WHEN MTV first went on television in August 1981, Alan Hunter’s was the first face viewers saw. As one of the original five V.J.’s, his segment was to have been the last on the debut tape that had been prepared. But the tape was out of sync when the network’s signal went national, and Mr. Hunter’s visage was suddenly front and center.
For seven years he expropriated fame from the rock stars and celebrities he was interviewing. But by the end of it, Mr. Hunter, by then married with children, was talking of having become burned out by the experience. So he headed to Los Angeles before ultimately settling in his hometown, Birmingham, Ala., where he joined his brothers in starting a production studio and entertainment venue there called WorkPlay.
By the time Elizabeth A. Bradley, 18 years his junior, encountered Mr. Hunter, now 50, MTV was better known for its reality shows than its V.J.’s. Not that Ms. Bradley would have known about either. She had grown up in Michigan, where her parents had blocked the channel on the family’s television.
Their first contact, in 2005, came about when Ms. Bradley decided to leave her job in Manhattan for a sabbatical in Alabama, where she had family. She had been working for eight years in New York, most recently as a director of development — reading scripts and seeking new film projects — for Andrew Lauren Productions, which made “The Squid and the Whale.” Now she wanted to try writing a screenplay while teaching writing workshops to pay the bills.
Moving away from New York, Ms. Bradley feared, might be the death knell for someone harboring hopes of becoming a screenwriter, she said. Her agent was not pleased with the idea. “I promised him I wasn’t going to stay,” she recalled.
Ms. Bradley had her Alabama relatives send out feelers to those they knew in the filmmaking community there. Through a convoluted series of connections and relationships, Ms. Bradley came upon Mr. Hunter.
“My cousin’s best friend’s mother’s little sister was your high school girlfriend,” she wrote to him in an e-mail message. “Help me start a screenwriting workshop.”
A few weeks after she arrived in Birmingham, Ms. Bradley and Mr. Hunter were introduced at a fund-raiser for a film festival he helped create. He immediately noticed the petite woman in a blue cowboy hat, said Mr. Hunter, whose first marriage had ended in divorce years earlier. He said he was charmed by her cosmopolitan air. Once they started talking, they could not stop, she said.
New York had imbued Ms. Bradley with abrupt social reflexes that did not fit well in a smaller, slower Southern city, she said. In contrast, Mr. Hunter was more deliberate, with a social intuition she found charming.
“He takes time to really think about things before he says them,” she said. “He listens intently and considers what’s going on in situations, while I was still using the New York voice I had for cabdrivers and drunks standing too close to you on the subway.”
For their first date, Mr. Hunter took her to another fund-raiser, at which he was to be the auctioneer. When the waiter came by, she surprised and impressed Mr. Hunter by ordering a steak. “So she was this petite gal from the North, but she wasn’t a wilting flower,” he said. “She ate a big giant slab of beef.”
As their relationship became more serious, she called home with the news. “I got an enormous charge out of calling my parents and saying: ‘Remember how you blocked Channel 29? I watch it every day in person now,’ ” said Ms. Bradley, 32.
In Birmingham, Ms. Bradley fused with the local arts scene. As planned, she taught screenwriting workshops, and she founded “Muse of Fire,” a Shakespeare production at Sloss Furnace, a giant relic from the city’s steel-producing past.
Because Ms. Bradley had not planned to stay in Birmingham, their relationship began slowly and escalated in stages as her ties to New York began to fall away.
“We kept feeling like the universe was demanding that we make decisions,” Mr. Hunter said of their evolving relationship. “It kept asking us to evaluate and be purposeful, which in the long run and in hindsight was the perfect way to do it.”
After subletting her Manhattan apartment for a year, she let the lease expire — a significant milestone, Ms. Bradley said. She moved in with Mr. Hunter and closed the loop by giving up her New York cellphone number.
Ms. Bradley had become enamored with her new home, the Southern mystique and by what she called the “freaky aesthetics” of Sloss Furnace — all things Mr. Hunter said he had treated with incredulity. “There are lot of things that I don’t really buy into about Southern culture,” said Mr. Hunter, who had once strayed long and far from his roots. Ms. Bradley, he said, “Opened up my eyes to some things that I should be appreciating about my own culture.”
When the couple first met, Mr. Hunter’s offspring were becoming adults, with Callie nearing the end of high school and Dylan in college. And while Mr. Hunter was not looking to remarry, he said he was not opposed to it, either. “I surely opened the door unconsciously to something like this happening,” he said.
That door swung wide open during a trip to New York last November, where they dined at Café des Artistes before crossing the street to Central Park. She thought he was going to buy her a carriage ride. Instead he pulled a ring from his pocket. He proposed. She accepted, and it began to rain.
It also rained when the couple married on July 7 in downtown Birmingham, which, like much of Alabama, has been afflicted with one of the worst droughts in the state’s history. (A week before the wedding, Gov. Bob Riley implored citizens to pray for rain.)
“If the drought was going to break, it was going to break on my wedding,” Ms. Bradley said.
Inside the First United Methodist Church, Mr. Hunter’s children sang Schubert’s “Ave Maria” before the nearly 100 guests who had gathered in the vaulted Romanesque chapel. The Rev. Henry D. Mitchell quoted the Apostle Paul and E. E. Cummings.
The storm clouds outside broke in time for the wedding party to march to bagpipes for four blocks to the Kress Building, a former five-and-dime that now houses offices and an urbane rooftop party space with its own boccie court. The bride and bridegroom danced across the roof to Frank Sinatra’s version of “Fly Me to the Moon” while guests drank Champagne and ate grits garnished with collard-green pesto and andouille sausage.
“We wanted our wedding to match our personalities and our relationship” Ms. Bradley said. “Reinvented Southern neo-Gothic,” she called it, in an attempt to put her finger on the quirky synthesis of cultures and eras they had put before their guests. “If there wasn’t such a thing before, then there is now.”
