A Diary

A Filmmaker's Diary

August 4, 1999

Diary August 4, 1999

Last night we had a couple three beers at the Club 13 down Broadway from our rooms in the Finlen Hotel. Sitting near us at the bar was a man who looked like a slimmed down version of Walter Huston, circa Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Walter was waving at us, sending us the peace sign, and had a smile that cut his entire head in half. This morning, the first thing we did was head down to a cafe on Park Street, Doreen's Cafe (tho the sign over the door had a few letters work off so that it read "Een's Cafe") and as we approached the door who else would be walking down the street than our skinny Walter Huston, who walked into the Cafe just before we did.

But today was a new day and Walter had lost his smile. He had sobered up and sat at the counter, looking for specials in the newspaper. He commented on good prices for chicken and VO5.

We sat at a table nearby and planned out our day.

Today we had fewer things to accomplish, but they would take the entire day. The first thing we did after breakfast was head over to the Butte Silver Bow Archives. The place had been a major help on our trip here two years ago, and particularly the head archivist there, Ellen Crain.

The Archives hold the Silver Bow county records, big books of names, handwritten, elegantly bound books showing names and addresses and places of birth and death and reasons for death. Next to these were the huge bound newspapers, actual newspapers dating back a century and more. You could take out the huge bound volumes and run your fingers over the paper and pictures and immediately that touch would sent you back to the days of rumbling mighty Butte.

We walked up the steps into the back door of the Archives, the only way in, and nearly knocked Ellen over when we did. She was right there and actually about to leave for a half hour this morning and then a week after today. We reminded her of our visit two years ago and she remembered us and helped us get started looking for the part of our film that would take most of the day, finding a gravestone for our fictional character Hail Mary harrington.

We had picked the name for Irene's long lost great grandmother because Mary Harrington was the most popular name in Butte in the early years of the century. We looked through cemetary records for Mary Harringtons that may have lived the same years as our character might have. We looked up the obituaries of a few of them from the Butte papers, and I spent some extra time with my video camera capturing some of the interesting images from the newspapers. The Butte Archives release documents that Ellen Crain gave us spelled out very high rates for use of photographs, but she added that everything was negotiable and that her primary interest was that we got the name of the institution correct when we credited it. I was a little concerned about getting enough interesting period images, but the illustrations in the newspapers were so evocative that I quickly gathered as many as I could.

With death dates and some section numbers for Mary Harringtons buried in St. Patrick's cemetary, Rob and I went there. When we were in Butte two years ago we drove through this cemetary, the older Catholic cemetary, on our last morning. It was mid-April but the day began with a light coating of snow on the ground. The snow on the ground and mist in the sky made our trip through the cemetary a surreal experience, one so hushed and holy that we seemed too overwhelmed to talk or do anything other than press the buttons on our cameras to shoot some film and video of it.

Today the cemetary was very different. The grass had all died yellow by this August day and little clumps of spiney weeds were the only green around. The cemetary seemed a bit neglected, though there were workers going through it this morning to trim weeds.

Right away we noticed that there were no section numbers anywhere. The coordinates that we had gotten from the Archives were useless in helping us locate any plots. We asked one of the weed trimmers if he knew where we could find a map of the cemetary and he told us that he gets asked that every day but he has no idea. He just trims the weeds. But he did recommend that we go to the new Catholic Cemetary, Holy Cross, and ask there.

We went across town to the Holy Cross cemetary, and a young women in the Sexton's office there helped us a great deal. She said that the only map of the cemetary was the big one on the wall, and then she went back to the microfilm to look up Mary Harringtons and write down the plot sections where their graves were located. We then cross referenced these to the map on the wall. St. Patrick's cemetary had been laid out with plot numbers assigned in an almost random fashion in some cases. At first the plot numbers spiralled out from a central section, but on the sides and back of the cemetary they often marched one after the other. I had to draw something of a map in my small memo book to help us find the section numbers where the Mary Harrington grave sites were located.

We were soon back at St. Patrick's where we began to look for grave stones. The first Mary Harrington we found had died after living only a little over a year. One of the ones I was hoping would be the most promising, a Mary Harrington who died in the year 1930, had only a small plaque as grave marker. We found a couple in the back, one a solo Mary Harrington grave, but recently delivered flowers on the grave made us not want to use that one. The other had a husband and son's name listed along with hers, but had a large enough stone to be interesting to film.

Suddenly we began to feel a little queasy about these grand plans we had drawn up at a distance, months ago and in the cities where we lived. We were actually planning on using an actual person's grave stone, a person who may still have family around, and we would use this stone for our fictional character. Rob suggested trying to make something with marbelized paper, and even a Madonna figure on it, but I felt that it would be difficult with our budget to make it look realistic enough not to make our audience laugh. We talked more over the day about this, our queasiness, but we realized that we had to make this movie too, and had to check at the door some of our sensitivity and scruples to do this.

This search for Mary Harrington, this real example of genealogical research that we did, took us into the afternoon. We made a stop at the Blue Venus to regroup and plan the rest of the day, and just as we had yesterday, ran into another camera there. The owner of the restaurant was watching video in a Sony TRV-900, the same camera that I had. He was completely preoccupied and so one of the patrons of the coffee shop actually stepped up to the counter to serve us. She had to ask the owner several times where things were, how much things cost, and how to use the cash register, and he begrudging told her but he was completed absorbed in the video that he was watching through the camera.

We sat on the back deck by the back door and Rob started up a conversation with a woman who was looking for a cat in the vacant area behind the Blue Venus. She was also in Butte to make a movie, a documentary about the Bike Rally at the Dumas this weekend. She was shooting with the TRV-900, and told us that the German crew was working on their own documentary on the same event. She mentioned the History Channel documentary that would be filming soon, and we felt a little smothered by all the filmmaking going on while we were there!

She told us about the problems she was having gathering stories through oral histories by older Butte residents. She said that even more difficult was getting them to sign the talent release afterward. After hearing this we began to reevaluate more and more our plans to try to get a few oral histories on our last couple days in Butte. We seemed to be on the end of a long train, and maybe it was time to focus on those things that made our project different from all those other projects documenting this place.

After our stop at the Blue Venus we drove around the city, checking out locations we had planned for the film. After dinner at the Pekin Noodle house we went to El Toro to get the owner to sign our location agreement and line up filming there for Monday afternoon.

Day two in Butte and both some victories and a lot more to think about. There were so many stories going on here, and we seemed to be missing the big story. But the big story was the target of so many other people with digital video cameras. We had our own story, but did it have anything to do with this place?

This page last updated 21 August 1999

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