From Deseret News archives:
The story of two 'Country Boys'
Powerful series on PBS focuses on the struggles of Appalachian teens
"I was 14. I did not think ahead," said Cody Perkins.
"I'll go with his answer," agreed Chris Johnson.
Yet they never pulled out of the project, which has been seven years in the making. Award-winning filmmaker David Sutherland ("The Farmer's Wife") filmed them from the ages of 15-18 (1999-2002) as they struggled to overcome unbelievably difficult circumstances.
Johnson grew up in a ramshackle trailer in Appalachia with his high-school dropout mother and his alcoholic father, who was dying of cirrhosis of the liver. The teenager, who struggled with learning disabilities, became a surrogate parent to his younger siblings as he fought to better his own circumstances.
Perkins' mother lost a battle with postpartum depression and committed suicide when he was an infant. Twelve years later, his father shot his seventh wife to death before killing himself. After being bounced around to various relatives, Perkins ended up living with his former stepgrandmother, Liz McGuire, who gave the kid a home.
"Country Boys" begins as these two teens enter an alternative high school where they get the help and guidance they've lacked. It's a story of not only their struggles, but life in a part of the country where poverty is part of everyday life for a lot of people.
Sutherland said the idea for "Country Boys" originated shortly before "The Farmer's Wife" aired when someone in a focus group said after a screening that the family in that film — people on the verge of losing their farm — didn't look poor. So he decided to do something in Appalachia. And while he found plenty of poverty, he also found that everywhere he went in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, "the teenage kids all understood me. In spite of what I read in the New York Times, they were all on the Web, all wired, and they all watched MTV.
"So I got interested in doing teenagers. And it took me a while to find the right school and the right place. And everything was different than I imagined it to be."
The young men also saw it as an opportunity to stand up for a part of the country that "the media stereotyped . . . really, really bad," Perkins said. "But I kind of learned (that) just how we think the media stereotyped us, we kind of stereotyped everybody else. I've met a lot of really nice people. It seems like you get five people out of 100 that are jerks and it ruins everything. So it's been good to meet a lot of other different people to be open like that."
