Sasquatch lives

Story by JOHN STAND

A reporter finds his inner Bigfoot on the backwoods set of 'Paper Dolls"

Bobby Brooks blew out the back of my head.

I didn't feel a thing, but I instantly smelled death.

It smelled of talcum powder.

I was wearing the shirt and hood of a huge, brown, furry Sasquatch suit.

Brooks - a Laurel rancher who is sometimes a movie horse wrangler and a special-effects expert - was figuring out the best way to shoot a Sasquatch (also known as Bigfoot) at night.

He cut a hole in my hood and inserted an "air squib" inside it with a narrow hose leading to a push-button in his hand. Brooks pushed the button and the air spurted talcum powder out of the back of my head to show that I had been shot.

No blood though.

Spurting blood doesn't show when squishing out of a squib at night.

But spurting dust would show up in the dark when the crew of the horror movie "Paper Dolls" filmed an intricately choreographed shootout and escape involving two actors and four Bigfoot monsters in the Stillwater State Forest around midnight on Aug. 10.

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Five of us worked hard at losing our humanity.

It was an acting exercise - Sasquatch 101.

The goal: Channel the directors' visions of a clan of killer Bigfoots through our heads and hearts so the

audience sees something deeper than guys in fur suits going "boogah-boogah."

Overall, six Flathead Valley men filled the four Sasquatch suits during filming - four primary creatures and two backup Bigfoots to cover two nights when one primary Sasquatch would be absent.

The six included 6-foot-8-inch Gatlin Hardy, 18; 6-foot-8-inch Dane Sjoden, 16; and 6-foot-5-inch Gunnar Hamilton, 24 - all recruited because of their size.

Five-foot-11-inch Hauser, 24, and 5-foot-10-inch Josh Mintz, 34, heard about "Paper Dolls" through grapevines and volunteered to be Sasquatches. At age 50 and 6 feet 1 inch tall, I was there to write a first-person story on being a horror-movie Bigfoot. Hamilton and I filled in for Sjoden on two nights of filming.

As the biggest of us, Hardy would be the "alpha" Sasquatch - meaning his face would get the most detailed makeup for the two quick close-ups, including one of him throwing a severed human head through a window. His makeup would include some red lines around his mouth - a makeup artist's trick to keep the audiences' eyes from focusing on his face's features for the few seconds it would be on the screen, keeping the Bigfoots shrouded in mystery.

Hamilton didn't make it to the Sasquatch 101 session in a Whitefish backyard with the rest of us.

We walked around the backyard. First as men. Then we each thought up and added one Sasquatch feature to our strides. Then another. And then another.

We gradually developed smooth, stooping, arm-rolling, loping gaits - meshing bits of chimpanzee, King Kong and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, all with a cat-like cougar vibe.

Lead director David Blair and co-director Adam Pitman kept suggesting things that we should think about.

We're killers. We live isolated in the mountains and forests. We're territorial and hate all outsiders. We and our ancestors learned to hunt as teams. We're brutal, but not evil. Nature made us what we are.

Pitman said: "You fight like two people in front of a bar; you're so animalistic. I want you to mull over how civilization made us what we are; tear it away as animals. The big theme of this movie is animal instinct versus humanity. It's a very fine line between being an animal and being human. How do you react when angry? How do you react with each other?"

Blair added: "I want you to take chances. You have relationships with each other because you're like in a clan. I want you guys to come to your own conclusions."

The five of us molded our own Sasquatch personalities as we went. We all treated Hardy as the alpha Bigfoot, our leader because he was the biggest and orneriest. I turned myself into a crotchety, over-the-hill Sasquatch with a limp. Sjoden became the young stud who wanted to replace the alpha Bigfoot. Hauser converted himself into a young Bigfoot scared of the bigger ones.

We initially growled and swatted at each other. Then under our directors' suggestions, we transformed ourselves into a clan, pointing things out to each other and grunting like we were pals.

