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.

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.