Swarms of lovebugs couldn’t keep Hollywood out of Micanopy on Wednesday as film crews raked in red clay, dressed up extras and built covered wagons to shoot scenes for season one of “A Land Remembered” TV miniseries.   

Written and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1984, “A Land Remembered” chronicles three generations of the MacIvey family from the mid-19th to the 20th centuries, as they endure poverty and the Florida “Cracker” frontier before rising to wealth.  

Tampa-native director and writer Todd Wiseman Jr. said he bought the rights to the novel in 2021 and is producing season one as a four-part miniseries—starring Micanopy—through his private company, Tobias LLC, with a goal of more seasons in the future.  

Although Wiseman declined to give a full price tag for the project, the series received $500,000 from the state, funding from the city of Tampa and private support to get cameras rolling this year.  

“Almost everybody who reads this book is like, ‘Why isn’t this a movie?’ Or ‘why isn’t this a show?’ And I was just the last person to do that,” Wiseman said.  

While the show doesn’t have a set release date yet, co-producer Sean Valdivieso said it will likely air next year. It could appear on any streaming platform, but it still needs a buyer.   

Filming for episodes one and two will finish this week, he said, and the crew will get back to work in the fall for three and four after hurricane season.  

“Everybody wants their own ‘Yellowstone’, so we feel really good about moving this up,” Valdivieso said.   

Cast, crew and set  

Philip Ettinger (Tobias MacIvey) and Lily McInery (Emma MacIvey) currently star as the leading cast members in “A Land Remembered”.   

The Tampa-based crew of around 200 members has been on the road for the past two weeks, filming “only when the light is perfect,” Wiseman said.   

Valdivieso said the first part of this week was spent shooting a cattle drive on Payne’s Prairie. The scene featured over 600 heads of Cracker Cattle trucked in from Georgia and nearby ranches and local “cow hunters”—not to be confused with cowboys.  

Many of the horses on set are blood-verified descendants of the original breeds introduced to Florida by the Spanish in the 1500s. Extras include trained reenactors from The Amaranth Society, some having personal connections to “A Land Remembered.”  

Adrian Cox is a teacher whose family carries a legacy of cow cavalry, as Patrick Smith writes about in the novel. She said she can relate to everything in it and will play the show in her classroom if she’s still teaching by the time it releases in a few years.  

This week, the crew transformed Micanopy into an 1850s town in Georgia, aiming to create a flashback scene of Tobias and Emma MacIvey leaving their home for the rural hammocks of Florida.  

They raked six truckloads of red clay across NE 1st Street for a golf cart-pulled covered wagon to travel down and dressed businesses up with props rented from a supplier or borrowed from museums in Florida and Virginia.   

Viewers can watch for an “Easter egg” in the shot as set designers decided to leave in a green elixir wagon built by a resident that reads “Micanopy, Florida” on the side.  

Some crewmembers called Micanopy the most civilized place they’d been on the shoot so far after enduring the prairie and swarms of bugs, just like in the book.   

“We went to this place called Brahma Island a month and a half ago and there was a swarm, like everybody was enveloped by them. It was absolutely insane,” Valdivieso said. 

Whether each detail in the show is historically correct is up to University of Florida graduate and historian Donald Saba. Saba wrote “Florida Cracker History, A History of the Celtic Frontier Culture in Pre-1840 Florida,” which aims to expound on the state’s history illustrated in “A Land Remembered.”

Some key distinctions according to Saba are that the story is not in the Western genre, but is a Florida Southern because Florida cattle culture predates Western culture. The cowhands are cowhunters because they use whips and Catahoula dogs to herd cattle instead of lassos and saddles.   

“That cutter set you guys did at the Civil War battle, I looked at it, and you know how picky I am,” Saba said to the set designer. “I didn’t find one thing wrong. Gold star.”  

After cleaning up the clay on Thursday, the crew will spend the rest of the week in Dade City. Wiseman said wrapping actors on Payne’s Prairie has been the most special moment of the project for him so far.  

“When you wrap an actor, everybody claps, they give a little speech, it’s an emotional end to the roles for these actors who are either dying in the show or just don’t come back,” he said. “They were all great people that have just really felt like they’ve been totally immersed in the role and it’s sad to say goodbye.”  

Costumes, hair and makeup  

The Micanopy fire station turned into a makeshift costume shop and studio for makeup and hair, surrounded by trailers for the cast members to escape the heat and lovebugs.  

