Ball Busters

This summer, the South rose again.

The uprising started in June, when Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt gave his blessing to a one-day flying of the Confederate flag in a Higginsville Civil War cemetery in honor of Confederate Memorial Day. The flag hadn't flown on state-owned soil since January 2003, when then-Gov. Bob Holden banned it.

The incident sparked protests, including a demonstration by the NAACP at the governor's mansion in Jefferson City.

Bizarrely, Blunt spokesman Spence Jackson called upon the ghost of Abraham Lincoln to defend the governor.

"The furthest thing from Abraham Lincoln's mind would have been to interfere with the honoring of fallen Confederate soldiers by families, comrades or their ancestors," Jackson said.

(The fact that truth was stranger than fiction led a surprising number of Pitch readers to believe a satirical June 23 spoof that "reported" on a controversy raging after downtown arena construction workers supposedly unearthed the bodies of six whore-mongering rebel soldiers.)

The rebel revival continued in July when commercials for the widely panned Dukes of Hazzard movie played nonstop prior to the adaptation's August 5 release. Although it was conspicuously absent from the movie's trailers, the Confederate flag is emblazoned atop Bo and Luke Duke's orange '69 Dodge Charger, affectionately known as "the General Lee." (According to The Wall Street Journal, the filmmakers feared that excluding the flag from the Dukes' Dodge would have offended longtime fans of the TV show. So they compromised with concerned execs at Warner Bros., who told the Journalthat the movie's treatment of the flag would be "tongue in cheek" and "derided as an inappropriate symbol of the dark past.")

Despite its absurdity, the recent Confederate cavalcade reveals something disturbing about the unfinished business of the Civil War — and the timing couldn't be better for Lawrence filmmaker Kevin Willmott and his producer, Rick Cowan.

They appreciate the free publicity.

Nearly two years ago, their faux documentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America shocked the Sundance Film Festival. In the film, Willmott evokes an alternate world in which the South has won the Civil War. Slavery is still a thriving industry, with the goods sold on TV's Slave Shopping Network. Instead of "The Star Spangled Banner," the national anthem is "Dixie."

At Sundance, scores of people were turned away from the movie's sold-out screenings. Entertainment Weekly lauded C.S.A. Melvin Van Peebles, considered the godfather of black cinema, praised Willmott, saying he'd been aiming for something similar with his own groundbreaking Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song,the story of an African-American sex worker who beats down a couple of white cops after seeing them assault a black revolutionary. In a matter of days, Willmott and Cowan sold the film's American distribution rights to IFC Films. IFC set a release date for early 2005. Then ... nothing.

"They bought it in the heat of the passion of Sundance. They saw hundreds of people being turned away in the waiting line; they saw what was there," Cowan tells the Pitch. "Time passes, time passes, the new-car smell wears off, they show it around and people are like, 'I don't know if we can get people in to see that,' and it gives them cold feet."

"This is like you're handing them an atomic bomb with the fuse lit, and you're saying, 'When you going to show it?'" Willmott adds. "And they're like, 'Whoa, man! Let's talk about this for a second.'

"We've always called this the most controversial film that never had sex, violence or bad language," Willmott continues. "When you question your inherent moral worth and your belief system and your history, it offends people. And it upsets theater owners, too. And people, as liberal as they try to be, have a tough time getting their head around it."

The bomb will finally drop on October 7. That's when IFC has scheduled C.S.A.'s release. In the South.

C.S.A.is funny, but to appreciate the humor, audiences must summon the courage to laugh at the absurdity of enslaving an entire race of people.

On one level, the film parodies Civil War documentarian Ken Burns, following the PBS icon's blueprint of talking heads spliced with archival photos, paintings and drawings. However, instead of an epic saga incorporating battlefield commentary, à la Shelby Foote, Willmott presents a supposedly controversial British documentary about the rise of the Confederacy.

It recounts how French and British forces joined with the South at Gettysburg to rout the North. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant surrenders to Gen. Robert E. Lee. Harriet Tubman disguises Lincoln in blackface — when he balks, she tells him, "We're both niggers now, Mr. President" — and they flee via the Underground Railroad. They're caught, though; Tubman is hanged and Lincoln is tried as a war criminal.

Willmott wickedly weaves in his own footage of an aged Lincoln living in Canadian exile ("Now I, too, am a Negro without a country," the would-be Great Emancipator says) as well as Adolf Hitler visiting his Confederate allies. Willmott also blurs his fiction with reality, altering archive photos of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon and the soldiers at Iwo Jima — in both cases, they're raising the Confederate flag.