Can’t believe it’s taken this long for me to write this, but within the past couple of years, my house was a setting for a Hollywood movie.

Here’s the trailer for “Wildcat“:

The weird shots beginning 34 second in with the mysterious couple in a bedroom: That’s our bedroom. The woman with glasses entering a room: That’s our foyer. The drinkers with a spilled bottle of wine staining the tablecloth: our dining room. The frozen people and the moving cat: our living room.

The movie “Wildcat,” starring Maya Hawke, is about the life of the short story writer Flannery O’Connor, whose prose is best described at Southern gothic. It was filmed throughout Kentucky in 2023.

The scene in my house, though, is supposed to reenact a party thrown by participants in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

In late 2022, Ethan Hawke, the director and Maya’s father, literally showed up at our doorstep saying he was looking for locations for his new movie, and our house was intriguing. His production team earlier placed notes in our mailbox expressing interest, but we didn’t respond because, like, who gets notes in their mailboxes asking to host a movie by a famous Hollywood star?

Anyway, Hawke and a few associates knocked on our door, shortly after the annual Saint James Court Art Show, a major event in Old Louisville, and asked my wife (I was on a flight to California, since I was then an editor at the San Francisco Chronicle) if they could look around, partly because our house “looked like a place a Pulitzer Prize winner would live.”

That was a reference one of the characters in the movie, Robert Lowell, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1947 and 1974 and was a close acquaintance of Flannery O’Connor. My wife pointed out we had a couple of Pulitzer Prizes in the house as well: I helped edit award-winning pieces at the Wall Street Journal and at the Washington Post (copies of those prizes are in our library).

Since the film folks arrived around dinnertime, my wife fed them chili, and Hawke asked if he could send a crew member back that week to take photos. They returned days later around mealtime, were fed again, and said they were interested in the house for a specific scene.

A few months passed, and when I was back in Louisville, Ethan (he and my wife were on a first-name basis by then) returned with an entire crew to scope out the house. I watched as a movie star stood in our stairway and revealed his vision of the party scene, essentially that of an extremely religious woman surrounded by a bunch of pagans.

Worked for me!

I headed back to San Francisco soon after that, and the next time I was home in 2023, they had taken over the house and put us up at a local bed and breakfast for a few days. They had to do a few things to make the house look like it was somewhere writers would gather in the 1940s or ’50s: swapped out books in our bookcases, added a piano and a “ping-pong table” and removed things that would easily be identified as features you would only find in the 21st century.

Finally, the movie was released in 2024, and Ethan made the rounds of talk shows. Here he is on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”:

That movie scene, framed like “The Last Supper,” is in our dining room. Everything in the shot is ours with the exception of the dinnerware and tablecloth. Scenes throughout the movie contain our possessions. The couch in the living room, the furniture in the brief bedroom scene, a seating area at a window at the top of a flight of stairs. All our stuff.

We saw the movie in California. There was a premier in Louisville, but I was working at the Chronicle at the time and couldn’t make it. Biggest regret: I never asked for Ethan’s autograph, and we never took a photo with him, even though he was photographed with everyone in Kentucky when “Wildcat” was filming.

I liked the movie, but it wasn’t a hit. Probably because scenes of O’Connor’s life were interspersed with excerpts of her short stories, using the same actors who appeared in the biographical scenes. Anyone not familiar with O’Connor’s work would have been completely confused.

But it’s a good story to tell, and I’m overdue in telling it.

Kind of like the time the father from the television show “Family Ties” showed up at our doorstep.

But that’s for a later post.