Written by Ben Cox – A former Brown County educator, school principal, and superintendent is finding a new and somewhat unusual way to occupy his time in retirement.

 

Former Bangs and Rising Star Superintendent Bill Foster divides his time these days between writing novels and stage plays, and on location shooting TV shows and commercials. He has been seen in the HEB Super Bowl commercial, and as a recurring extra in Fear The Walking Dead as well as on The Son with Pierce Brosnan.

Bill Foster’s IMDB Headshot (left) On location during a shoot (right)

“When I was in 2nd grade, we were going around the room telling what we wanted to be when we grew up and one kid said he wanted to be an actor and everyone laughed at him, so I said I wanted to be a vet. I wanted to be an actor, but I didn’t want to get laughed at!”

While he knew early on that acting was what he wanted to do it took retirement to spur him to action when he saw a casting call for a movie shoot in Oklahoma. While that role didn’t pan out, he saw another possible show that interested him and thought “I’m retired, I can do whatever I want to now!”

After attending that casting call, he was selected for a small role in AMC’s The Son, featuring Pierce Brosnan. Since then Foster has also worked with Tim Nelson from O Brother Where Art Thou, and Clancy Brown from Shawshank Redemption and The Hurricane, as well as the Cohen Brothers.

Foster has written a script for the stage which he hopes to have produced locally at the Lyric Theatre in the near future. “Windows Home” is the story of two people who fall in love in 1960’s Ohio, get married, and have to face that he has been drafted and is going to the Vietnam War.

Foster says the story came from an interest in that time period, because “while I was too young to go, a lot of the people who were just a little older than me were leaving for the war.” His interest in what happened to those soldiers became a fascination that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

When the idea of writing for the stage came to him, “a love story dealing with some kind of angst” was an immediate inspiration. Foster was able to  draw on his passion for the war as a backdrop for the play as well as introduce the drama needed for the script.

The title for “Windows Home” is also part of the design of the set for the show, with the soldier “looking through a window of his POW cell to the east, and his wife at home looking through a window facing west. This allows them to ‘talk’ to each other” during the show.

A read through last year at the Lyric helped Foster to round out the script, and add several scenes that he wrote based on the feedback given at that reading. His wife Linda is also an integral part of the editing process.

Corrections made by his wife, Linda, on an early draft of his novel

Foster says “I tell her to write it all down, don’t spare my feelings, just tell me what’s wrong with it.” The pair often brainstorm on ways to alter a scene or change an ending. “We were in the car coming home from Fredericksburg trying to figure out the ending” and the version that made it to the final script was part of that creative session.

The second season of The Son will premiere later this year, Fear The Walking Dead will be on this Sunday at 8pm on AMC. Windows Home is anticipated to be part of the Lyric’s 2019 season, scheduling and show selection is ongoing at the moment.