‘Four Seasons’ turned over a few new leaves

Mother Nature knows best, and she has good reasons for not putting leaves on Virginia trees in late winter.

This did create something of a dilemma for the film crew that showed up in Albemarle County in mid-March 1980. Alan Alda had written the script for a romantic comedy called “The Four Seasons” and was hard at work making it.

The star of the popular television show “M*A*S*H” was, in fact, working himself to a frazzle. In addition to having one of the leading roles in the film, he also was directing it.

The picture revolves around three married couples who celebrate each new season by taking a vacation together. Things get a tad testy when one of the pairs divorces, and the man marries a much younger woman.

Autumn fell in spring

At the time of the filming, Alda was at the height of his popularity as the boozing Army surgeon Hawkeye Pierce. Because of the constraints of the television series, he had a relatively small window of time in which to make the movie.

The filming started in early March with the shooting of the winter scenes in Stowe, Vt. Next stop was Albemarle County to shoot the autumn segments.

Obviously, this put the moviemakers seasonally out of sync with reality. But this is an industry known for parting seas, giving people the gift of flight and generally making the preposterous palatable.

So it was child’s play for them to transform a group of starkly bare trees on Pantops Mountain into examples of autumnal splendor at its showiest. To create the illusion, workers painstakingly taped spray-painted leaves to the branches.

Imported local color

Apparently local leaves lacked the luster necessary to convey whatever it was the director wanted to project. He found it necessary to import multi-colored leaves from Georgia and have them spread over Virginia ground.

Watching all this going on would have been sort of like a magician explaining how a magic trick is done before doing it. Small wonder that the movie sites in the area were closed to the public during filming.

Interior scenes were filmed at Keswick Country Club. The exterior scenes were shot in the vicinity of the building that now houses the University of Virginia’s Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection.

At the time of the shooting this was the location of Worrell Land and Cattle Company. An adjacent building served as the headquarters of Worrell Newspapers, which owned The Daily Progress.

This might explain why Martin Bregman, the film’s producer, invited two Daily Progress reporters, David Perlmutt and Anne Richardson, to the shooting on Pantops Mountain. The pair of journalists watched as movie magic dissolved before their eyes.

It didn’t take long for the writers to realize that much of the seamless perfection that appears on the screen comes after countless hours of maddening repetition.

They watched one two-minute scene get shot nine times, then 10, and it still wasn’t acceptable.

One of the actors, Carol Burnett, helped keep everybody in good humor. The star of “The Carol Burnett Show,” which won 18 Emmy Awards, was as funny off camera as on.

During a break in the shooting, Burnett leaned back in her chair, jammed an imaginary purse into her lap, tucked her lips over her teeth and started imitating a deaf, elderly lady shouting commands.

Two of the actors, Len Cariou and Bess Armstrong, were laughing so hard they almost collapsed.

A little later, Burnett showed a serious side when she spoke of Alda.

“He’s a wonderful man. A Renaissance man,” Burnett said of the director. “He thinks about all things concerned. He’s the reason everybody is doing this.

“Everybody trusts him. It’s nice to have a director you trust. If he told me to jump from the window of the third floor and he’d catch me, I’d do it. I wouldn’t hold anything back.

“I know he’d be there to catch me.”

The other major stars in the film were Sandy Dennis, Rita Moreno and Jack Weston. One of their favorite people wasn’t a star at all, at least not in the literal sense.

Nonetheless, Jean Veilleux was perhaps the most popular person on the crew.

He was the caterer to the stars, the guy responsible for the food that kept everyone fueled.

Veilleux had dished out grub and gab during the filming of Burt Reynolds’ “Smokey” movies and the “Daniel Boone” television series. He even had fed James Stewart and the other stars and crew members during the filming of “Flight of the Phoenix.”

When an assistant producer complimented Veilleux on the pie, the chef was quick to reply.

“I stayed up to 3 in the morning baking those pies,” Veilleux said. As soon as the producer was out of sight, the caterer confided to the reporter that they had actually come from a Charlottesville bakery.

“But they are fresh,” Veilleux was quick to add.

Despite many retakes, the local filming actually wrapped up ahead of schedule.

The caravan was then off to Georgia, the state of perfect leaves, to film the spring scenes.

The crew was kind enough to leave the Georgia leaves in Virginia.

They also were thoughtful enough to remove all the spray-painted leaves from the bare branches so Mother Nature could produce a batch of real ones.