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It's a little embarrassing, if you think about it. Like watching old
home movies and realizing with a start that it's not your little brother
in the video at all, but someone playing him.
So imagine how much more embarrassing it is for us, as Montan-
ans, when a Western that's supposed to be set in Montana is shot
somewhere else, as was the case with Hostiles, a 2017 Western star-
ring Christian Bale and Wes Studi. At the end of the film they arrive
where they've been headed the whole time: a valley in Montana. But
again, it's not really Montana.
Maybe Richard Gray and his Yellowstone Film Ranch can help us
with that.
Gray was born in Australia, which by all conventional measures of
distance is a long way from Montana. But he grew up on Western mov-
ies like Jeremiah Johnson, Unforgiven, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller—
movies which have helped to define the Western today. For Richie, as
he told me to call him, films were an intoxicant. In fact, he told me, his
dream since he was twelve has been to make a Western.
And while he still plans to make one, he might have found some-
thing that a twelve-year-old would have been even more excited
about: making a Western town.
The Yellowstone Film Ranch is composed of twenty-six struc-
tures—some 29,000 square feet of screen-ready Western authenticity,
M
ONTANANS WHO ARE MORE THAN PASSINGLY INTERESTED IN STAR TREK KNOW THAT SOUTHWESTERN MONTANA,
SOMEWHERE AROUND BOZEMAN, IS WHERE HUMANITY FIRST MET THEIR EVENTUAL SPACE-BUDDIES THE VULCANS.
In fact, those Trekkies will probably have seen the moment that the pointy-eared aliens stepped out of their ship—surrounded by rolling
hills and evergreens. But it wasn't Montana at all; it was really a forest in Arizona, standing in for the Last Best Place.
How the Yellowstone Film Ranch and
the MEDIA Act Are Bringing the Western Back to Montana
