The Movie Business

Northwestern Montana

After a summer of laying in the grass beside good trout streams, the fun tickets ran dry in Browning, Montana. I had connections in California, made a few phone calls, and came up with a job as a location scout for a group who wanted to shoot yet another mountain man movie. Two hundred and fifty bucks a week, plus expenses. Big money in those days. I had no idea what a location scout did, but I did know the mountains where the film was to be shot.

At the appointed time of the first meeting with my new employer, a black Lincoln town car pulled up in front the Timber! Cafe, in Augusta. Out of the driver's side climbed a pudgy white male human, clad in beaded elk fringe leggings over Gucci shoes. Around his neck was sixteen troy ounces of chain with a golden goat dick dangling from it. I should've run out the back door of the Timber!. Instead, I hurried onto the sidewalk to prevent this Californian from being eaten by log truck drivers.

My term of employment with Jack was exactly five hundred dollars plus expenses long. The first week was spent teaching him what a beaver dam looked like, how not to close himself on the wrong side of a barbwire gate, (We were riding in my rig. His Lincoln took a boulder through the oil pan the first day out.) and why real mountain men probably did not rendezvous right at the very tops of the Rocky Mountains. During the second week, Jack offended every rancher with whom he made contact by assuming that they were willing to mother-up to the almighty dollar and allow Jack's outfit to bulldoze equipment trails into hidden valleys or to convert line shacks into trappers' cabins.

I quit the movie business in a motel dining room in Browning, in the heart of the Blackfoot reservation. Jack was in costume number two, that of a Sunset Strip cowpoke, complete with a silverbelly Stetson that fit him like a beany, pointy-toed lizard boots, and a purple paisley shirt with dayglo piping. He was eating bloody steak.

The waitress was a young Blackfoot woman.  Jack had a meeting the next morning with her elders to sign papers on the hiring of a band of extras to add the Indian flavor to his film. He was running at the mouth about the nobility of all aboriginal peoples, about how Indian affairs should be turned over to private enterprise, that there was a fortune to be made from simple things. 

When the waitress walked by, he reached out and actually grabbed her by the back of her skirt then launched into a hissy fit about how the wine that he had brought onto a dry reservation was undrinkable slop, and he accused her of bruising it. 

     Folks who are rude to food service workers are enemies of the people. I'd had enough. I apologized to the woman, asked for her forgiveness, promised we were leaving immediately, then slapped Jack with his own hat, told him to leave a hundred dollars on the table, and follow me out of the cafe, or else. Outside I shook him down for my wages, plus two hundred dollars expenses, and despite his threats that I would never work in "The Industry," again, I left him there, on the streets of Browning, fifty miles from his Lincoln, in hope that the Blackfoot Nation would scalp him the rest of the way. 

     That night I camped on a fork of the Milk River in southern Alberta, where I met an ex-Air America pilot, four months out of Saigon, who was flying weed from Mexico into Texas. He told me about a little town with hot springs, high in the hills above the Salmon River in central Idaho, that disappeared into the snow for six months per year. That is where I spent the next few years.