? Why and how?”
“Hell yeah we do,” said Tanya, with Cameron nodding in agreement.
“Then think of us like a private investigation team that’s going to work on your behalf,” Griffin said. He laughed here, characteristically, but the laugh was muted, half-choked, as though something had caught in his throat. “We’ll be the ones reaching out to experts and doctors and theologian types, trying to figure this out. Because those people? Honestly, dude? They won’t talk to you. They’re not going to return your calls. ‘Cameron Harris? Who the hell’s that?’ You get what I’m saying? But you know who everyone talks to? Everyone? TV. Everyone talks to TV.” Still flexing his fingers, Griffin paused to allow this point time to get sponged into their minds. “Whatever the truth is about why you couldn’t walk before, and why you can right now—we can get you closer to it than you can get alone. It won’t be just you and your doctor and your priest trying to figure this out here in Biloxi. You’ll have the full resources and might of a network behind you. That’s not a small thing. It’s a freakin’ huge thing really.” Then with an analogy he tried appealing to Cameron’s military service: “It’s like air support showing up, man. Every rocket you could need. Aimed anywhere you want. You get what I’m saying?”
The analogy hit its target, Griffin decided; the nod Cameron accorded it was firm, strong-jawed. Having pitched dozens and dozens of subjects over the years, some of whom (moonshiners, truck-stop prostitutes) he’d been asking to perform illegal or degrading activities onscreen, and being furthermore wired with his father’s salesman DNA, Griffin could sense when he was closing a sale. He knew what the ionic charge of momentum felt like. Hence his calculated retreat: “Just think on it for the night, okay?” he said. “Y’all talk it over. It’s a very personal thing. And it’s a powerful thing—TV, I mean. TV can change your life. And while most of those changes end up positive, I can’t promise every one of them will. But I’ve been in this business long enough—and I’ve got a core in here” (slapping his chest) “that actually gives a shit, you know?—to know how to manage this stuff. To make sure you feel in control. To make sure you get that a TV show doesn’t last forever but this human thing that we’ve got going, you and me, this mutual relationship—that does. So I’m not laying any pressure on you, okay? The only thing I’ll ask, and it’s small, is that if someone else swoops in with a pitch, you give me another chance to talk before you sign anything.”
“I appreciate that, man, I really do,” Cameron said. He swung his head to look at Tanya for a moment; she responded with a lazily encouraging shrug. “I like what you said about helping us find out the truth.”
“That’s going to be the entire purpose of what we do,” Griffin said, snorting out a laugh. “That’s the show right there. That’s the steak on the plate.”
To his sister Cameron finally said, “You got any issues, Tan?”
When Griffin left the Harris house he carried with him the signed option contract for which he’d come plus two signed appearance releases. Once in the rental car he whooped and punched the air, all but peeling out as he drove from Reconfort Avenue. “Did you see the scar on that dude’s face?” he said to Douglas. His excitement was apparent in the manic way he was driving, texting, and talking simultaneously—gunning the engine, flurrying his iPhone’s keypad, almost slurring his sentences together. “Goddamn. He’s got this wounded Steve McQueen thing going. I was figuring we’d be dealing with some meathead, you know? Some big-ass chunk of Army Strong. But this guy…fuck me, I hope he doesn’t get washed out on camera. You remember me telling you about that subway musician show, the one that never went anywhere? The one about the punk chick and the ancient Chinese violinist? That chick had this amazing elfin vibe to her—this fragile, Björk thing about her that fucking killed you in person. But you saw her on camera and it was like: Who’s the talking mouse? The camera just shrank her. But he’ll show up. He’ll totally show up. Can you not see the opening shot? Him in his wheelchair? That little shitball store…?”
That night, Griffin and Douglas and Honeybun ate dinner at a casino restaurant beside the beach. Champagne bottles were drained and replaced. Griffin launched into a rant about the objectionable presence of burrata cheese on a menu billed as “New Southern.” (“I hate when ‘New Southern’ means adding some Benton’s country ham to a Thomas Keller dish.”) And then later that night, according to documents filed eleven months later in Los Angeles in Griffin’s divorce, he and Douglas slept together for the first time. The mood was celebratory, loose, a little unhinged. They had a TV show on their hands. “More than that,” Griffin says. “We all felt sure we had a hit on our hands.”
