Close Encounters of the Wyoming Kind By Dina Mishev
While two of 2005's biggest movies were set in Wyoming – the Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain and the Robert Redford drama An Unfinished Life – they weren't filmed here. Close Encounters of the Third Kind was, though. As was the classic western Shane and the 2006 family-friendly Flicka. And parts of Rocky IV. And episodes of TV's The Amazing Race and The Bachelor. The list goes on. Wyoming has been the backdrop for hundreds of productions. Stars big and small – Charlton Heston, Sylvester Stallone, Richard Dreyfuss, Maureen O'Hara, Alan Ladd, Clint Eastwood, Robert DuVall, Douglas Fairbanks, Casper Van Dien, Neil Patrick Harris – have ridden through the state's mountains, looked out over its open spaces and stared in wonderment and awe at its natural beauty, and have been captured on film while doing it all.
Whether you want to walk in the footsteps of Hollywood stars or recreate a scene from a movie, here's where to get your Tinseltown fix in the Cowboy State.
Devils Tower WTT
Devils Tower
When looking for the place where extraterrestrials would make their first contact with humans (at least in his 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Steven Spielberg had instructions for his location scout: "…scour America for a place that only my imagination told me existed." The scout came back after touring more than 2,700 miles throughout the West with two words: "Devils Tower." One look at it, and Spielberg realized the national monument in far eastern Wyoming was perfect.
He and the rest of the cast and crew spent over a month at Devils Tower getting ready for the spaceships to land. Prop guys were hard at work before Spielberg and the cast arrived, constructing elaborate sets at the foot of Pine Ridge (on U.S. 14 north of Keyhole State Park). Filming itself took 12 days. Most of the filming took place at Pine Ridge with some – remember Richard Dreyfuss and Teri Garr driving past all those dead cows? (they really weren't dead, but anesthetized on site by a Gillette veterinarian) – scenes shot along Wyoming Highway 24 and U.S. 14 as well as at various spots inside the national monument.
Hell’s Half Acre WTT
Hell's Half Acre
Panned by critics but enjoyed by audiences, Starship Troopers (1997) took over Hell's Half Acre – which is really more like several hundred acres – 40 miles northwest of Casper in 1996. Pre-production crews scouted more than 22 states before settling upon this site, formerly a Native American buffalo hunting ground. It wasn't just Wyoming scenery that ended up being used, either; casting calls went out in Riverton and Cheyenne for 17- to 30-year-olds in "excellent physical condition." Some 350 extras were hired.
More than a decade after Starship Troopers was filmed, little evidence of Whiskey Outpost, A Company Base Camp, Port Joe Smith, Tango Urilla Base Camp and Klendathu exists when looking down from the canyon's rim. If you manage to get permission to walk down into the canyon, though – and rattlesnakes are still every bit as present now as they were when filming, so watch your step – you can find everything from spent bullets to bottle caps stuck in the mud.
Hell's Half Acre is managed by Natrona County Parks and is right off U.S. 20/26.
Near Jackson Hole WTT
Jackson Hole
So many movies – more than 30 – and TV episodes have been filmed in Jackson Hole that an area film buff started giving movie-themed tours here. Walt Farmer, the author of The Making of Shane and Wyoming: A History of Film and Video in the 20th Century, offers private guided tours of Jackson-area movie locations. He knows locally filmed movies so well that he can take clients to the exact GPS coordinates where a certain scene was filmed. Farmer is happy to cater to anyone's particular interest, but says most clients, some from as far away as France and Japan, are interested in Shane. Since Farmer has spent years interviewing producers, directors, stars, writers and pretty much anyone else who could give him insight into a particular Wyoming film, he knows behind-the-scenes stories and incidents that never made it onto Entertainment Tonight. Farmer will show you Rocky's "Russian" training camp from Rocky IV and the falls the boys went over in A River Runs Through It, and then share anecdotes from those directly involved with these movies.
Wyoming Recreated
Just because finances dictated Brokeback Mountain be filmed in Canada rather than Wyoming doesn't mean there isn't anything to see here. Brokeback director Ang Lee spent days touring the state in the early stages of production with the idea of recreating what he saw in Wyoming up in Canada. The Wyoming folk who showed Lee around said he did a great job. State videographer Mike McCrimmon confesses having to watch some scenes in the movie several times to make sure that they weren't actually of Wyoming. The Wyoming towns of Claremont, Arvada and Spotted Horse particularly struck Lee. McCrimmon says the town in Brokeback is a dead ringer for Claremont (with the exception that Claremont is slightly bigger). And while even Lee supposedly said of the Canadian mountains he ended up shooting, "They're just a cheap imitation of Wyoming," the expansive valleys in the film are similar enough to those in Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains to work. See the mountain scenery Lee was trying to copy around Burgess Junction, in the heart of the Bighorns outside of Sheridan.
If You Go:
Walt Farmer's Jackson Hole Movie Tours, 307-690-6909, www.theastrocowboy.com. Copies of his CD-Rom books about movies filmed in Wyoming are available on his Web site.
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