By DEBBIE WACHTER MORRIS

dmorris@ncnewsonline.com

Ray Robinson will never know the number of friends he accumulated in his life.

He’ll never know someone wrote a song about him or that he would become the subject of a movie.

Interest in Robinson was rejuvenated recently when a Studio City, Calif., movie team, “Ivory Seam Productions” set its sights on making a movie about the scarred Ellwood City-area man who had spent much of his life in the dark.

Tisha York, formerly of Ellwood, is a producer and screenwriter for the film about Robinson, who morphed into the legendary “Green Man” after being nearly electrocuted by a high tension wire. He was 8 years old when the incident happened in 1919 near Beaver Falls.

As an adult, Robinson would walk at night along Route 351, away from the ridiculing society. But people found him, and stories sprung up about “The Green Man” or “Charlie No-Face” — the scary creature in the woods.

People would go in troops to look for him. Some were scared and some played mean tricks, but others befriended him and found him to be a genuinely nice person.

The real Ray Robinson, who died in 1985 at age 74, is who York hopes to capture as the camera zooms in on his life.

Auditions in mid-October attracted 70 local acting hopefuls, including Gene Quinn, 64, of Beaver County.

“This is about 20 years too late,” he said. “It’s going to be a big seller. I felt sorry for him.”

While Andy Zelesnak’s daughter auditioned, the 70-year-old Koppel man told his stories about seeing Robinson seven or eight times, when they discussed weather and the miles Robinson had walked.

Robinson was called the Green Man because his damaged face had a greenish hue, “especially when light shone on it,” Zelesnak said. “He was wonderful guy, having a hardship like that ...”

Zelesnak’s friend, Joe Nanni, was fleet-footed and “scared to death” of Robinson. One day while the two were riding bikes, they saw Robinson walking on the road and Nanni “got off his bicycle and ran like a deer.”