All morning and afternoon, assistant costume designer M.L. Hart sifted through a long rack filled with antebellum dresses and suits and bins stacked with laced boots and cobbled shoes to fit each extra and cast member with an outfit.  

“A Land Remembered” isn’t the first film rodeo for Hart, who also helped with costumes for “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”  

She said a period piece like “A Land Remembered” comes with specific challenges to conquer, starting with accuracy to the book and time period itself.   

The costumes for the show are a combination of purchased and rented. The rented outfits come from warehouses in Los Angeles and Atlanta, including Western Costume Rental, a company Hart said does clothing for most of the period shows seen on streaming sites.  

Hart said she and costume designer Elizabeth Bourgeois tried to utilize as much of the local economy as they could. Numerous pieces were purchased from estate sales and period clothing “sutlers,” who specialize in historic clothing made in the style and fabric it would have been originally.  

“We used one [sutler] in particular called Rum Creek, and we purchased about $27,000 worth of cobbled shoes from the time period,” Hart said.  

She said using clothing made during historic time periods can be challenging because bodies were smaller and thinner than they are today, and people had much narrower feet. Buttons are the most difficult detail to perfect because new plastic ones differ from originals, usually carved out of bone and wood or poured from lead and pewter.  

“We primarily focus on our main characters, making them look the most accurate, and everybody else we get as accurate as we can,” she said.   

Hart said tackling the scale of “A Land Remembered” with bustling towns and vast cattle drives is a hefty task. Although Wednesday called for dressing up roughly 30 extras, Hart said she clothed around 500 a few weeks ago for a scene recreating the Civil War Battle of Olustee.   

Various Hollywood hacks can help make alterations on the day of filming, but pre-fitting characters at the crew’s offices in Tampa are the most efficient route, Hart said. Ultimately, every decision aims to create the exact vision Wiseman has.  

“We’re trying to give a distinction between the different classes of people,” Hart said. “Some people might have things that are older or newer, and so that kind of helps you understand the storyline.”  

Once fitted by Hart, cast members head over to vanity mirrors where a team of artists painted and brushed their skin with makeup—alcohol based to combat sweat in the Florida heat—and hairdressers styled updos.  

Makeup head Anthony Brooks said the facial hair research board for the show included lots of sideburns and mutton chops, long and dirty enough to indicate someone who’s been herding cattle for months at a time. Makeup and hair also factor in regional differences, such as Union versus Confederate soldiers.  

Hair department head Rita Parillo has worked on films ranging from vampire features to “The Last of the Mohicans.”

As a method hairdresser for a pioneering story like “A Land Remembered,” she said she envisions what it would’ve been like for each character to live in the time period of the story and style their hair accordingly; no highlights or clipper cuts allowed.  

“It might be a little different for a storekeeper versus somebody with the cows out in the field. The guys that have been driving cattle probably haven’t even rinsed off,” she said. “You just think of those layers of grit and grime and kind of get your head wrapped around what that would mean.”  

Because Emma McIvey is one of only female leads for much of the story, Hart said the crew wanted to accentuate her signature long black hair and gave actress Lily McInery 26-inch hair extensions for the role. Still, Parillo said she appreciated Wiseman’s desire to prioritize grit over beauty.  

“The only real thing we haven’t done is put ticks on everybody,” she said.  

The fans  

Residents from around the state waited for hours to watch Wednesday’s filming in Micanopy, including Shawn and Heather Boorman from Fort White.   

Shawn said he’s read his copy of “A Land Remembered,” signed by Smith, at least a dozen times, resonating with the story as a fourth-generation Floridian.   

He said he’s excited to see how the crews translate the hurricane storm, mosquito swarm and bull scenes to the screen.  

“It kind of brings you back to the old Florida, stuff that most people will never see again,” Shawn said. “I’ve been waiting forever for them to make this a movie.”  

Anne McKinley of Archer said she was humbled by the amount of work it took to be able to settle in Florida, as illustrated in the book, and appreciated the hardships and resilience required.   

Kathy Pickera from Belleview said she hopes the TV series shows people old Florida, as opposed to the beaches and amusement parks people typically associate with the state, giving new generations a desire to preserve it.  

“My grandchildren have all read [‘A Land Remembered’],” she said. “It teaches them it’s important to protect what we have, you know? There’s not a lot of it. It didn’t come at an easy price.”