“The Legend of Boggy Creek,” Texarkana resident Charles B. Pierce’s 1972 docudrama about the storied Fouke Monster, is set for a 4K restoration, the Texarkana Gazette reports.
The film will premiere June 14, 2019, at Texarkana’s Perot Theatre, with the original oil-on-canvas poster art that, the Facebook event notes, “is the later inspiration for Star Wars’ Chewbacca.” Pierce’s daughter, Pamula Pierce Barcelou, who owns the film rights and collected supplementary archival negatives and prints from a Technicolor office in Burbank, Calif., collaborated with New York’s George Eastman Museum on the restoration.
“I saw it up on the big screen for the first time in 45 years and it made me cry,” Barcelou told the Gazette in August. “The Legend of Boggy Creek” features interviews from witnesses in Fouke, Ark., who say they encountered the shaggy ape-like creature, said to have attacked livestock and emanated a terrible stench.
It’s cult classic material, honorably lambasted by the astute cast of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” and cited as a prototype for a long succession of “mockumentary” films — a style Pierce refined with his 1976 picture, “The Town That Dreaded Sundown.”