American Friendly
From our Western correspondent, Mark Sundeen
Wim Wenders, the acclaimed German director of Wings of Desire and The Buena Vista Social Club, was in Butte, Montana, the other day for the premiere of his new movie, Don’t Come Knocking. Sam Shepard wrote and starred in the film, marking the men’s first collaboration since their 1984 Paris, Texas.
Wenders shot much of the movie in this mining town whose population has declined steadily since the 1920s, and which, these days, with its grand “Historic Uptown District” of largely vacant Victorian and early-century brick hotels and storefronts, resembles, well, a movie set. The gala screening was held at the Mother Lode Theatre, an opulent 1200-seat palace built in 1923 as a Masonic Temple. For the event, one of those devices with the rotating spotlights was parked out by the curb, sending up shafts of light visible from Interstate 90. Tickets were distributed free to local residents, many of whom arrived in the town’s fleet of trolley buses to the theatre on what was once known as “the richest hill in America.” The house was packed.
Wenders, dressed in jeans, an overcoat, and a rodeo belt buckle, took the stage to rowdy applause. (Shepard did not attend the event, according to Wenders, because the actor was filming on location in Texas, and does not travel by airplane.) He told the crowd that he had loved Butte ever since he first visited in 1978. He had always wanted to make a film here. He said the town reminded him of the mining town in Germany where he’d grown up.
“People ask why I chose to film in Butte, Montana,” he said. “And I tell them it’s my favorite city in America.”
When the applause subsided, Wenders thanked the town for its help with the filming, but warned them that they might not want too many more movies filmed there. “Wait till they block off your street. Wait till they throw furniture out of your window.” He finished by reading the inscription of his belt buckle. “This is the film’s full title: If this trailer’s rocking, don’t come knocking.”
Despite projector malfunctions that caused blurriness and muffled sound, the audience settled down for the two-hour film, erupting at the first sight of their town, a still shot of the lonely main drag and the M & M Café, which Jack Kerouac heralded as “the end of my quest for an ideal bar.” After that, the loudest cheers came for cameos by a locally-known mirror-plated sedan, and a dog.
Reviews of Don’t Come Knocking have faulted Wenders for indulging in Western cliches—vintage cars, cowboys, smoky bars and twangy music. But the critics have praised the photography, particularly the way Butte evokes a lonely rural America well past its prime. An anomaly in the Rocky Mountain West, Butte remains a largely industrial city with a significant Irish-Catholic population, strong labor unions, and fervently Democratic politics. But since the decline of mining in the middle of the century, Butte has been economically depressed, and its most recent sources of reknown are as hometown of daredevil Evel Knievil, and as site of the Berkeley Pit, the nation’s largest Superfund toxic waste site.
After the show, some locals were discussing the movie at Maloney’s Bar. Shamrocks hung on the wall beside a mounted jackelope. A young woman said, “I was glad to see Rita,” referring to a Butte woman who had won a one-line role. When the gray-haired woman beside her wanted to know who Rita was, the younger said, “You know her, she comes in here and pours her beer into a plastic cup, and gets drunk, then comes out of the bathroom with pink lipstick all over her teeth.”
A bearded, barrel-chested man named Tom Malloy was drinking Irish whiskey and telling a story about his job for the County, which involved evaluating any large hole discovered beneath the town. “We never know if it’s an old outhouse, or a Chinatown tunnel, or a mineshaft,”he said. He told how a construction crew from Billings recently poked drilled into such a mysterious hole while excavating for a new playground structure.
“They didn’t know what to think,” said Malloy’s companion, a woman named Julie who said her father and grandfather were Butte miners and union activists. “But we see that sort of thing all the time. It’s so Butte.”
Julie enjoyed the movie but didn’t see why the director needed to insert ranch decor into the interior of the M & M, with its 1940s-style stainless steel paneling and chrome barstools. “Sure it’s a Western town,” she said, “but not cowboys. Miners!”
Also at the bar was a graduate student in English at the University of Montana who had driven some 120 miles from Missoula to catch the screening. Julie asked what had inspired the trip.
“I’m a big fan of Sam Shepard’s,” said the student.
“What?” Julie said.
“I said I really like Sam Shepard’s work,” the student repeated. Then she said, “The playwright. The actor. He wrote the screenplay.”
“Oh,” Julie said.
Malloy, who grew up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and moved to Butte in 1975 to play football for Montana Tech, described what it was like to drop 5000 feet in a caged elevator to the bottom of the mine, where he worked a stint in the late seventies. “The wind was blasting up through the grate, and you kept falling for fifteen minutes or so.”
He thought the movie was okay, but complained that parts of it were out of focus, and that the music sounded fuzzy. “Some of the things seemed like screwups to me, but maybe that was just his way of being creative,” he said. “Who am I to say? Maybe it was art, or maybe it just sucked.”