The exercise was like dancing in public; you looked sillier if you held back.

After the exercise, the directors debriefed us on what we thought about our characters.

Mintz and Hardy came up with the same interpretations and shared them.

Our Sasquatches should be swift, alert hunters with quick reflexes - the same traits found in athletes. So we should move like basketball or football players, low to the ground, moving on the balls of our feet, ready to react to anything.

Mintz said: "You wanna stay in an athletic position all the time. You're always in attack mode."

. . .

The "Paper Dolls" filmmakers' approach to Bigfoot has a couple of wrinkles.

One is that the backstory doesn't get revealed until midway through the movie. The filmmakers are fanatical about keeping that a secret.

The other wrinkle is that the audience is not supposed to get a good look at the Sasquatches.

This is a suspense movie - depending on furry blurs, shadows, brown mayhem and murky mystery. The flick will show a Bigfoot's face unexpectedly twice for a few seconds, disappearing by the time the audience's minds will grasp what happened.

The film's budget earmarked $5,000 for six Bigfoot suits.

Costume designer Angela Millhone hunted for buffalo and deer skins with the fur intact. Buffalo fur is expensive - $500 a skin with two skins needed for each oversized Sasquatch suit. That doesn't include the deer skins, the sewing equipment, the hoods.

The tight budget dropped the number of Sasquatch costumes to five, and then to four.

Five of us Sasquatches tried on the four costumes in late July - heavy, bulky things with the arms and legs deliberately too long so our limbs won't stick out. Furry hoods hung over our eyes, leaving only nostrils, mouths and chins exposed. Makeup would disguise those features.

The script calls for Sasquatch mobs to first attack a car and later a shack - both in a remote Montana forest.

Wearing his oversized costume, Mike Hauser blurted: "How do you expect me to knock over a car with this hood?"

Millhone said: "These costumes are gonna kick your ass."

. . .

The filmmakers told us to watch nature shows on television to study how animals move.

None of us did.

But Mintz watched a DVD of "Harry And The Hendersons" - a wholesome 1987 movie about a family adopting a cuddly Bigfoot named Harry.

Mintz critiqued Harry. The critter walked upright like a man in a well-combed fur costume. Harry moved around a house and sat in chairs like he had been doing that all his life.

"He wasn't real at all," sniffed Mintz, a Whitefish small businessman, shortly before he put on his fur suit to pretend to be a rampaging killer Sasquatch for the first time.

This was the night of Aug. 7 on a state forest backroad. Blair and Millhone fretted about their Sasquatches looking like men in cute furry suits.

Millhone and others sprayed black paint on the costumes. They also slopped on a stinky goo. She and some Whitefish High School students, who were production grunts, dragged the suits back and forth on a gravel road to scuzz them up.

Meanwhile, Blair worried that the four primary Bigfoots - all non-actors - would need constant coaching to look realistic.

The first Sasquatch scene to be filmed would show shadowy silhouettes of four critters blocking the road and then rushing a car holding two actors.

First take of that scene: Every Sasquatch broke into a wild crouching loping run at the camera.

Perfect, Blair thought.

. . .

It was the night I became Bigfoot.

Aug. 11 was the fifth of six nights of filming solely Sasquatch attacks. I wore the costume belonging to Sjoden, who had to be elsewhere.

Like the other costumes after four nights of shooting, it was beat-up and clammy. The arms and legs that barely covered Sjoden's limbs hung over big time on my body, which is seven inches shorter than his.

Each Bigfoot costume came with a woman's wig - the hair mangled and tangled to drop around and over each Sasquatch's already-largely-concealed face. My kinky-curly black wig hung over my eyes, giving me an English sheepdog's view of the world. Since I'm practically blind without my glasses, I wore my wirerims when I wasn't in a scene. Twice, crew members told me I looked like Howard Stern.

