Oct
14
The first thing you see in “Blood for Dust” is the Billings Gazette office. The opening shot is just delicious, a blood-soaked and lovingly corny amuse-bouche for a blood-soaked and lovingly corny movie. It opens tight on a photo sitting on a desk. It’s a portrait of a white bread, cookie cutter family. There’s two young kids, a beautiful wife and a father in a Navy uniform. Then a gunshot rings out and the family portrait is splattered in blood. The camera slowly zooms out and a body is revealed to be sitting at the desk, shotgun at his feet. There’s brain matter smeared across the back of his head, and blood drips down the wall. The film crew for “Blood for Dust” sets up in Billings Gazette President Dave Worstell’s office at the Gazette. AMY LYNN NELSON, Billings Gazette And then something funny happens. A title card appears on screen: “Boise, Idaho: 1989.” Except, no it’s not. That’s the wall in Gazette publisher Dave Worstell’s office. Peer through the semi-closed blinds in the scene and maybe you can see my red Subaru in the parking lot. Right before the camera started rolling, the guy with half his head missing was just milling about in the lobby, trying (and failing) to blend in. They spent that whole day shooting in the Gazette office, with employees standing in as extras. People are also reading… But here’s the thing. For almost everyone in the world, that office is anonymous. It could be anywhere. You’d only recognize that office if you’re like me, and are there five — sometimes six — days a week. For everyone else who sees this movie, it’s just an office. That’s the experience of watching “Blood for Dust” — which I did Friday night as part of the Montana Film Festival at the Roxy Theatre Missoula, along with a sold out crowd and, confoundingly, a crying baby — if you’re from Billings. It’s like seeing a movie from both sides of the camera at once. Scoot McNairy and Kit Harington in “Blood for Dust.” Courtesy photo The indie thriller, which is still making the festival rounds after a premier at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival back in June. The Missoula date was its Montana premiere. And that’s fitting, since it was entirely shot in and around Billings last November and December. The script originally called for the film to be set in Texas, with the high plains of eastern Montana standing in for their counterparts on the Llano Estacado. But it’s hard to do a film shoot in Montana in the winter and pretend you’re anywhere else. Although “Blood for Dust” does have some issues with Montana geography. Both Baker and Grass Range are mentioned as stops on I-90, and one character says they’re headed to “Kally-spell.” The whole thing was shot in Billings and Laurel, with some exteriors around Red Lodge, but the script hops around Montana and the mountain west, with stops in Missoula and Great Falls. All of this, by the way, is fine. That’s what movies do. They’re not meant to be exact portraits of place. Rod Blackhurst, who directed and co-wrote “Blood for Dust” said as much in an intro that rolled before the Missoula showing. “Blood for Dust” Director Rod Blackhurst, left bottom, speaks with other members of the crew while filming in the Billings Gazette office. AMY LYNN NELSON, Billings Gazette “Please don’t hold (geographical inconsistencies) against us, we’re just doing some movie magic,” he said. And he’s right, because even if he isn’t totally sure where Dickinson, SD is, Blackhurst seems to have a handle on Montana. He doesn’t shoot the place like a painting, full of mountains and endless skies. It’s real. The snow that covers everything in “Blood for Dust” isn’t the newly fallen stuff. It’s old and windswept, trod over and mashed. The powder in the streets has been driven over so much that nobody bothered to plow it, and now it’s a compacted sort of ice. Plus, it’s fascinating to see a movie like this, where you can see the cracks. How many movies have I watched before that use the same location as different places and never noticed? The only reason I noticed this time is because said location is the Dude Rancher Lodge. You don’t want to see how the sausage gets made, they say, but sometimes you do. Especially if it’s pretty good sausage. Scoot McNairy and Kit Harington in “Blood for Dust.” Courtesy photo As it turns out, “Blood for Dust” is pretty good sausage. Blackhurt’s biggest credits are a pair of true crime documentary miniseries: “Amanda Knox” and “John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise.” That makes sense, because this guy is an expert at capturing the casual horror of the every day, filled with cheap hotels, half-fabricated homes and empty offices. Other than a score that sounds like the “Psycho” theme being played by someone falling down a flight of stairs, “Blood for Dust” roars with the constant low hum of breaking down automobiles and the whir of machinery. The gunshots echo like thunderbolts. There have been literal depictions of hell that feel less demonic than the “Blood for Dust’s” strip club, a rotten place where you can get female attention, a hamburger, or involved in a drug running scheme. That’s what happens to Cliff (Scoot McNairy, one of the greatest character actors alive absolutely relishing a leading part), a traveling salesman stuck in a dead end job and a dead end life. He’s not a deadbeat, per se, he’s just the type of zombie that life turns many of us into. “Blood for Dust” is set in the early 1990s, but its themes feel pretty contemporary. Then again, those themes, about the crumbling American dream and the lengths desperate men go to to achieve it, would be as at home in 1923 as they are in 2023. Cliff is chowing down on his strip joint burger when he