Hollywood Here in Iowa

Surely, most bloggers have within their minds a stash of blog posts in the embryonic stage just waiting to be fleshed out into a full blog-post story. Here's one of mine:

A major Hollywood movie was once filmed right here in my neighborhood! It was the 1984 movie, "Country", starring Jessica Lange and Sam Shephard as Jewel and Gil Ivy, an Iowa farm couple on the verge of going bankrupt. In the mid-1980's, the Farm Crisis was in full swing, with many farmers being forced off their land due to tough financial times.

The movie was big news around here.....I think the filming was done in the fall of '82. Down the road from us was a farmstead of buildings that had sat abandoned for several years. Evidently, it was just what was needed for this movie's location. The land was owned by another neighbor of ours, and somehow he had heard that a group from Hollywood was looking for an empty set of buildings to use, and he contacted them.

The photo in this post shows Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard in a church scene from the movie. If I remember right, the child is actually theirs......they were together then as a couple, and I assume maybe they still are, but I don't know. They rented a big house in Waterloo during the filming. Wilford Brimley was also in the movie, as Jewel's father, who lived in a little house out behind the main farmhouse.

A couple weeks before the filming began, there was a farm auction here in our neighborhood. An older couple had decided to retire and were selling off their farm equipment and household items. Pushing my little daughter in her stroller, I walked over to the auction. Jessica Lange was there and I watched as many people approached her for autographs, which I figured must be quite annoying for her. Soon, a neighbor girl of mine came up to me and said she wanted to walk over and talk to Jessica Lange, but she didn't want to go alone, and would I walk with her. Not wishing to be a meany, I said yes. We walked over to the movie star and the neighbor girl asked her something.....I can't even remember what. I just felt sort of idiotic being there.

Pretty soon, household items started being auctioned off. I stayed in the vicinity of Jessica Lange during this time. She bid on a wicker doll buggy, which she eventually won for $100. (I need to watch the movie again sometime and look for this doll buggy, possibly amongst the daughter's toys in the house scenes.)

There was a rickety old barn there on the place where the auction was being held. That barn ended up being used in the movie, as the place where the Ivys' despondent neighbor committed suicide.

By the time the filming began, it was October, I think. The fall had turned cold and windy early that year, adding to the bleak hopelessness of the movie's atmosphere.

A local boy was cast to be the Ivy's teenage son. Also, many extras were hired from the community to play bit parts in the movie. I didn't apply because I had a little one at home, but my husband signed up. He did end up getting called to be in a scene at the local co-op elevator. He spent the whole day there, and he said they filmed the same scene over and over again. His duty was to walk into the co-op building and and browse at a rack of gloves that were for sale. So he did this over and over. I think its the scene where Gil or Jewel goes to the co-op to buy feed and they're turned down due to bad credit.

When we went to the movie at the theater many months later, and this scene came up, we watched intently, hoping to see Husband's few seconds of fame. At some point in the scene, you can hear a door open.......Husband excitedly said, "That's me coming in....", but, alas, he never came into view. They cut him out of the scene! My goodness! We had a good laugh over that one.

Like I said, the fall was very cold and windy that year, and I think that's just what the movie's directors wanted. One of the more unbelievable scenes involved a combine being blown over by a strong wind or tornado. Obviously, a wind of that sort couldn't be counted on to just appear for the filming, so the night of that scene, they used some sort of big wind machine. We could see the action amid bright spotlights over in the field where it was being filmed.

There was a line of several semi-trucks along the road by the "movie farm", whenever the filming was taking place there. That year, we were renting 80 acres of farmland on the other side of the movie farm. One day, Husband was driving a tractor and implement down the road to do fieldwork at the 80. The movie crew stopped him and told him he couldn't go by. He argued with them, explaining how many miles out of his way he would have to go in order to get to his field. Turned out, they finally did agree to let him pass slowly by the line of semi-trucks.

The film entourage included their own caterer from California who served the actors and crew everyday in a community hall building in a local town. Husband ate there the day his scene was filmed. Also, he was paid in cash for his one day of "work" as an extra......if I remember right, he earned $80.

I haven't watched the movie for a few years now, but it is always enjoyable to do so, because we recognize many faces in various scenes. Scenes in the church.....at a local dance......and at a farm auction......and at our neighbor's farm across the road, where Jessica's character had gone to gather signatures for a petition.

The movie was made with good intentions, I think. It was supposed to be a meaty role for the lead actress and, indeed, Jessica Lange did get nominated for an Oscar for her role as Jewel Ivy. Because we are very familiar with farming, we easily could pick out the parts that seem unlikely and contrived, but the filmmakers tried, anyway. It was a relevant film at the time, due to the Farm Crisis that was going on.

The "movie farm" is now long gone. The building site was razed a few years after the filming. I remember watching the blaze the day the house was intentionally burned down. People still mention the "movie farm" occasionally, though, sometimes we even direct people to our farm by saying, "Do you remember where the movie farm was.....?"

The filming of "Country" was a fun, unique experience for our community, and, surely, nothing like it will ever happen here again!