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An Excerpt From SHOT IN MONTANA, by Brian D'Ambrosio

Riverbend Publishing

Montana is a realistic feast for filmmakers. It is not surprising that Hollywood selected Glacier National Park as the mythical setting to depict heaven in the 1998 Robin Williams movie, “What Dreams May Come.” Filmmakers captured the surreal beauty of one of the world’s greatest treasures so vividly that critic Roger Ebert declared “What Dreams May Come” as “one of the great visual achievements in film history.”

Montana’s majesty and unspoiled beauty offer detailed delights and, at times, peace of mind. Such eye-dazzling assets are a filmmaker’s paradise. For that reason, the motion picture industry has often hitched its journey to Big Sky Country. As filmmaker Arthur Penn (“Little Big Man,” “The Missouri Breaks”) noted, “It just doesn’t get any better. Montana is the real thing.” Penn first fell in love with the smell of sage and the whistle of the wind while vacationing and scouting locations in the late 1960s.

The movies “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot,” “Heaven’s Gate,” “Firefox,” “Runaway Train,” “The Stone Boy”, and “The Slaughter Rule” have little in common. But one thing they all share: each was filmed in Montana. For more than 100 years, production companies have been coming to Montana to capture its elements. From the earliest known 1897 travel promotion film “Tourist Train Leaving Livingston” to major studio films such as “The Horse Whisperer,” “A River Runs Through It,” and “Nebraska,” Montana has hosted nearly 100 feature films.

In film and on the map, Montana covers a lot of soil. Montana has a land area of 93,157,952 acres, holds 10 national forests, including 14 wilderness areas, with 26,616,234 acres of national forest and BLM land. Approximately 1,000,000 people live in Montana (and 2.3 million cows). The fourth-largest state, at 500 miles by 300 miles, there is a richness of diversity in Montana: from rolling prairies, cropland and badlands in the east to forests, vast mountains and trout streams in the west. Filmmakers working on period pieces can often use Montana to effectively simulate the look of past or even ancient eras –thanks to the low population and tremendous amount of open space without impeding towns, roads or power lines.

The state is divided roughly into thirds. On one border there is Glacier National Park and three of the five entrances to Yellowstone National Park are in Montana. The east is rolling plains; the mid-section, high plains with isolated, towering mountain ranges, buttes, mesas, pristine river valleys and canyons; and the west is mountainous. In between is the stark beauty of the Missouri Breaks and the high desert of Charlie Russell country. Central Montana’s also a haven for independent filmmakers whose use of the landscape informs the narratives of thoughtful, introspective films – like “Northfork,” a film with Biblical undertones involving a young orphan, a hydroelectric dam and – perhaps – Noah’s Ark. Sweeping Montana landscapes set a melancholy mood in “Northfork,” a surreal drama that boasts sumptuous cinematography.

Montana has served as a snow-covered no-man’s-land in Clint Eastwood’s “Firefox” and supplied a large building blown to smithereens in Charles Bronson’s spy thriller “Telefon.” Sometimes Montana is naturally Montana: Kootenai Falls, the largest undammed falls in Montana, served as the setting for the 1994 film “River Wild” starring Meryl Streep, a thriller about a family on a rafting vacation that is tormented by some ruffians and rough water. “The River Wild” was filmed on two of Montana’s whitewater rivers: the Kootenai River (and Kootenai Falls) near Libby, and the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. Testament to Montana’s treacherous nature: a rafting sequence in almost killed Meryl Streep one August afternoon.

Excerpted from Shot in Montana, by Brian D'Ambrosio.

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Brian D'Ambrosio
Brian D'Ambrosio

Brian D’Ambrosio lives in Helena, Montana, where he writes for a variety of publications. His favorite subjects: history, architecture, biography, boxing, NHL tough guys, photography, forgotten inventors, and obscure American poets and authors.

Copyright 2020 Montana Public Radio. To see more, visit .

Chérie Newman is an arts and humanities producer and on-air host for Montana Public Radio, and a freelance writer. Her weekly literary program, The Write Question, is broadcast on several public radio stations, and available online at PRX.org and MTPR.org.