PopHorror Let's Get Scared
On November 22, 2019, the one and only Joe Bob Briggs came to the Columbus Theater in Providence, RI. He was there to teach us Drive-in Mutants the history of the lowly redneck and how they went on to save the movie industry, all during this stop on his How Rednecks Saved Hollywood tour. He even brought the gorgeous and scantily clad Darcy the Mail Girl with him!
The How Rednecks Saved Hollywood event may have been held in the smallest state in the US, but the fans that came had the biggest hearts as they screamed and whooped from all corners of the venue when Joe Bob walked out on stage. From the second he got to the podium, the straight-talking, quick-witted Texan never stopped filling our heads with southern factoids and trivia, starting with the very first redneck in history, where they originally came from, and how Hollywood has portrayed them for over the past 100+ years.
SPOILER WARNING: If you plan on seeing the How Rednecks Saved Hollywood show, stop reading now. There are spoilers by the fistful in this review.
There was so much information packed into the How Rednecks Saved Hollywood show. Joe Bob’s rapid-fire delivery dropped fact after fact onto the eager audience. He talked for over two hours about some of the most interesting and sometimes mind-boggling redneck trivia.
- Surprisingly, the identity of the first redneck in history was Scottish Presbyterian and Protestant Reformation leader John Knox, a religious rebel who ran around Europe in the 1500s opposing the Catholic Church, which pissed off a lot of Irish, Scottish and British monarchies.
- John Knox influenced the original rednecks, also Protestant Presbyterian, a tribe of lowland Scottish migrants called the Scots Irish. These guys were shipped from Scotland to Ireland in the early 1600s to cultivate Gaelic land taken over by their native country. After a few hundred years, many of them moved moved to the United Colonies of Britain (AKA the US) to settle in what would later become northern Alabama. All they wanted was to be left alone, so they stayed high up in the Appalachian mountains, minding their own business and creating their own unique dichotomy.
- Being pale Europeans, they were scorched by the Southern sun as they farmed those mountains and valleys, getting it the worst on the area below their hat brims and above their shirt necks, leading to their eponymous namesake.
- The most well-known redneck cinematic moments were mentioned during How Rednecks Saved Hollywood, including: the very first movie about hillbillies called The Moonshiner (1904), which has forever linked rednecks with illegal alcohol; the blossoming Lil’ Abner franchise; comparisons between The Cannonball Run (1981) and its much better predecessor, The Gumball Rally (1976); the Ma & Pa Kettle franchise and the Ernest movies, which have earned millions of dollars each, despite being lambasted by critics; the horror of the killer cannibal rednecks in Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and the inbred rapists in Deliverance; the rash of redneck TV series like Hee-Haw, Mayberry R.F.D., The Dukes of Hazzard, and of course, The Beverly Hillbillies; and, contemporary redneck-themed reality TV like Floribama Shore, Moonshiners, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, 16 & Pregnant and Duck Dynasty. These may not be award-winning projects, but they sure are lucrative for Hollywood.
- How Thunder Road (1958), the Whiskey Rebellion, the tight cutoffs worn by Claudia Jennings in Gator Bait (1973), illegal Coors beer, and the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash combined to inspire the greatest movie in the history of the world… Smokey & the Bandit (1977).
- Hollywood says that there are only two kinds of Southerners… the rich plantation landowners and the inbred hillbillies
- How the stereotypical definition of “redneck” has evolved throughout history, going back and forth between moonshiners to racists to uneducated imbeciles to inbreds to assholes and rapists and then back again.
- In just about every scenario, Hollywood got the portrayal of the redneck completely wrong.
- Why the redneck is the scariest monster in all of film history (see: the definition of a “redneck”), along with plenty of film clips to prove the point.
- How similar yet different the main characters and plotlines from Forrest Gump and Sling Blade really are.
- Hollywood’s favorite place to film movies about the South, and why.
Honestly, this is barely scratching the surface of what he talked about.
I loved How Rednecks Saved Hollywood. I learned so much about redneck history, movies, political agenda and Hollywood assumptions; it was like going to the best college lecture ever. The offensive yet hilarious Joe Bob Briggs holds nothing back. Only this man could take something as simple as a stereotypical, movie-making trope and turn it into its own genre… the barely mentioned but often used Hicksplotation. If he thought a show in New England would be full of the easily offended, he was totally wrong.
“All hillbillies are rednecks, but not all rednecks are hillbillies.” — Joe Bob Briggs, How Rednecks Saved Hollywood
You can see Joe Bob this Wednesday, December 4th at Forbidden Planet: NYC (no tickets necessary!) and on Joe Bob’s Red Christmas on Friday, December 13th at 9:00pm on Shudder. And, if you get the chance to see him on his How Rednecks Saved Hollywood tour, don’t pass it up. Check out his upcoming appearances here and grab tickets before they sell out. You won’t regret it!
