1 week Ago By DUNCAN [email protected]
BUTTE — The pigs rooted through the mire, poised for cameos. Wranglers attempted to guide the swine to hit their marks in the muddied corral for the big fistfight scene. A choreographer coached two bare-knuckle combatants to rehearse punches, feints, chokeholds and sprawls.
Blood eventually flowed but it wasn't real. The setting was Gunslinger Gulch west of Anaconda. Timeworn buildings strung along a dirt street there resemble an authentically bedraggled town of the Old West.
Filming was underway Oct. 9 of scenes for "Hunter Grail," a supernatural Western set in the late 1800s. Its plot follows Hunter Grail, a Wild West prizefighter known to dime novel fans as Death Fist.
The story ultimately pits Grail against Jeb, a survivor of the infamous Donner Party of 184647. Jeb has become a connoisseur of human flesh and has founded a cannibalistic cult. And he's run off with Grail's sister, more as a coerced paramour than appetizer.
At one point, as the story unfolds, Jeb dines on Grail's "still beating heart." But a teen-aged Bill Cody, who will become Buffalo Bill, resurrects him. Hunter and Cody set out to find Jeb.
"Along the way they team up with a Ute Indian, named Crow, and a shotgun toting priest. Together they navigate Hunter's new powers and find a way to defeat Jeb and his cult of Flesh-Eaters," according to a plot summary. Cinematic cannibalism was not on the menu during filming at Gunslinger Gulch.
(A catered lunch featured pulled pork barbeque, but no one told the pigs.) Instead, the fistfight at the porker corral, and a separate but brief scene featuring a bad guy draped in a wolf pelt, took about eight hours to film. The pigs and the mud likely served a metaphorical role but, if so, it wasn't articulated.
I had hired on as an extra, defined by one Hollywood glossary as "an actor who appears in a movie in a non-speaking, unnoticed role, such as part of a crowd or a patron in a restaurant." "Unnoticed" certainly applied. I'm keeping my day job.
Our role as a clamorous crowd of extras, also known as "background," involved cheering or jeering and gesticulating during the fight between Death Fist and an opponent referred to as Buck. Timothy Prindle played Hunter Grail/Death Fist, the movie's hero. He looked and played the part — handsome, earnest, long hair that became increasingly muddy as the fisticuffs continued.
One scene required him to be flung face first into the mud, action Prindle embraced with aplomb and good humor. Some of us cheered for Death Fist and some for Buck. I kept forgetting which camp I was in, partly because our instructions changed.
But it didn't really matter. Our task was hubbub. A man I assumed was the assistant director guided our acting, if you can call it that.
Sometimes we were directed to make emphatic gestures and hoot and screech with gusto. Other times, we were told to make cheering or jeering gestures but pantomime the vocalizations — which is harder than it sounds. We waited for the word, "Action!" One of my fellow extras asked whether profanity was OK.
He was advised to exercise restraint, which seems a tad prudish given the film's focus on cardiac dining and cannibalism. The extras were due on set that day at 9 a.m.
I arrived early. We'd been advised by an advance email from wardrobe to wear personal garb that might suggest the 1800s. I wore a felt hat with crown-and-brim falling somewhere between cowboy hat and fedora, along with baggy wool pants, scuff ed Chippewa lace-up boots and a cotton vest over a nondescript shirt.
Wardrobe signed off on my attire. The woman in charge outfitted several other extras with a variety of headgear and boots, leather vests and dusters and other clothing that fit the era. I met interesting folks in the pool of extras.
They included movie veteran Stan Smith of Dillon, slated to soon rejoin filming for "1923" when it returns briefly to Uptown Butte, and Charlie Mulluk, an Inupiaq man born in Nome but a longtime Montana resident who is known for stand-up comedy and radio work. The day mixed fun, tedium and fascination. As a cinephile of sorts, I savored watching the movie-making process, even if it moved slowly, at times.
Fortunately, Lukas Colombo, the film's director, did not demand numerous takes during the fight scenes. Extras were paid $100 for the day. Both Prindle and Colombo thanked us for participating and their appreciation seemed genuine.
Jackie Vetter, an actor, director and theater maven based in Anaconda, helped recruit us background folks. She visited the set toward the day's end and later emailed. "As soon as I got there, multiple people [from the film crew] came up to me and thanked me for the superior group of background that was assembled," she wrote.
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