BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — He lived the kind of remarkable life that befits a character from a classic work of fiction — but the Merle Haggard story needs no fictional embellishment.

His flawed, charmed life was an epic saga alternately heartbreaking and triumphant.

Nine years after his death, however, the Bakersfield-born and bred singer-songwriter is long overdue for a third-party perspective – an artist’s rendering set to Haggard’s own poetry.

On Monday, that artist brought his brush to town.

Ethan Hawke, the actor-writer-director, four times nominated for an Academy award, is directing an independent film –  working title: Merle Haggard’s Highway 99.

Hawke was in Bakersfield, at Rooster’s Honky Tonk and elsewhere, shooting scenes with two of Haggard’s sons, Ben and Noel, and his widow Theresa.

There’s a subplot, if that term can apply to a documentary – the road, and the role of fathers in shaping a man. Merle famously lost his father when he was 9, and it shaped his future in a profound way. Ben, Noel and Marty Haggard live in the long shadow of their father.

As for Ethan Hawke, his father owned a 1968 Plymouth Barracuda. Son Ethan is retracing Merle Haggard’s life in, appropriately, a ‘68 Barracuda.

Hawke’s Under the Influence Productions and Rolling Stone Films visited Haggard’s childhood home in Oildale, as well as Haggard’s boxcar home, which now resides at the Kern County Museum. His crew filmed Ben Haggard’s band, with brother Noel and mother Theresa, playing Haggard’s signature song, Mama Tried, before a small audience that included the last surviving member of Haggard’s original band, the Strangers – 90-year-old Norm Hamlet: An apt name for a player in a “Shakespearean musical.”

Once it’s complete, Hawke will likely debut his film at Sundance or another major film festival, where filmmakers go to shop for distribution deals. Then maybe next year, maybe the year after, perhaps Merle Haggard’s Highway 99 will play on a screen near you.


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