At the edge of a church graveyard, a preacher beseeched God to help police find the monster who had murdered the teenage girl who was being laid to rest.

Within earshot on the other side of the church, his prayers were seemingly answered as the figure of a man dangled from the end of a rope slung over an oak branch.

(ENLARGE)

Leo Frank, murder suspect of Mary Phagan.

Elissa Eubanks/AJC (ENLARGE)

Director Ben Loeterman (left) and Will Janowitz, who plays Leo Frank, look over story boards on the set near Griffin. The film will be screened in Atlanta next spring and then broadcast nationally, probably on PBS.

Elissa Eubanks/AJC (ENLARGE)

Extras take a break on set in Williamson, Ga., during the filming of Ben Loeterman's documentary 'The People v. Leo Frank.' These actors are playing the part of the lynching party that hanged Frank, a Jewish man wrongly accused of murder, in 1915.

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Almost a century after the fact, a film crew was burying Mary Phagan and lynching Leo Frank on the same summer day, as one of the most notorious criminal dramas in American history came back to life for a TV documentary.

"I think we've lynched someone at this church before," said hairstylist Taylor Knight, recognizing the location from other movies.

"This is my third lynching," said set dresser Konrad Lewis, as he regarded the mannequin. "As long as it isn't one of us up there, I'm OK with it."

The scenes were being staged for "The People v. Leo Frank," a film that will be screened in Atlanta next spring and then broadcast nationally, probably on PBS. Numerous books and a handful of movies have treated the Frank case, an operatic tragedy that exposed anti-Semitism and divisions of class and race in the New South of the 1910s. But there has never been a full-scale documentary.

"I think this story still has a lot to teach us," said the filmmaker, Ben Loeterman. "It isn't just a Jewish story. It's about the other, about being gay or Palestinian or an immigrant."

Loeterman and his crew of 50 were shooting at a church outside Griffin, one of several locations they used to re-create scenes he'll intersperse with interviews, archival photos and the few seconds of surviving newsreel footage. He wanted to get the details just right.

"How many coils do you count in that noose?" he asked, holding up a grotesque picture of the 1915 lynching.

Over at the oak tree, the crew was lavishing attention on the dummy. One person dabbed fake blood on its manacled feet, while another sprayed water on its garments to approximate the way a lynching victim looks after losing control of his bodily functions.

The head was the trickiest part. "We had to take it off and reattach it to get the right angle," said production designer Frank Galline.

'The story is here'

"OK, lynching party, let's gather 'round!"

The assistant director's call mustered a posse of men in period costumes carrying bats and shotguns. They were extras playing members of the vigilante party that kidnapped Frank from a Milledgeville prison after his death sentence for killing Phagan had been commuted. Her body had been found in the basement of the Atlanta pencil factory Frank managed; he had been tried and convicted of the crime, but the governor and others came to doubt his guilt.

Loeterman watched in front of the church, where a line of Model Ts and other vintage cars waited to carry the lynchers to their quarry. He could have shot the film near his home base of Boston. "We have factories, courthouses and trees in Massachusetts," he said. "But the story is here. The accents are here. The supporters are here."

He was referring to almost 100 donors who helped finance the project. In addition to $725,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Loeterman raised almost $500,000 locally with the help of fund-raising consultants Lynda Walker and Linda Selig. Selig hadn't even known her husband's family was part of the story; his great aunt Lucille was married to Frank.

The Seligs weren't the only donors with connections to the case. While most of the money for the film came in small contributions from metro Atlanta's Jewish community, some of it came from Cobb Countians whose ancestors were implicated in the lynching conspiracy. Among them: former Gov. Roy Barnes (his wife's family) and Marietta Daily Journal publisher Otis Brumby (his extended family).

"This film wasn't going to happen unless Atlanta wanted it to," Loeterman said.

The 52-year-old director has made Emmy-winning documentaries for the PBS programs "Frontline" and "American Experience." But he had never heard of Leo Frank until he read a magazine article by Steve Oney, a former Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter who went on to write the definitive history of the case, "And the Dead Shall Rise." The story of a Jewish man lynched for murdering a gentile girl struck a chord with the filmmaker.

