Bullets Over Baton Rouge

A Southern breeze holds sway over thick strands of Spanish moss that drape like jewels from ancient oaks in the first image of 61 Bullets, a new documentary that boldly exhumes the details and doubts surrounding the death of Louisiana's most iconic politician, Huey P. Long.

Maybe that's what chasing unsolved mysteries feels like: trying to catch the wind.

Filmmakers David Modigliani, Yvonne Boudreaux, and Louisiana Kreutz have attempted just that for the past five years, and their resulting hour-long look at the enigma will have its premiere at the New Orleans Film Festival in October.

"The real challenge for this project was that we knew it wasn't going to have this buttoned-up ending, this solid answer," said Boudreaux. "We just wanted it to be honest."

And still, while embracing the puzzles of Long's demise, the trio trod on a narrative that is, perhaps, just as resonant as some grand revelation could be.

Every school child on a field trip to the State Capitol places his or her hands on the holes dotting those pink granite walls and, by doing so, is baptized into the darkness and light of Long's legacy, a considerable shadow and one shaded most by the enduring riddles that cloak his death eighty years on.

The official record of events is that Dr. Carl Weiss, a supremely educated Baton Rouge physician, confronted and shot the populist U.S. senator inside the Capitol over the matter of Long gerrymandering the district of Weiss' father-in-law, Judge Benjamin Pavy, in order to oust one of his more vocal opponents.

When first questioned more than a week after the shooting, Long's bodyguards told police that Weiss fired one shot from his .32 caliber pistol that struck their employer, when they then unloaded dozens of rounds into Weiss' body in self-defense.

There was no autopsy or even a detailed medical report. No testimony ever surfaced to indicate that Weiss was planning an assassination—in fact, he was still making routine house calls earlier the same evening—and no evidence was ever presented to law enforcement that a bullet from Weiss’ gun struck Long's body.

So it is little surprise that more questions than answers have always surrounded the incident and haunted the Weiss family for decades.

"When a well-respected man goes from the proud center of a family to an assassin over night, the family's life after his death, and how they navigate that and search for closure, is compelling," Modigliani said. "When Yvonne [Boudreaux] told me the story for the first time, I knew immediately I wanted to make this film."

Boudreaux's grandmother is Ida Pavy Boudreaux, Carl Weiss' sister-in-law; she is interviewed extensively in the film (a narrative account of Ida's remembrances appeared in Country Roads' October 2013 issue). "No one in the family ever talked about what happened," Boudreaux said. "Then one year at Thanksgiving, Ida leans over to me and says, 'You know no one has ever told this story right.'"

The carrier of this strange legacy has, for his entire life, been Dr. Carl Weiss Jr., just three months old when Long and his father died.

As seen for the first time in 61 Bullets, Weiss Jr.'s journey is intensely emotional, a winding path of discovery, denial, acceptance, and empowerment as the documentary climaxes with his address to a rapt audience at the Old State Capitol during a symposium dedicated to the life and death of the man his father allegedly murdered; a man who brimmed with promises—some kept, some not—a man who bloomed from populist firebrand to borderline dictator to mighty martyr in less than a decade.

With Long's unexamined body buried beneath his statue and thirty feet of concrete on the Capitol grounds, it's easy to watch 61 Bullets and feel that the truth is lost forever. But the film's producers would argue fervently that such a dark conclusion is not the point.

"Viewers should leave with a feeling of questioning the history we are told," Modigliani said. "They should see how nuanced it is, how many twists and turns these stories can take as they are handed down to us. If nothing else, I want those who watch 61 Bullets to come away with a healthy skepticism."

Details. Details. Details.

For further reading, check out "Crossing the Line," Claire Boudreaux Bateman's fictionalized account of the night of Long's assassination, published in our October 2013 issue.

61 Bullets premieres at the New Orleans Film Festival in October with two viewings: