Tom Jones

On the eve of the final Off-Broadway performance of the long-running musical "The Fantasticks," filmmaker Eli Kabillio takes a wistful look back at the show's genesis with composer Harvey Schmidt, author Tom Jones and original cast member Jerry Orbach.

The film is an attempt to evoke, through paintings, the world of a small Texas town in an era long gone. The paintings are freely based on photographs, letters, and postcards, discovered hidden in a cigar box in the family barn by director Robert Benton, and dealing entirely with a courtship between his grandfather's brother, who was the local mailman, and a young woman who came to visit her relatives in Waxahachie, Texas, in the summer of 1909. They met, fell in love, got married, and shortly after the marriage, she died.