Main Street

The black-and-white shots that appear in the opening minute were made in Durham, N.C., in the late 1930s by H. Lee Waters (1902-1997), an itinerant photographer from Lexington, N.C. During the later years of the Great Depression, Waters earned money by visiting more than one hundred towns in North Carolina and surrounding states and shooting 16mm film of everyday scenes and people. He would arrange to exhibit his films in a local theater where the movies were shot. In an era when movie camera ownership was rare, and long before home video cameras became common, people would flock to the theaters to see themselves and their neighbors in moving pictures. Many of Waters's films have been collected and archived in North and South Carolina. One of his films, made in Kannapolis, N.C. in 1941, was added to the National Film Registry in 2005. Other samples of his work can be seen in "The Cameraman Has Visited Our Town" on folkstreams.net.

Georgiana is talking to one of the workers at the warehouse and says that tobacco used to be ground up and there would be tobacco dust floating through the town, turning people's skin brown. While tobacco was processed in town, and you could smell the leaves, dust did not float through town.

Featured in WatchMojo: Top 10 Worst American Accents by Non-Americans (2016)