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Wednesday, 22 August 2007 |
By Buck Traxler, I-O Editor
 CHECK IT OUT – Director of Photography Doug Hostetter makes final adjustments on the filming camera in the Home Cafe before a scene from Dry Rain is filmed on Wednesday. The day before the film crew was in Pendroy and Friday they were to film in Lincoln. I-O Photo by Buck Traxler
The café closed down early and set crews and actors took over until after 9 p.m. shooting six pages of script of a short film, Dry Rain-the movie.
The movie is based on a book by Great Falls author Pete Fromm.
He is a three-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Bestsellers Association award for his works that include How This All Started, Dry Rain, a story collection, and Indian Creek Chronicles.
This is his first piece of material that has been made into a movie. He also did the screenplay.
Dry Rain is actually 17 stories that capture the hardships and rewards of the life in the West, looking at ordinary people in extraordinary situations.
Fromm says it is all about family, love, commitment, and heroism. “I wanted to make ordinary human beings seem much more than that – and by extension, deepen our own ordinary lives.”
Director Matt Clark, from Seattle, found the Home Cafe while driving around the Golden Triangle.
He was looking for a place that was kind of empty and stopped here to have a bite to eat. “The café and Conrad filled the bill,” he said.
He went on to add, “We chose this location for the look. The interior here probably hasn’t changed in 20 years. It offered all the things we needed. We wanted a café that was just a café, not a combination of other things.”
The short feature movie will be between 20 and 25 minutes and will be entered in the Sundance Film Festival, sponsored by actor Robert Redford, in Utah this year.
The scene shot at the cafe revolved around a father-son team involved in an extortion plot, played by actors James LeGros and Nathan Gambler and actress Jodie Harwood who took on the role of being a waitress.
While you may not recognize the name, Clark has directed an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger, Chicago Hope, and The Practice.
Clark also noted that they had won an IFP/Spotlight award in Seattle, “Which is a $100,000 award, in goods and services to produce the film.”
“It started out with over 6,200 applications and was whittled down to just one winner,” he said.
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