That night, the Sasquatches attacked a shack holding two actors. The shack had windows and wide vertical cracks in the wood-board walls. The camera would be inside the shack with the actors, showing their view of hard-to-see Sasquatches surrounding and trying to break into the tiny shelter.

Another Sasquatch and I pounded on the door like wild creatures. Then four of us scurried about two sides of the shack, creating shadows in the wall cracks and brown shapes in the windows.

Crew members stood about four feet to one side of us. We gingerly stepped around lights and light-reflective panels maybe two feet from the shack - all the time waving our arms and bouncing off of our fellow Bigfoots as we moved past each other.

The mood inside the shack was dark terror. But just outside of the shack, it was a clumsy dance comedy, but no one snickered. We looked goofy, but the crew only cared about what the camera caught inside the shack.

The costumes were unwieldy and scratchy on the inside. We sweated. We tried to catch our breaths between takes. The oversized hoods and mangled hair in our faces made it hard to see, hear and track anything farther than three feet away.

The suits became heavy, claustrophobic prisons.

And they ripped easily.

I stepped on my left pant leg and tore it off up to my ankle - revealing that this Sasquatch wore brown hiking boots. Luckily that night, each Sasquatch would only be filmed as a murky thing above the chest. The other Bigfoots wore sandals or tennis shoes, with black gaffer's tape covering any light or shiny surfaces.

We wore black shorts and black T-shirts so any costume tears would not show bright colors or white underwear.

That was important because the most costume tears occurred in the seats of the Sasquatches' pants, which Millhone sewed up daily.

Dawn - signalling the end of night shooting - approached. The scenes to be filmed the next night included several Bigfoots being shot.

Mintz would be the first Sasquatch to bite the dust.

"Why don't we kill the reporter next?" a crew member asked.

. . .

Hamilton saved my cinematic life because he was scheduled to take Sjoden's place on the sixth and final night of Sasquatch-attack scenes.

I did put on a Bigfoot costume so Brooks, the special effects expert, could test the dust-spurting air squibs.

Meanwhile, time haunted Blair.

Lots of running and Bigfoot deaths would occur in this long shoot-out-and-escape-from-the-shack sequence.

That translates to lots of time-consuming individual shots of break-ins, break-outs, Bigfoots grabbing people and Sasquatches getting shot. Time was money, and the filmmakers didn't have much of either.

So they improvised on the spot. Several potential individual shots in the first half of the attack-and-escape sequence were replaced by one long, extensively choreographed shot from the viewpoint of the actor blasting away with a rifle. The key was to coordinate bullet squibs exploding on the shot Sasquatches.

Blair and Pitman huddled with Brooks. The special effects guy said it could be done.

They abandoned the air squib that was tested on me.

Instead, the lighting director, Hollywood Heard, crammed himself into the shack with a paintball pistol with dust-filled squibs that would poof when they hit something.

Brooks handled the smoke machine - which mixed heated mineral oil and distilled water trying to escape under pressure - that generated the fog that wafted around the small cabin. The crew inserted a thick towel beneath the back of Hauser's costume to lessen the sting of being hit.

So anyone watching the finished movie should share the view of a cornered actor with a rifle - with one Bigfoot, Mintz, already dead in the doorway from the previous take.

Hamilton's Bigfoot will break through a window, and get shot as another actor jumps over the dead Sasquatch to run outdoors, where Hauser's Bigfoot will grab him. Heard's paintball gun will shoot Hauser with dust poofing off his back in the night. The escaping actor runs to a truck and into Hardy's Bigfoot.

Cut!

It was time for another camera angle to be set up.

And the "dead" Sasquatches rose up to be recycled as more of the rampaging Bigfoots in the next take.

Although he briefly played a Sasquatch, reporter John Stang did not receive any pay from the filmmakers. Stang and the filmmakers agreed that the filmmakers would have no say over his coverage. The Daily Inter Lake did not reveal any plot twists because that wouldn't be cool.