Oney signed on as a consultant. When he visited the set early this month, they enlisted him as an extra, slicking back his hair and parting it in the middle to join the crowd outside Frank's trial.

On the day the crew began restaging the proceedings at the Walton County Courthouse in Monroe, Loeterman stopped by a Starbucks and was astonished to see the ghosts of the gothic South rear up before his eyes.

The local newspaper said law enforcement agents were searching a nearby yard for evidence in the 1946 murders of two black couples — the infamous Moore's Ford lynchings. The next issue carried news of a police officer suspended for using a racial slur during an arrest.

Loeterman saw both articles as reminders of why some stories need to be told and retold.

'Don't be offended'

Back at the church, the lynchers departed on their long, dirt-road drive to abduct Frank. The Model Ts returned after a while, and the grim-faced men piled out with their bats and guns.

As they wandered toward the grove, the extras noticed the mannequin strung up in the tree. Some put down their weapons and pulled out their cell phones to take souvenir pictures, just as the people who came upon the scene in Marietta 93 years ago had done with their cameras.

"This is great!" said one of the party, Tom Trimble. He stopped cold when he realized what he had said. "I mean, this is tragic — but they did a good job. It looks great."

Trimble added that when he told his Jewish neighbors about his latest role as a movie extra, they said they'd skip this one. "Don't be offended, Tom," he remembered them saying, "but we don't want to watch you lynch Leo Frank."

The dummy was ready for its star turn. Loeterman wanted to show people arriving to discover the corpse, the beginning of what became an unruly death scene. He composed a long shot, with extras warily approaching Frank's body and milling about with looks of revulsion and vengeful triumph.

The assistant director called out instructions:

"Walk close to him ... touch him ... is he still alive? ... take a picture ... now walk away ... you've had enough of this ... no, you want to go back and take another look."

Restaging a horror

The daylight was dying. It was time to summon the lean young actor who would play Frank, Will Janowitz, best-known for his role as Finn DiTrolio, Meadow's fiance in "The Sopranos."

Janowitz arrived wearing a long nightshirt and flip-flops that made it seem like he had just walked out of the shower. His angular face brought to mind Oney's description of Frank looking like the "flesh and blood articulation of a mechanical drawing."

The actor took a seat in a canvas chair and faced the figure in the tree. As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, he understood something about the perils of inflamed prejudice. He had read about the lynching and knew his character suffered a slow, horrible death.

"He flailed around and strangled," Janowitz softly told crew members.

He later admitted that it was impossible to fully inhabit a scene like the one he was about to attempt. "No one can really prepare for a lynching."

Loeterman had agonized over the execution. He had intended to restage the entire ordeal, with Janowitz in a hanging harness, but decided to stop just before the plunge and dissolve into documentary pictures. No re-creation could be as disturbing as the real images of Frank suspended in fresh death.

The set-up was finished. "Action!" the assistant shouted.

A knot of lynchers tightened around the man in the nightshirt and roughly delivered him to the foot of an oak, where a table was waiting. One of them asked whether he had any last words.

"I think more of my wife and my mother than I do of my own life," he said, his cuffed hands turned inward, as if in prayer.

The men slipped a hood over his head, fitted a noose around his neck and lifted him onto the table.

Beyond the movie lights, the Georgia countryside was almost totally dark.

THE LEO FRANK CASE

• Murder. On April 27, 1913, Mary Phagan was found strangled in the National Pencil factory, where she worked, in downtown Atlanta. The manager, Leo Frank, was charged.

• Trial. A Fulton County jury convicted Frank on the testimony of Jim Conley, a janitor who said he had helped his boss move Phagan's body. Most historians suspect Conley was the killer.

• Lynching. Gov. John Slaton doubted Frank's guilt and commuted his death sentence to life, enraging many Georgians. On Aug. 16, 1915, vigilantes abducted Frank from prison and drove him to Marietta, where Phagan had roots. They lynched him near the present site of the Big Chicken.

• Repercussions. Inspired by the lynching, the Ku Klux Klan was reborn atop Stone Mountain. The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, which had just been founded, used the case as a rallying tool.

• Pardon. In 1982, Alonzo Mann, who had been an office boy at the factory, came forward to say he had seen Conley with Phagan's body. Four years later, the state of Georgia pardoned Frank posthumously.