In the summer of 2002 I spent a week on location for one of our movies in Montana. Originally titled Heaven’s Pond, it was a thriller starring Kip Pardue and Tara Reid that ended up going direct-to-DVD under the title Devil’s Pond. A marketing genius decided that sounded scarier. Oh well, for a while they intended to call it Terror Lake.

No bones about it – we didn’t mean for it to but this became a bad movie. The reasons are many, and maybe I’ll write them down sometime, since they involve everything from forest fires to stock footage of submarines to the voice of Fievel from An American Tail. But the week I spent in Montana was unforgettable in its own right, and that’s what I’ll focus on here.



Somewhere in Montana, a voice shouts…
“Brown Sugar!”

I’m sitting with two movie stars and a director, trying to guess the ingredients in a can of baked beans while the camera team preps the next shot. Nearby, two of the crew are holding a rock-skipping contest – it’s our unofficial sport, the best I’ve seen is fourteen, although they claim the record is twenty. Another person is learning the finer points in the craft of whittling from one of the locals.

Ahh, the glamour of movie-making.

The actual, physical shooting of a movie is a unique blend of hard work and boredom. Because there’s always someone doing something to get through the day, but almost no one is actually working all of the time. But whenever you are, you’re pressured to get it done as quickly as possible, because no one else can do their job until you’ve done yours. So you never really completely relax, but you look for a lot of ways to kill time in small chunks, hence our guessing game.

I’m on an extremely small island – about 100 feet by 50 feet, according to our line producer, along with about two dozen other people and several pontoons’ worth of equipment. There’s a rustic cabin in the center – the crew tore apart an old barn on the mainland, brought the wood over, and built it a couple of weeks ago – now it looks like it’s been there for years. They also built up parts of the island to make getting around easier, so sometimes ground that looks like just dirt and rocks buckles when stepped on, betraying the plywood underneath. Craig, my colleague and a producer on the movie, is sitting on a tree stump – when he wants to talk to me, he surprises me by picking up the stump and bringing it over with him.

When I see this movie, first I’ll be struck by the claustrophobia of two people on such a small island. Then I’ll remember that wherever the camera is, all of those people and equipment are scattered behind it. It’s like a giant puzzle, moving the same stuff through a finite space over and over again so that (hopefully) the camera will never see it, or us. (NOTE – We didn’t quite succeed, I’ve seen a cast chair pop up in at least one shot, and a bottle of water in another.)

I arrived yesterday for 5-6 days of observing and relaxation. The scenery is all miles of trees, lakes, and the hills that meander through them. The mornings are cold, foggy, crisp, just the way I like them. The air is like drinking icy bottled water – you taste nothing but the essential element, and you love it. In the morning, riding one of the boats from base camp over to the set, a thick mist curls off of the surface of the lake, tricking glimpses of rainbows into the corners of my eyes.



The weather is devilishly unpredictable – a completely blue Big Sky can fill with clouds and dump rain on your head with less than a half-hours’ warning. I experience this my very first day on the set, which sends us scurrying to cover the generators and get under shelter (someone waits out the storm in the portable toilet) when clear turned to dark, dark turned to extremely wet, and extremely wet turned to extremely-wet-with-hailstones.

We're roughing it in style. Yes we’re doped up with bug spray and have to share a limited number of Port-a-Sans, but there’s also a catering truck serving hot meals twice a day, coolers full of drinks, and a heaping snack table.

In the evenings, we pile into our locally-rented cars (I’m assigned a Suzuki Sidekick, which I could have sworn was recalled for it’s Weeble-like tipping habit) and drive forty miles to the nearest town of any size – Libby, Montana.

The “motor lodge” I’m staying in is three stories tall, and as near as I can tell is the highest building in Libby. Then again, with land like this, who needs to build upwards?

Gambling is everywhere. Standing in front of my motel, I can see a casino to my left and two across the street in front of me. But these aren’t the lavish pseudo-amusement parks of Vegas, or their poorer Nevada cousins, or even their poorer California reservation cousins. These are about the size of liquor stores, with a couple of rows of slot machines and video poker. Most of them are just additions onto restaurants or gas stations. You’d really have to work to lose a lot of money here, but I’m sure people manage.

We’re less than fifty miles south of the Canadian border, and hundreds of miles from anything resembling a metropolis – most of the radio and TV stations come from Portland or Spokane. But one local surprise – the radio stations truly, indisputably rock. I hear songs I love that I haven’t heard in years, one after another. I guess some of these smaller stations have escaped the shrinking-playlist homogony of the larger radio networks – name one station in LA that will play Peter Gabriel’s “Kiss That Frog”, I dare you.

