Down Home Genius

originally published October 17, 2007

The name Ray McKinnon either means something to you or it doesn’t. If you know who Ray McKinnon is, you will be wildly ecstatic to know that he is coming to Athens to pimp his new film opening Friday at Ciné. Randy And The Mob is the second feature-length film that Ray and his company have made. The first was Chrystal, which I have not seen.

Like many of his fans, I first learned about Ray by watching The Accountant, which won the Oscar in 2002 for best live-action short film. Since it is a short film, it never came to a theater near you, so you never got a chance to see it. I only saw it because my neighbor, Jim Hawkins, was the sound mixer for the film, as he was for Chrystal and a lot other films you probably have seen. Jim pressed a copy of The Accountant into my hand and told me to be sure to watch it. I did watch it repeatedly and showed it to as many people as possible before Jim began to hint that he’d like to get it back before the images wore off.

The Accountant introduced us to the McKinnon team: Ray, his wife, Lisa Blount (An Officer And A Gentleman, Chrystal, etc.) and Walton Goggins (“The Shield,” etc.). McKinnon (Adel) and Goggins (Lithia Springs) grew up in Georgia, and Randy And The Mob was shot around Villa Rica and Covington.

So, Ray McKinnon grew up in a small, South Georgia town, went to Valdosta State College, where he began to act, gravitated to Atlanta for more acting and got a role in the weirdly compelling film Paris Trout, filmed in Crawfordville and based on the book of the same name about a strange, Southern character in Milledgeville, GA.

After that, McKinnon was off to Hollywood, where he combined his acting and writing talents with a facility for making friends. Probably his nice-guy-from-the-South schtick was so against the grain that people were disarmed and charmed. McKinnon is, by all accounts a real mensch’s mensch, who always takes other people seriously, but seldom himself, except when stranded in airports.

I asked him by telephone the other day if on the obligatory promotional peregrinations he is able to think about the next film while waiting for the next flight. He said that at such times he is only able to meditate on “what my purpose is on this planet.” I also asked McKinnon how he got to be friends with so many people in Hollywood, such as Billy Bob Thornton. “I certainly have a lot of shit on people,” he joked.

Thornton, in fact, steered McKinnon toward the late Macon music producer, Phil Walden, who had been wanting to get into films and had approached Thornton.

“He told them, hey, these people have a script ready to go,” McKinnon said. Walden saw Chrystal and The Accountant, and he was sold. He and McKinnon shook hands at a soul food restaurant in Macon, and the film was underway.

Friday night at Ciné, McKinnon will be on hand to talk about Randy And The Mob. For those of us who already know his work to some extent, this is bound to be somewhat unsettling. He’s a director, a writer, a producer. He can talk about all aspects of his film and about filmmaking in general. He knows Hollywood from the inside. But we know him only as an actor, who has worked with the likes of writer-director-producer David Milch in the acclaimed HBO series, “Deadwood.” The last time I saw McKinnon, his poor, pathetic, majestic character Reverend H.W. Smith was smothered to death by Al Swearengen, to put him out of his misery and to put McKinnon out of “Deadwood” so that he could get on with his writing and directing.

Randy And The Mob is a comedy about a small-town entrepreneur who, trying to cope with an unsatisfied wife and an unscrupulous business rival (a cameo by Burt Reynolds), gets indebted to mobsters (including Goggins as a kind of Being There-type idiot-savant enforcer) and has to ask for help from his twin brother, a gay antiques dealer (also played by McKinnon). See Drew Wheeler’s review on p. 18.

The tease for The Accountant asks, “Can one man, one hard drinking, chain smoking, backwoods accountant, stop a national conspiracy, change the course of history, and save a way of life? It’s do-able... but it ain’t gonna be purdy.”

He was only drinking coffee when I talked with him, but it looks like Ray McKinnon’s mission in life is both doable and right purdy to boot.

Ray will be at Ciné on Friday, Oct. 19 for both evening shows and Saturday, Oct. 20 for the 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. shows, talking about Randy And The Mob. He needs a good crowd to help build the buzz about the film.

Pete McCommons

editor@flagpole.com