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Diary 8/5/99
After breakfast (we had another Walter Huston encounter on our way to breakfast, tho this time we saw him waiting at a light to cross), we went to the World Museum of Mining to location scout there and to talk to the Museum Director Geri Walter about getting approval to shoot around there. Geri Walter needed a few minutes to get an idea who we were and what we wanted but then she warmed to us right away. When we told her that we would have one of our actors dressed as a miner her main concern was what period of miner we had in mind. Before the 20's, miners wore slouch hats, after that they wore the helmets. We told her that we still needed to find a lunch pail for the character and so she pulled out a book that showed us what one looked like. She said the museum had one in a display but we told her we would check out antique stores for one. On our way back from the Museum we stopped at Frank's house and talked to him about our shooting plans. The night before we had gone through the script and scheduled our entire shooting week, so we were able to give him a fairly solid time when we thought we would be there. We also asked him about getting an interview. He had done some travelling to Italy recently to explore his family's past. Then we were on to antique stores to look for more postcards and photographs, and to look for a lunch pail. At the first store we stopped in we asked about a lunch pail and the woman there said they had one but it did not have all the insides to it. She showed us a perfect old miner's lunch pail. The price of it was $40. It was a little steep for us, but she asked us why we were buying it. We told her about our movie and she offered to rent it to us. She also told us that we needed to deal with her about it and not her boss. So we ended up renting a classic lunch pail for $20, a perfect prop for our movie. Because of our talks with Allyson and just thinking about the amount of documentary activity going on in Butte and the amount of people getting requests for oral histories, we were re-evaluating the oral histories in our film, and so instead this morning before we left for breakfast I wrote out a long radio narration about the early days of Butte and the War of the Copper Kings. As much as possible now we wanted to tell the story of Butte from these radio pieces and not from oral histories. We talked about contacting our old radio friend in Bozeman, Barret Golding, about reading the part. With our work done for now in Butte, we left to go to Bozeman, to visit our friends there and pick up Kristine, my partner and our Emily, at the airport. We were leaving Butte just before the descent on the city of thousands of bikers for the Dumas Hotel Biker event. We had heard people talking about it at Doreen's Cafe, where we had breakfast that morning. We had talked about it with Gerry at the Museum and with the woman at the antique store. She had offered an interesting spin on it all. She was a little surprised at all the offense at the thought of reopening the Dumas.She had mentioned that during hard times, when miners were laid off, many women, wives of miners, would leave to go work at the cribs at Venus Alley, would work as prostitutes, to help feed their families during times without pay. This page last updated 21 August 1999 http://www.sloppyfilms.com/buttemagic/diary85.html
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