Amanda Robinson never set out to be an actress — indeed, at 67 (and known as Amanda Robinson Lane), she’s a retired schoolteacher with a proud record of achievements in that field behind her; but in 1956, at age 15 she achieved something akin to big-screen immortality by way of Elia Kazan’s production of A Face In The Crowd, which was partly shot in her hometown of Piggott, Arkansas. Not only did the teenaged Amanda Robinson manage to get a featured spot on screen, doing some of what she did best in those days (twirling a baton), but she got her real name mentioned in the movie as well, by the star, Andy Griffith.

It was early 1956 when Kazan and company began making arrangements to shoot large sections of A Face In The Crowd in Piggott, Arkansas, where Robinson lived with her family. Her father, Loran D. Robinson, was the local superintendant of schools, and her mother Mildred was a teacher. “They approached me after they observed our high school band, because I was the drum majorette, and they thought I looked like Lee Remick,” she recalled in a June 2008 interview, referring to the movie’s ingenue.

The producers initially thought that Robinson might help double Remick, but the actress was a full five years older than Robinson. They later found someone else to double the actress in the baton twirling, but instead they asked her for something much more important. The Massachusetts-born Remick needed to learn to talk and act like an Arkansas teenager, and Kazan asked Robinson’s family for permission to have Remick stay with them, to pick up accents and phrases, and ways of doing things that were authentic to the movie’s small-town Arkansas setting. According to Robinson, Remick ended up living with her family for almost three weeks, and they became very close.
Her parents were very glad to participate in the production, and Robinson ended up appearing — under her own name — in the baton twirling sequence in which Andy Griffith’s Lonesome Rhodes proposes to Remick’s Betty Lou Fleckum. The other local girls who appeared in the segment were Bunny McCallum, Mary Thomas, and Suzanne Ballard, all of whom, along with Robinson, were asked to come to New York City to appear in the wedding scene which follows. According to Robinson, she and Remick became very close while they were living together in Piggott and during the shooting there, but for the New York shoot later on, the actress seemed standoffish, although Robinson understands why — “She was a young actress with her colleagues and didn’t want to be seen by them as too close to the inexperienced extras.”

A Face In The Crowd’s production was a major event for Piggott, Arkansas, which was (and is) mostly a farming community - the town was also home in the 1930’s to Ernest Hemingway, who lived there during the time of his second marriage, to Pauline Pfeiffer, and it now has the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center, but in 1956 the presence of Kazan and his crew was unprecedented. “Mr. Kazan was very nice to all of us,” said Robinson, recalling her interactions with the renowned stage and screen director. “One thing that I remember that was very sweet - Suzanne Ballard and I asked him if we could keep the costumes that we wore for our scenes, and he said that was impossible because they didn’t belong to him, that they were rented. But a few weeks later, we each got a package in the mail, and it was our costumes - he’d obviously made arrangements to do it, and there they were.”

For all of the excitement caused by the production, the movie, when it opened, received a less-than-enthusiastic response from the residents of Piggott. “Many people here thought it was horrible, dreadful,” recalled Robinson. “We didn’t expect a story like that, or to see Andy Griffith like that. I think it was just too strong at the time,” she observed. Today, however, the movie is thought of as an enduring classic and the town is proud of its participation. Robinson, at 68, finds herself recognized for her participation in it, and her high school graduating class, for their 50th anniversary reunion, even used the film’s title as a reference point for their theme: “Not a Face In The Crowd.”