Over the next three days the trio produced what’s called a “sizzle reel”: a four-minute teaser for Griffin to exhibit in his pitch to networks. Griffin, who admits to liking movie trailers often more than movies, is particularly deft with these, and the reel he crafted for what he was then calling “The Rising” is a masterwork of this sub rosa genre: It begins with combat footage from the war in Afghanistan—unruly mountain ranges as glimpsed from a helicopter’s gun port, AK-47–toting Taliban fighters slipping behind boulders, infantrymen scrambling for cover in copter-flattened poppy fields, tracer fire, random explosions, soldiers shouting at one another in the hot chaos of battle, more explosions, and then a montage of wounded men (including harrowing close-up cellphone-camera footage of a wounded soldier’s blood-spattered grimace)—as all the while the 78-rpm scratch-sound of the blues artists Bukka White and Memphis Minnie singing “I Am in the Heavenly Way” swells from a background whisper to a foreground roar. It’s a Holy Roller gospel number the duo recorded in 1930, yet White’s voice has an unholy, gravelly timbre to it as though his drink of choice was turpentine on the rocks, with actual rocks. Then the screen goes suddenly black, the music does a split-second fade, and a static-edged voice, audibly stressed, announces, “I have a nine-line medevac. Are you ready to copy? Over?”
What follows is a wide, Eggleston-esque shot of Cameron slumped in his old wheelchair in the otherwise empty parking lot of the Biz-E-Bee. It’s sunset, the sky behind the store smeared with clouds so furiously and unnaturally orange as to evoke pollution more than splendor. The shot lingers, the only audio the gray noisescape of unseen traffic on Division Street. Then we hear Cameron’s voice: “I was paralyzed from the waist down by a bomb in Afghanistan in two thousand ten. There wasn’t any way I was ever gonna walk again.” At this point the camera is slowly, almost imperceptibly zooming closer, yard by yard. A rapid-fire series of re-created shots follows—Tanya pushing Cameron down Reconfort Avenue, Cameron in his wheelchair playing a video game, Tanya grunting as she hoists her brother into his bed—before returning to the Biz-E-Bee, the zoom having continued through the intervening montage. “When the feeling came, I didn’t know what was happening to me,” we hear Cameron say, as the camera arrives at a close-up and lingers on his scar. “I just…” It sounds like his voice is cracking here, though it wasn’t; Griffin added that effect in post-production. “I just stood up and walked. Something told me I could walk. And I did.�
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In the remaining three minutes, during which Bukka White and Memphis Minnie resume their singing, we see Cameron and Tanya in interview shots mixed with scenes of them interacting. There’s also a shot of a priest confirming that Cameron’s recovery was in his view a bona fide miracle, but this was not Father Ace—this was an actor friend of Griffin’s in Los Angeles, reading lines Griffin wrote for him (Griffin also wrote Cameron’s lines).
What’s otherwise noteworthy about those three minutes is how Griffin chose to depict Tanya: almost exclusively as comic relief. Regarding her exchange with Ollie in the Biz-E-Bee, we see her saying: “I’ve hit men with a lot of things but never no box of Cap’n Crunch before.” Later she’s seen rolling her eyes as she delivers a variation on her joke about fetching beer for her brother: “When he walks to the fridge to get his own damn beer, that’ll be the real miracle.” Then there’s a briefly absurd scene wherein Tanya is seen encouraging her brother to dance: “Come on, baby bro. Let’s see if them new legs came with some hot moves.” (According to Tanya, this moment was plucked out of context; she was making a joke after Honeybun asked them for some movement as he was setting up a shot.) Cameron emerges from the sizzle reel as something of a tortured Hamlet figure—a man gnawing at the fact of his existence, with even his beer-drinking depicted as some downhome strain of philosophical inquiry—while Tanya fills the role of the gravediggers: as coarse comedy, as a buxom, Fritos-chomping, tension-easing fool. “I wanted to inject some warmth into the reel,” is how Griffin defends this. “I was afraid of the pitch coming across as too religious or deadly serious. I needed to show some post-miracle joy, you know?”
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