Filmmaker Steve Turner looks homeward for next big project

Steve Turner looks pensive over his cup of coffee and small notebook on a blustery February morning in Cape Girardeau.

He's a film producer and director of television commercials and documentaries.

He's done local work and national work, for clients including Kraft and AB/Inbev.

But what Turner is after is the story.

Right now, Turner is gathering information on what he calls a great American story: the history of the Little River Drainage District.

He's building out the historical timeline the film will cover, Turner said.

Then he'll shift his focus to finding and pre-interviewing the real people with lived experience of those early efforts to build a network to make Southeast Missouri livable.

Steve Turner poses for a photo near the Sikeston Ridge along State Highway ZZ on Thursday in Sikeston, Missouri.BEN MATTHEWS

Turner said he's planning to begin filming those interviews in May. Then this fall, he'll take a crew to get footage of different landmarks that factor in, such as the Sikeston Ridge and hills that border the LRDD. They'll also head to Arkansas to get footage of the swamps, he said, and incorporate historic documents and photographs.

Turner said his Big Prairie Films production company is also still in fundraising stages for the documentary, looking for a lead donor. "Fundraising is a slow process," Turner acknowledged, but the ball is rolling, he said.

Of the story of the Little River Drainage District, or LRDD, Turner said it isn't as well-known as it could be, and he wants to change that.

It is, after all, essentially how Southeast Missouri went from swamp to solid ground.

The district was formed by the state courts in 1905, after a land survey in 1893, according to "The Little River Drainage District of Southeast Missouri: 1907 to Present," a 1989 booklet by John Ramey.

The LRDD serves an area about 90 miles in length, in parts of six counties: Bollinger, Cape Girardeau, Dunklin, New Madrid, Pemiscot, Scott and Stoddard.

The stick-straight body of water known as the Headwater Diversion Channel south of Cape Girardeau is in the north district, and meets up with the Castor River in Bollinger County.

A ditch referred to as Ditch Number 1 is the longest ditch, at about 100 miles, and runs north and south from Cape Girardeau County south through Scott and New Madrid counties.

Hundreds of miles of ditches and three detention basins comprise the district's drainage system, and the story of how it was built is the story Turner will tell in "Little River."

As Turner tells it, he was standing at Sikeston Ridge one day, looking at the way the land sloped away, and thought, "This is very interesting."

He spent about a year researching the LRDD's history, from the timber companies that had exhausted the lumber supply in Southeast Missouri and were left with empty land that flooded with distressing regularity, to the people who would have farmed the land but could not because of those same floods, to the surveyors and the families who lived on and moved with the dredging equipment to build the network of channels and ditches.

This story could have been told by any number of filmmakers from any number of places, Turner said. "New York, Los Angeles, but for me as a filmmaker, the opportunity, here in my backyard" was irresistible, he added.

Turner was quick to point out, too, that while the documentary will necessarily have to spend a little bit of time on the history, he's most interested in the stories of the people involved, and how the LRDD shaped the topography -- and the history -- of Southeast Missouri.

"New Madrid was going to be the town in southeast Missouri," Turner said, but between the lumber companies and the railroads and other geographic and economic factors, New Madrid today has a population of just under 3,000, as opposed to neighbors to the north Sikeston at 16,300 and Cape Girardeau at nearly 40,000.

Turner said he wants to take "Little River" through 1928, the year after the disastrous 1927 flood, which flooded more than 16 million acres along the Mississippi River, damaged 162,000 homes and destroyed 9,000, according to a 2002 Southeast Missourian story. Confirmed deaths from the 1927 flood totaled 276, though estimates put the number closer to 1,000.

In 1928, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers came in and took over floodwater management, Turner said, and that was a kind of turning point in the LRDD's story.

"I just find it of interest," Turner said. "There are all kinds of stories you can put two, three years of your life into, but I have always lived within 20 minutes of the river, except for my time in Carbondale [Illinois]."

And where he's interested, he likes to dig deeper, Turner said.

That was the case for his most recent project, a feature documentary, "The Past Is Never Dead." The documentary focuses on David Robinson, a man convicted of the 2000 murder of Sheila Box. After Robinson served 17 years of a life without possibility of parole sentence, was recently recommended for exoneration by a special master appointed by the Missouri Supreme Court.

At the core of it, he said, he wants the story, and he has a particular ability that comes in handy.

"I can get people to talk," Turner said. "Whether CEOs or housewives -- it's a gift, I guess," he adds, wryly.

mniederkorn@semissourian.com

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