The Big Picture

http://www.missoulanews.com/News/News.asp?no=3594

Headline:

 
The Big Picture
by Jed Gottlieb
 
Photo by Chad Harder

Drury Gunn Carr, left, and Doug Hawes-Davis share the workload at High Plains
Films. Both shoot, direct, edit and research.  
 
Taking the High Plains road with Doug Hawes-Davis and Drury Gunn Carr

A transient in dark glasses and white baseball cap sits on a bench beside
Highway 2 in Libby, Mont. The traffic is loud and the man has to raise his
voice to be heard by the film crew. Heâs outlining his treatise on Libby and
the impending Day of Judgment, punctuating his points with handmade placards:
Ronald Wilson Reagan. Six letters in each name. 666. 

âOh, what a story I could tell,â he shouts to the crew. âThis is history.
We all have a light side and dark side within us. We can love. We can hate. We
can live and promote life or we can kill. Somewhere in the Book of Revelations
it is written that the devil knows that his time is short. So if things get a
little nuttier day by day, donât be too surprised or shocked by it.â 

Things in Libby have gotten more than a little nutty over the past few decades.
For 40 years, the W.R. Grace Corporation operated a vermiculite mine that
contaminated Libby residents and the local environment with deadly asbestos
fibers. Company CEO Peter Grace was a friend of Ronald Reagan, and there have
been allegations that friendship led to a cover-up of the dangers the company
was unleashing on Libby. 

After years of local concern over the mine, the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency and dozens of journalistsâTV and newspaper reporters, book authors and
documentary filmmakersâdescended on the town at the turn of the century.
Hundreds of locals were sick from the asbestos, legal battles raged over
cleanup, the state was promising help but doing little, and the media were
whipped into a frenzy. 

Among the observers to arrive in 2000 were Drury Gunn Carr and Doug Hawes-Davis
of Missoula-based High Plains Films. But unlike many journalists, who didnât
stick around long enough to get the whole story, Carr and Hawes-Davis hung
around, letting their cameras capture the tales of years of secrets and lies.
High Plainsâ latest project, Libby, Montanaâset to be finished early this
winterâis the result of 100 hours of tape rolled in Libby. 

One of the filmâs characters, the transient obsessed with Libby as an
apocalyptic epicenter, is right about more than just his retrospective
prediction of a town gone nutty. His religious diatribes and High Plainsâ
film both center on the same conclusion: Libbyâs story is bigger than just
the town. 

âHe believes that Libby is the spot where the apocalypse will begin,â says
Carr. âThe reason he works so well for us is because his thesis is basically
the thesis of our film. Libby is symbolic of something greater. You could look
at Libby and say this is a unique situation, this is a tragic story and it
needs to be told. And you could just tell that story. But really our film is a
parable for a much bigger story about our culture.â 

Hawes-Davis agrees: âI canât imagine a better symbolic example of the
classic rural American company town that got totally abused by a multi-national
corporation.â 

Neither Carr nor Hawes-Davis can remember exactly when they knew that their
next project would be Libby. They agree the discussion began while driving back
from filming El Caballo, having camped several nights beside a corral to
document the plight of the captive wild horses of eastern Montanaâs Pryor
Mountains. 

Maybe the two canât remember exactly how the idea evolved because up until
that point, theyâd always worked on three to four projects at once. While one
was shooting, the other was editing. Or both were shooting, both editing, and
both hunting money for future projects. What they do remember is they knew the
story, like all their projects, warranted coverage more complete than it got.
It was important to them, and so they knew it would be important to others if
presented in the right way, the High Plains way. They also felt confident that
in Libby they had found a subject to catapult them to the next echelon of
success. Libby, Montana will be, in its makersâ estimation, their
break-through film. 


 
Photo courtesy of High Plains Films

Part of the allure of High Plainsâ work is the intimacy the filmmakers
develop with their subjects. During Killing Coyote, the filmmakers followed
hunters across Wyoming in search of prey.  
 



Carr and Hawes-Davis, both 35, didnât grow up wanting to be filmmakers. They
didnât spend summers fooling around with dadâs super 8 or renting and
rerenting Casablanca and Citizen Kane. They picked up cameras to capture
battles over the preservation of a threatened natural world. 

Both Hawes-Davis and Carr were students at the University of Montanaâs
Environmental Studies Program in the early â90s, but as they got close to
finishing, neither was thrilled at the prospect of sitting down and typing a
hundred-page thesis no one would read. So in 1992 and 1993, respectively and
independently, each began filming documentaries in lieu of their theses.
Hawes-Davis made The Element of Doom, about a mining companyâs environmental
pollution in Missouri. Carr followed with Mining Seven-Up Pete, about a
closer-to-home mining proposal on the Blackfoot. Neither was totally satisfied
with the results, but both were encouraged. 

As Carr explains it, the two had similar visions of creating movies that run
against the grain of the typical environmental and wildlife documentary. They
were disenfranchised with stale and predictable treatments of endangered
species and threatened wildlife habitats. They wanted to make films that could
deliver a message without force-feeding the audience a party-line moral. 

âThere are dozens of environmental film festivals across the county, there
are tons of media outlets, our messages are out there. So why arenât our
messages getting across?â asks Carr. âI think itâs because weâre
preaching to people.â 

The two started High Plains Films in 1997 with the vision of creating less
predictable, more complex environmental films. Unfortunately, the vision
didnât come with equipment, expertise or money. They rented gear, slaved at
side jobs, worked on shorts and contract gigs, and didnât feel much like
filmmakers. 

âI did a lot of temp work,â says Carr with a smile. âI actually did a lot
of temp work until very recently.â 

Hawes-Davis struggled alongside his partner. After three short documentaries,
Southbound, Green Rolling Hills and The Paper Colony, the endeavor still
wasnât profitable, and he didnât feel like he could present himself at
cocktail parties as Doug Hawes-Davis, filmmaker. 

âThereâs this place on your taxes where you have to fill in your
occupation, and for a long time I didnât know what to write in there. At some
point, I started writing in filmmaker,â he says. âBut it wasnât until my
parents accepted that this was what I was going to do and came to a screening
of Varmints, and there were a ton of people there. Then it dawned on me that
this is what I am.â 

In 1997, the two began work on Varmints, their first feature-length
documentary, wherein some of the trademark qualities of High Plainsâ films
emerged. All their feature-length films are stylistically linkedâwith few
exceptions, characters arenât identified until the end credits roll, and no
narration is used. This makes a film like Varmintsâan alternatingly humorous
and nauseating view of the controversy surrounding the impact of prairie dogs
on the Western landscapeâless a solution to a problem and more a Russian doll
of questions. 

The film cuts between prairie dog hunters in action, U.S. government efforts to
exterminate the animals, and sit-down interviews with sober and angry animal
rights advocates. The film holds nothing back. For every cute and cuddly shot
there are two of prairie dogs spinning head over heels, drilled with rifle
bullets. 

The filmâs debut in Boulder, Colo., received a response that surprised the
filmmakers. Outside the screening, animal rights advocates told people not to
go in, saying the film allotted too much time to the prairie dog huntersâ
viewpoints. Inside, one of the filmâs central characters, prairie dog hunter
extraordinaire Mark Mason, sat in the front row, loving it. 

âHe felt like he was at the Oscars,â says former Sierra Club President
Jennifer Ferenstein, who worked with the two on the film, travelling with them
and setting up interviews. âI think itâs a testimony to the quality of the
film that they didnât manipulate him or make him feel belittled or put him in
the position to be defensive, because they presented him as he was.â 

Hawes-Davis says that he was ultimately proud that Mason liked the film. ...
(cont)