CityView Magazine

Publisher’s Note THE POWER OF FILM P rofound events stick in our memory banks forever. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, I remember exactly where I was and every moment of that day. The same is true about the murders at Luigi’s restaurant on Friday, Aug. 6, 1993. I was away playing golf in the mountains of Virginia with a group of friends when someone called home and heard the horrid details. In those days before 24-hour television news and cell phones, we were all in a panic. We prayed that none of our friends had been caught up in the atrocities of that night. Luigi’s was a popular Fayetteville eatery; most of us would frequent the spot on many a Friday night. It turned out that some people we knew had been there earlier in the evening but left before the horror began. A friend of mine, John Dawson, and his friend Dave Clark have recaptured the events of that evening in a documentary. “Twenty Minute Nightmare: The Luigi’s Story” is worthy of attention. I recently asked John why he undertook a task that wound up consuming five years of his life. He said it was such a dramatic event in the life of Fayetteville he felt the story should be told on film. John did the writing and interviewing while Dave oversaw the editing and filming. They brought in Mike Ivey as an audio consultant. The result is professional despite a small budget. As a matter of fact, John and Dave used small video cameras on skateboards to better capture 12 | April/May • 2010 the cramped feel of the patrons hiding under the tables during Kenneth Junior French’s 20-minute rampage. It took years before people agreed to be interviewed, including the most difficult and final interview, one with French in prison. All together, John and Dave conducted 21 interviews over the course of more than 30 hours of filming before they arrived at the final 60-minute product. John paid for the project out of his own pocket; he says it is highly unlikely he will ever recover much of the cost even if it gets aired on national television or at film festivals. Our featured artist this issue is a young filmmaker who is just beginning his career, one that truly requires commitment and passion. For John, the project was about faithfully telling the story of that terrible night. The thing that impressed him the most was how everyone remembered the smallest details of that night, all these years later. The human mind is like that. I can still remember my ninth-grade math teacher, Grady McKeithan, running into our classroom and turning on the television to see Walter Cronkite announcing that the president of the United States had just been shot in Dallas, 47 years ago.CV Marshall Waren, Publisher

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