While developing the screenplay, McCarthy and Pearce spent several months researching the circumstances of the murder, the community's reaction to the crime, and the socioeconomic conditions in Graniteville during the period.

Stacey Peebles—a scholar of McCarthy's works—likened his small role to Alfred Hitchcock's famous cameos in his own films, though rendered ironic by the fact that the obscure author would have been unrecognizable to the viewing audience.

[10] The Gardener's Son was produced by KCET, a Los Angeles-based PBS affiliate station, as the twelfth installment in its Visions series of made-for-television drama films.

[1] Its budget reflected the average expenditure for entries in the Visions series, each made with much less money than the typical hour-long episode of major network era dramas.

[20] Terrill identified Pearce's source for the McEvoy–Gregg story as Broadus Mitchell's 1928 biography of William Gregg, owner of the Graniteville mill and one of the most significant industrialists of the Antebellum South.

[28] Already acquainted with the author's early work, Pearce felt especially impressed by the latest novel: Child of God, the oddest of a wonderfully odd lot, had been the one that struck me.

As their work continued, Pearce and McCarthy uncovered numerous historical details that complicated Mitchell's rosy narrative of the Gregg family and their impact on the regional economy.

They learned of an 1875 labor strike responding to docked wages and an 1877 petition to the governor, bearing hundreds of signatures, requesting that he commute McEvoy's death sentence.

[16] Beyond historical and literary influences, McCarthy likely drew cinematic inspiration from film titles listed in his archived notes, such as Black Orpheus (1959), La Dolce Vita (1960), In Cold Blood (1967), and The Great Gatsby (1974).

'"[36] Casting was primarily handled by co-producer Michael Hausman, whose previous experience included Miloš Forman's Taking Off (1971) and Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid (1972) and Mikey and Nicky (1976).

[38] Hausman convinced Ned Beatty to play the role of Pinky by scheduling his scene to be filmed when he could stop en route to New York from an unrelated shoot further south.

[40] With less than a week before filming, the production still needed more adult men as extras for crowd shots, so Pearce, McCarthy, Dourif, and Hausman held a press conference on March 23, 1976, at the arts center in Graham, North Carolina to publicize further auditions in the area.

"[47] More than three decades later, he had similar recollections for The Wall Street Journal: "Dick Pearce and I made a film in North Carolina about 30 years ago and I thought, 'This is just hell.

"[17] Alan M. Kriegsman of The Washington Post hailed The Gardener's Son as the standout from the Visions series to date, writing that the drama "reflect[s] a writer's accurate ear for local vernacular, and a filmmaker's grasp of the revelatory power of imagery," with further praise for the cast and score.

[12] In the Winston-Salem, North Carolina paper The Sentinel, Genie Carr highlighted the climactic scene when "16-year-old Martha McEvoy pleads in vain with her older brother Bobby—handcuffed and guarded by a burly deputy sheriff—for understanding of her life, and his own," saying the moment "brings tears in a film that for more than an hour has emphasized the deadly placid surface stretched tightly over controlled feelings".

He applauded the cast, particularly Martin (who he wrote "controls each of her scenes") and O'Sullivan (who "combines the face of a young worker—beautiful but quickly becoming too old and weary—with the depth of a tender, but wise-too-early girl").

[58] He said it was the year's "most provocative unknown American movie", worthy of comparison to The Battle of Algiers (1966), and a fine example of "class-conscious filmmaking, a rarity in this country, that is squeezed for humanistic insights rather than doctrinaire propaganda".

In the Los Angeles Times, the critic James Brown dismissed The Gardener's Son as too dreary and directionless for audiences to connect with its historical themes on its own terms.

"McCarthy and Pearce have asked the audience to determine Robert's motivations," Brown said, but he found this was "a less than compelling task" given the drama's reliance on vague symbolism and emotional detachment from its central character.

[61] A reviewer for the North Carolina newspaper The Greensboro Record said the film "contained dialogue gross enough to make an alderman blush, to say nothing of repeated blasphemies of the commoner sort" and objected so strongly offended to its content that he called for its permanent removal from the airwaves, invoking obscenity law via the Communications Act of 1934 and Title 18 of the U.S.

[74] In Pearce's foreword to the published screenplay, he called The Gardener's Son "my education as a filmmaker" and said McCarthy had become a godfather to his daughter and, "in many ways, to all the films I've made since.

[79] A review in Booklist called it "lesser in scope and impact than his All the Pretty Horses (1992) or The Crossing (1994) but bearing in full measure his gift—that ability to fit complex and universal emotions into ordinary lives and still preserve all of their power and significance.

[83] The screenplay suggests that while records and artifacts may embody the distorted views of their creators, they are nonetheless the fragments out of which we may apprehend the past if we read them closely, sympathetically, and in context.

[86] "In typical McCarthy style," Richard B. Woodward wrote in his 1992 profile of the author, "the amputation of the boy's leg and his slow execution by hanging are the moments from the show that linger in the mind.

"[87] Peter Josyph praised the acting and cinematography but found McCarthy's writing below the standard of his finest works, though he also described the screenplay as "certainly sympathetic to the screen", concluding that it was certainly "better than most of the crap that was made at the time.

"[89] The Gardener's Son represented a noteworthy turning point in McCarthy's development as a writer not only as his first attempt at screenwriting, but also as his first rigorously researched work of historical fiction, anticipating his Western novel Blood Meridian (1985) in this respect.

In addition to writing the screenplay, McCarthy took a hands-on role in development of The Counselor just as he had on The Gardener's Son, this time as an executive producer, weighing in during pre-production, casting, filming, and editing.

[29] Rick Wallach regarded Pearce, not McCarthy, as "the real author" of the film in terms of vision and ultimate artistic responsibility, a position aligned with the tenets of auteur theory.

Mitchell claimed McCarthy "reined in the pyrotechnics, perhaps uncertain about the ways in which experimental techniques might alter visual possibilities as thoroughly as his lexical experiments were already recasting late modernist expectations," adding that "nothing [in The Gardener's Son] suggests the surreal, contorted vision evoked by his novels.

"[94] On the other hand, Luce judged the screenplay "in every way consistent with McCarthy's treatments of characters, theme and the spoken language in his novels," even as its interpretation of historical events demonstrates Pearce's input and approval.