Diary 8/20

I'm back home in Minneapolis now, nearly a week after making the last diary entry. On Saturday we left Butte after another breakfast at Doreen's and some time walking through an Arts Festival in Uptown Butte. A vendor had a table from which she was selling postcards and I bought a couple dozen wonderful old hand-painted images of Butte with no copyright notice on their backs. These will be great images to scan in and use for the film. Then we drove out of town and back to Bozeman.

Saturday afternoon we shot scenes with Dan Glenn as the asshole boyfriend. He hadn't had time to read the script so I fed him some of the ideas for the part and he improvized. We shot the scene in his office above a storefront in downtown Bozeman and he was marvelous in the part. We then went to Paul Rose's house to thank him and to shoot genealogy interviews with him and three other people who were visiting him. That evening we watched some of the rushes at Megan's and really noticed some of the dust problems. I really cursed myself for not bringing lens cleaning tissue and not cleaning the lens every night, but the dust was really only noticeable at those times when the camera was aimed into the sun or the scene was lit very brightly.

On Sunday we Rob and Megan and I met Sam and Deb at the Stockyard Cafe at the outskirts of Bozeman for a beautiful breakfast and then we all headed (except for Deb who stayed there to work) to the Bozeman cemetary to shoot a scene and then to Dan and Susan Glenn's house to shoot the scene where Irene finds the box of things in her mother's closet.

Visiting Dan and Susan were Susan's parents. Susan's father had a deep Montana voice so I asked him if he would read the part of the oral history interview that Irene listens to in the cemetary, the interview that tells her about Hail Mary Harrington. He agreed to this and I recorded him.

After a couple of hours walking down Bozeman's Main Street Rob and I returned to our old haunts of 5 years ago, the third floor of the Student Union Building at the MSU campus, where the Exponent newspaper and KGLT radio have their offices. There we spent nearly two hours with Barrett Golding recording the radio story of the copper kings. His voice will add such character to our project, getting him, who does stories for national public radio, for our film was a real coup.

That evening, Rob and Megan and Sam and Deb and our old friend Jim Kehoe all met for sad pizza as Rob and I lamented our departure the next day. We weren't looking forward to leaving behind the magic of both Butte and Bozeman but promised a return in a few months for a premiere of our finished film. We also celebrated that we had done all this, that we had put our bodies and money into actually going out and fulfilling this strange dream of ours, this Butte Magic of Ignorance.

This page last updated 21 August 1999

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