It’s quiet, so damned quiet for someone who lives in a city where at any hour of the day there’s the steady hum of hundreds of thousands of cars plus a few planes flying overhead. I park my car by the side of the road to take a picture, and when I get out I'm stunned by the silence. I have to adjust to the nothingness. It’s technically a working vacation, but boy does it feel like a vacation vacation.



To be fair, I’ve brought the office with me, and read through 3 scripts a day (when they aren’t shooting or involving me in bean-related games), but in the office I couldn’t skip out for an afternoon swim, could I?

Although I’m a glorified fifth wheel on my trips to sets, it’s indescribably fun to watch this part of the process. There’s some tension here and there, mostly arising from long days and very little personal space, but there’s a sincere desire here to make something of quality. I’ve been on sets where that desire was nowhere to be found, and there’s an ambient difference.

The LA crew and the locals are getting along well despite some culture clashes. One of the boat pilots fears being videotaped, and is concerned that working for us is going to result in him finally having to pay taxes. Another (the whittling teacher) talks about training his dogs to tree mountain lions for fun. Mostly they’re just decent people living ordinary lives with ordinary troubles, but in an environment where Mother Nature is still visibly in charge – one of them remembers having their entire house buried under a snow drift.


If Donnie was in a good mood, he wouldn’t make you row

On our day off, many people go directly from morning hangover to afternoon partying, cramming every free hour into one massive pressure release. Not feeling the need to blur my senses so, I’m lucky some of the crew have different ideas.



We take a van and make the drive to Glacier National Park, about 2-2 ½ hours away. We wind thousands of feet up into the mountains on Going-to-the-Sun Road, stopping to pile out for hiking trails, waterfalls, or any view that’s too beautiful to pass up along the way. There are many. Even in late August there’s still patches of snow on the ground, and we see mountain goats lounging in them. One goat strolls along the hiking path beside us for awhile, generally content with tourists who photograph him like he’s a furry celebrity.



As the afternoon wears on, gray clouds begin to roll in – and I mean roll, I can’t remember the last time I saw weather assert itself so quickly. We’re in the woods, in a “bear frequenting area” – we debate about what “frequenting” involves, having just read in our guidebook absurdly deadpan tips on what to do if a bear gets it in his head to maul you.

We’re heading for a scenic waterfall, and are halfway there. As the water begins to splat downward in thick drops, and the wind churns up the lake to our left, we realize – the guy who ran ahead has the car keys. If anyone doesn’t like the rain, it’s tough luck now.

We reach the waterfall and discover that there’s a natural rock shelf you can scoot into that puts you close to the water. It also has an overhang that shelters us perfectly. We sit by the roaring water, watch other hikers scurry across the log bridge running over the creek, and snap picture after picture.



After 5 miles of hiking – not a champion distance, sure, but notable for half-a-dozen out-of-shape Angelenos at a high altitude (except for Lance, the Steadicam operator, who’s in very good shape and sprints every trail we find), we’re ready for food. Big food.

We luck into possibly the perfect match for our appetite. The Back Room (on Highway 2 in Columbia Falls, just outside the Park limits) is literally that – a restaurant in the same building as, but behind, a diner called the Nite Owl. The choice isn’t difficult, because The Back Room is the type of place that proudly drops its food on your table in heaping baskets and has rolls of paper towels in place of a napkin dispenser. Powerfully good steak, ribs, and chicken, served big and with uniform no-side-dishes-menu-we-pick-em-for-you helpings of potatoes, baked beans, fried bread, and coleslaw. And it costs less than $10.

Given that I could spend a week in Glacier and just scratch the surface of what it has to offer, I’m sure that The Back Room and I will meet again.

Coming back to LA, I have the same feeling that I can recall coming back from Europe, and from Hawaii before that. Weight – like the atmosphere that pushes down on our head everywhere we go is just a little heavier here. Air – lungs spoiled by a respite from The City That Never Walks suddenly having to put in that little extra effort again. Tightness – the hemmed-in feeling of returning to the Big Pond, with all of the vibe and variety, but also all of the crowds and noise.

This is the city where I live, the city where I work, but every time I get out for a little holiday, I come back asking if this is really the city I’m going to stay in. I know why I’m here – the movies. And as long as I can still be excited about an a profession where you end up shouting “Brown Sugar!” because there’s nothing better to do, I can live with this.