MADE IN MONTANA Local filmmakers take center stage in Bigfork
Ridge Mallery needed a Ford Taurus.
Reaching the finish line on his low-budget, Flathead Valley-made feature, “The Beast,” Mallery had planned to push his own 1996 Taurus off a cliff in his film’s climactic scene. But just before big shoot, Mallery’s other vehicle broke down and, needing something to get himself, his wife and three kids around town, the Kalispell filmmaker was in a jam.
There was almost none of the movie’s $14,000 budget left to spend, so Mallery wrote an alternate ending just in case, all while keeping his heart set on that Ford Taurus.
Eventually, after some failed negotiating, Mallery paid list price ($600) for an old Taurus in town and drove the car up to the cliff at Ashley Creek Ranch in Kila, running out of gas as he hit his mark. He and his crew spent the day rigging the scene, a brick here, an I-bolt there, and sat poised on the ledge.
There would be no second take. No second Taurus. No time or money to recover from a missed shot by one of the volunteer camera operators. No second ending, not now, not after all this.
Down the car went, away the cameras rolled, and at the bottom, on a road just where they planned for it to stop, sat a demolished Ford Taurus.
“We pulled off a fricking car wreck,” Mallery said with a smile last week. “Some people, even on million dollar budgets can’t do that. We were very, very lucky.”
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MALLERY’S MOVIE, “The Beast,” will be shown to the public for the first time Saturday night at the Bigfork Center for the Performing Arts as part of the first-ever Bigfork Independent Film Festival.
The festival is broken into two blocks, each with two shorts and a full-length feature. It begins at 5:30 p.m. with a block anchored by Josiah Burdick’s “Silk Trees.” The block that includes “The Beast” begins at 8:30 p.m.
The first of what organizer Steve Shapero hopes will become an annual showcase of Montana films and filmmakers was born out of a desire to highlight those daring to make movies here, in a place that’s aura is light years away from Hollywood. Both Burdick and Mallery live in the Flathead Valley.
“We have an industry in the Flathead Valley of people making movies but nobody knows about it because you can’t see them,” Shapero said.
Shapero is also the organizer of the Bigfork Retrospective Film Festival, which will celebrate its second year in October. Both festivals operate under the nonprofit banner of the Bigfork Community Players, a local theater group.
Films weren’t sought out for this year’s festival, but the plan is for that to change in the coming years.
“We decided let’s start small,” Shapero said. “Thinking that if nobody showed up we hadn’t invested a lot.
“Next year, we’ve already gotten contact from three other filmmakers and we’re going to open it up. If we get 10 or 15 good films, we’ll show them.”
Shapero said that as of Tuesday more than 200 tickets for the 435-seat venue had been sold for each block. Tickets can be purchased online at www.bigforkfilmfestival.com or at the door, if available.
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THE CONCEPT for the 30-year-old Mallery’s film dates back to 2008, beginning as a short film, but the his full-length will make its public debut less than a year after it was completed.
Burdick, 31, has been waiting 10 years for “Silk Trees” to see a public audience.
“After 10 years, to see something that you’ve spent so much time and effort on, to finally get a public showing and to get hopefully some form of recognition, that’s exciting,” Burdick said.
The movie was filmed in Goshen, Indiana when Burdick was just 21, and when he and a few of his siblings were putting the movie together they dreamed the way most 21-year-old filmmakers dream.
“We thought we were going to send it to Sundance, they were going to flip out because we were amazing, and we were going to get in there,” Burdick said with a wry smile. “But when we didn’t make it in, that was a little bit like ‘oh, wow, ok.’
“Looking back on that original edit of ‘Silk Trees’ that … got sent to Sundance; was not amazing.”
The movie’s original edit was three hours long but the one screening Saturday is down to a “pretty quick” 90 minutes that Burdick says he’s proud to show.
The film has also never before been screened, in part because of a beginner’s mistake the beginner filmmakers made with their soundtrack, using unlicensed music that made the movie impossible to sell to a distributor. Since finding out the movie would be showing this weekend, Burdick has painstakingly removed the unauthorized music.
In the years since “Silk Trees,” Burdick has found a variety of ways to occupy himself, when not traveling around the world “using my camera to film people doing mission work.” He’s directed and co-written a children’s TV show that was never picked up (“Flizbins”) and started his own film company, Fearless Pictures, which does the majority of its work in the corporate realm.
Mallery, a construction worker by day, has also been pushed gently away from the world of filmmaking by the realities of every day life.
Neither, however, is willing or interested in giving up their dream of making it in movies.
“There is a passion and a faith that one of these times it will actually work,” Burdick said. “I think the other reason is because I’m really not good at much else.
“This is what I love and I think if you can actually finally break into this and begin making some money doing it then that would be something that’s really amazing. It’s worth fighting for.”
Both are still working on scripts, pitching to distributors and considering film festivals to enter, all first steps for an independent filmmaker. Mallery recently was accepted to and honored at the online Terror Film Festival for “The Beast.”
Burdick, meanwhile, has had his first project provisionally accepted by a distributor, “Useless,” a movie about a young Montana barrel racer. It begins filming this summer.
“After all of this it feels like finally a win,” he said.
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IN A nod to the small, connected world of Flathead Valley filmmaking, Burdick is involved, in one way or another, with all six of the filmsthat will be screened Saturday (he’s an actor in “The Beast”). His sister, Charity Ambrose, directed the one short film in his block he did not direct, “Fred Donahue.”
Mallery, too, directed two of the three films in his block, which includes his short “Songbird.” The other short in the late night session is Mitchell Underhill’s “First Time Out.”
For more information, including a complete lineup and synopsis of everything that will play, visit www.bigforkfilmfestival.com.
Entertainment editor Andy Viano can be reached at (406) 758-4439 or aviano@dailyinterlake.com.