The filmmakers are adamant that this was the only way to approach this particular subject, considering the racial undertones that came to the fore as the trial of white supremacist John William King and his two co-defendants, Lawrence Russell Brewer and Sean Berry, progressed. When it became clear from the testimony that this was, beyond a doubt, a racially-motivated killing, there were strong signs of solidarity from both extremes. Representatives from the Nation of Islam and Black Panthers arrived in Jasper, while the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in the town.

"Both sides were saying, 'This is my agenda. How can I fit this murder to further my own agenda?' and it naturally led to a discourse on race," Dow says. Williams continues: "It's not like the Amadou Diallo killing where whites were saying, 'This was a pure mistake' and blacks were saying, 'It's another example of racist police killing an unarmed black man.' That's what was interesting about this murder: Both sides agreed that it was terrible, but nobody really understood why it happened. Or nobody was really taking responsibility, or recognizing their own complicity as to why it happened. As we scratched the surface, I started to recognize the patterns, the thought processes, that go into allowing whites to feel that black life in America has less value than white life."

Jasper's 7,200 citizens are almost evenly split between blacks and whites. The mayor is black, half the city council is black, as are the executive director of the Deep East Texas Council of Governments (an administrative body based in Jasper), the hospital administrator, and the assistant principal of Jasper's high school. The filmmakers say, though, that the town only appears to be integrated on the surface.

Divisions begin to come out during the conversations in the film, when blacks and whites start off from a different place interpreting the crime. Williams says it's like Rashomon meets Nashville. The town's whites mention how the murder makes them feel bad because it could've been their kids in the dock at the trial. "The young whites you talk to say, 'It was a terrible thing that happened, but any one of us could've been in that truck,' whereas blacks constantly say, 'It could've been me, it could've been any one of us behind that truck,'" Williams says.

Williams and Dow interview people from a broad cross-section of the town. Sentiments in the black community range from the sadness and incomprehension of the older interviewees to a more vengeful tone of retribution from the younger ones.

"It's not the first time an innocent black man got killed in Jasper," says one black man. Meanwhile a younger black man has a solution for the three convicted murderers: "Put all three of 'em behind a truck and drag 'em." However, Byrd's daughter, Renee Mullins, is remarkably stoic considering the brutality of the crime and is at pains to make sure the filmmakers know that her on-camera appearance isn't a rabble-rousing or finger-pointing opportunity.

She says: "I'm not out to get sympathy from anyone. I just want people to be aware that this is a wake-up call for America. This could've been me, it could've been you Š it could've been anyone."

Most of the whites declare shock at the type of crime that was committed, and they are incredulous that this could happen in their community. Yet, the filmmakers convey the sense of a problem swept under the town's carpet that has festered for years and exploded in the sickening murder.

In one scene, Dow is at breakfast with an informal, daily, gathering of local whites. One woman reads aloud a newspaper report about how Byrd usually spent his time at home playing music, cards, and dominoes. She snorts and adds: "I thought he spent most of his time in jail." And this is where the real crux of the film lies-as another of the self-styled "Bubbas in Training" states: "I'd like him to be judged on how he lived, not how he died," as if Byrd's life and lifestyle somehow would lessen the crime.

Overall, though, the reaction from the white community is to treat the incident as an isolated one, and one that was, according to a white interviewee, a result of "outside influences." The purity metaphor is invoked over and over again by whites for the town's besmirched reputation. Ironically, perhaps the most poignant character in the whole piece is King's father, a frail man on oxygen, who is dumbfounded by the nature of his son's actions: "You just don't know where it all came from. He even had black friends... and I encouraged the association."

---- "The thing was not to catch people in their prejudice. We're in a generation brought up in many ways by music television where people don't want to talk about difference," says Williams. "We want to suggest that everything is fine. The consequence is that we don't know how to talk about difference. We want to pretend it goes away."

The approach of the film, he adds, is to say, "You can talk about it, because you're talking to one of your own. You're going to say what you feel because you know that it's all right, it's not censored. To give a sense of where that prejudice may come from, the only place to let them do that is where they're intimate and comfortable to express themselves."

Even with such topical and incendiary subject matter, the filmmakers didn't find funding right away. They were turned down initially by ITVS and the MacArthur and Ford foundations, so the filmmakers paid for everything themselves. Dow went down to Jasper first, in June 1998, and spent two months getting to know the town and its stories. Then Williams came in December and they started to shoot the following month. They spent their days apart filming and rarely worked together in the field.

During the first month of production, a friend helped the two get a $25,000 grant from New York's Wellspring Foundation that got them through the first six months of shooting. With some footage in the can, funding flowed in after that. They got $25,000 from the Richard E. Dreihaus Foundation, $30,000 from the National Black Programming Consortium, and then a whopping $250,000 from ITVS and $300,000 from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in mid-1999.

The filmmakers took their project to the Toronto Documentary Forum at Hot Docs in May looking for the final 30% of their $950,000 budget. "You don't enter something like this to make more money or because you want to spend a lot of time in southeast Texas," says Dow. "We want to make it easier to discuss race relations."

Two Towns of Jasper, which will air on PBS in 2002 accompanied by a comprehensive ITVS outreach program, treads a difficult line between being compelling viewing and offering a complex view without easy answers. "We found editing the film that the structure wasn't a 'he said, she said' piece," says Dow. "It's these big blocks of black material, white material. You spend some time in the black community and then you go and spend some time in the [white] community and you're building these blocks of perception as you go."

"This is not a hate crimes film; it's not a death penalty film," adds Williams. "This is about race, racism, and difference."