From Back Home to Up Home
story by Donna Hecker & photography by Talitha Schroeder
It was meant to be. Or maybe they willed it into existence. Either way, Up Home With Ouita Michel was conceived in a serendipitous meeting of the minds – between Ouita Michel and Harrison Witt.
The two have known each other since college days in the early ‘80s when Ouita competed on the University of Kentucky debate team with Harrison’s older brother David Witt. After undergrad, Ouita headed northeast to New York, and eventually the Culinary Institute of America; and Harrison headed southwest to film school at the University of Texas Austin campus.
Harrison laughs about it now, but the truth is that he ended up in Austin only because it had the latest application deadline. His sister was pressing him to apply somewhere, anywhere, and it turned out his UT-Austin application was due the very next day. Off to FedEx it went and Harrison says it turned out to be the “most wonderful experience.”
“Austin was a great place for filmmakers at that time. I got down there in the fall of 1990 and Richard Linklater’s movie Slacker had just been released in Austin. And Robert Rodriguez was an undergrad at UT-Austin so I got to meet him and see some of the first films he ever made. And later I got to work on some of his movies.”
“I’ve never been to a town that was as film-crazy as Austin. Back then, films were actually made on film and that was expensive. Partway through grad school, I ran out of money so I started working on movies.”
After a series of short gigs, Harrison got his union card and a job on the set of The Stars Fell on Henrietta, working with actors like Robert Duvall, Frances Fisher and Brian Dennehy. “The more I worked on movies, the more I wanted to make them. To actually be on a big film set; the community and synergy of working together; I just fell in love with it.”
Harrison explained that films are made three times – writing, production and post-production. “Writing is not my favorite; it’s such a lonely endeavor. I love production because you have all these creative people working together – all focused on one thing. It was the opposite of academia (Harrison’s previous career.) On a film set, by lunchtime, you’ve made more decisions than an academic environment would in six years. Does it work? Hopefully.”
“If it doesn’t work, you do something else. ‘Moving on’ are my two favorite words. Because our goal is creating these moments that people can emotionally engage with.” And getting to that point, according to Harrison, happens in post-production; where the filmmaker sorts through all the different pieces to figure out what the story is, what works, and what creates the emotional connection.
Chef Ouita says this all sounds a lot like the creative work that chefs do. While considering flavors from hours of cooking and sampling, chefs will run a list of ingredients through mental taste tests, relying on their palate memory for guidance. They can then create menus in their imagination; as inspiration from many sources flows onto the page and ultimately onto the plate.
A story is thus told; it may be about a particular farmer, or an ingredient, or a certain season or place in time. Whether expressed through film or food, all stories take on deeper meaning when they activate our emotional synapses.
Telling stories and making connections brought Harrison and Ouita back together a couple of years ago. Harrison had recently returned to Kentucky, briefly working on the family farm before moving to Lexington. Ouita had a story to tell that was about more than the act of cooking. It’s really the story of Kentucky and the two of them spent a long time trying to decide the best way to tell it.
The result was Up Home with Ouita Michel, a video series produced by Harrison’s Pony Boat Media company. Its first episode, called “The Hill '' and featuring tales from Holly Hill Inn’s early days, was released in April 2022.
Harrison is still surprised by how easily the scenes came together. “Every single person I’ve met has been great. If we needed to shoot somewhere, we were welcome. The people were fascinating. With Ouita as its heart and soul, I felt that was our rudder. Deep down, I hope lots and lots of people will see it, because it’s a story about Ouita’s desire to be local, to promote community, to preserve foodways and culture.”
Slender and square-jawed, blue eyes steady behind wire-rimmed glasses, Harrison projects a quiet intensity – somehow both exuberant and easy-going at once. Ouita said she’d never had an experience quite like filming a docu-series but Harrison “made everyone really comfortable in front of the camera so they could be themselves. That’s such a skill. He just wants to capture people as they are.”
His knack for capturing folks as they are has provided much fodder for family fun. After hearing endless loops of dialogue from edits of the first episode, Harrison’s sons Sam and Otis have immortalized such lines as “Are you lying? No, I’m not lying!” and the unforgettable “Our dog has a fungal infection.”
Even his wife Amy Witt gets in on the act; they met on movie sets and she once pretended to decapitate him with a prop chainsaw during a remake of the infamous Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
“Little did she know that she would one day marry me”, Harrison muses. “I love being back home in Kentucky. I’ve always wanted to come back and make films. There are stories here and I want to tell them.”
And so here they are. Back home in Kentucky, writing their own story and helping us tell ours. We hope you’ll stay tuned.
© 2022, Holly Hill Inn/Ilex Summit, LLC and its affiliates, All Rights Reserved
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