Hilton Head, Beaufort marshes backdrop for new terrorism action film
Walter Czura of Hilton Head Island, who made a movie based loosely on his involvement in a famous 1970s Lowcountry drug smuggling case, is following up his initial film with “One More Run.”
The sequel, scheduled to start production in the late spring, introduces more action and terrorism to the story, but keeps the intricate maze of Hilton Head and Beaufort marsh channels as a leading character.
“One More Run” is a follow-up to “The Final Run, ” which was filmed in the Beaufort and St. Helena Island area in 2023. It was released on Amazon Prime, Fandango, Apple TV and other streaming platforms in August.
Actor Jeff Fahey, best known for roles in Stephen King’s “The Lawnmower Man” and ABC’s “Lost,” will return for the sequel in the lead role of Pierce Butler. Maddie Henderson will play his granddaughter, Czura says.
Czura says the sequel will have more action with the same backdrop — “the breathtaking beauty of the South Carolina Lowcountry.”
“My original screenplay was intentionally intimate and character-driven,” Czura said in a news release. “For the sequel, we are widening the lens. The stakes are bigger. The danger is real. My protagonist, Pierce Butler’s world is about to collide with forces far darker than anything he’s ever faced.”
In “The Final Run,” Fahey’s character Butler is a former Marine and long-retired marijuana smuggler whose wife is suffering from a rare type of cancer. The dire situation forces him to make one “final run” in order to save his house, his company and his wife.
In the 1970s and 80s, Hilton Head-area men captaining trawlers, sailboats, and ocean racers criss-crossed oceans to buy drugs in Colombia, Lebanon and Jamaica. They returned to Hilton Head, Edisto and St. Helena Island on the coast of South Carolina, eluding authorities using the Lowcountry’s maze of rivers and creeks.
With college degrees, and an aversion to smuggling cocaine because of the associated violence, the marijuana and hashish traffickers became known as the “Gentlemen Smugglers.”
Eventually, some 200 drug traffickers were caught in the FBI’s “Operation Jackpot,” which helped to launch the career of South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, who was a federal prosecutor at the time. The operation was part of President Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs.”
Czura, a resident of Hilton Head’s Sea Pines Plantation and president of a billboard company called Marlin Outdoor Advertising, was an attorney at the time and one of the “gentleman smugglers” swept up in the operation. These days, he’s using his intimate knowledge of the real-life characters involved in the drug smuggling ring to make movies.
“One More Run” introduces a foreign terrorist operative determined to infiltrate components of a dirty bomb into the United States — using the same hidden waterways and backwoods estuaries between Hilton Head Island, Beaufort and Charleston once exploited for smuggling.
Veteran Hollywood director Dennis Smith has agreed to direct the sequel. Smith is an Emmy nominee television director and award-winning documentary cinematographer known for his work on TV crime dramas, especially the NCIS franchise.
