Whitefish writer finds home in Montana movies

For a month, the production crew was scrambling.

“Props every day would be like, ‘man, we can’t find anyone who has a dead deer, we talked to everybody!’” key production assistant Colin Scott recalled.

“And then it was last minute, like, ‘tomorrow we need a deer.’”

Stationed outside Bozeman, where he and the rest of the crew were filming the father-son drama “Walking Out,” Scott, a trained screenwriter but novice production assistant — “I didn’t know what it was … I had to Google it,” he said of his title — volunteered to help.

“I was just going to say yes to everything. If it doesn’t happen, I’ll deal with it, but that was my total outlook. I’m just going to say yes to everything, so I was like, ‘I’ll go get you a deer.’”

Scott grew up fishing the Gallatin River and hunting with his grandfather, Dick Symmonds, and spent summers in college working as a fly fishing guide in Glacier National Park. To this day, he still spends a few months each year in King Salmon, Alaska, leading bird hunting and fly fishing trips.

So he separated from the mostly Los Angeles-based crew one snowy night, hopped into his Subaru, set out to find his deer and it didn’t take long before he spied one near a car dealership in Bozeman. He walked in to give the staff a quick warning.

“‘Hey, I’m going to have to drag a dead dear through your parking lot,’” he told them. “And I wrestled it over a barbed wire fence and I just shoved it in the back of my Subaru.

“And then I had to gut this, like, bloated, disgusting deer. And then people take note. Montanans are probably like, ‘yeah, whatever, it’s just a dead deer on the side of the road’ but that’s where I think Montanans are so industrious.

“People outside of the state were like, ‘whoa, this is cool and crazy.’”

SCOTT, 31 and living in Whitefish, has parlayed a bit of Montana industriousness, a little life experience and an ever-present passion for storytelling into a burgeoning career as a screenwriter and filmmaker.

“Walking Out” — which includes a cameo from the dead deer, hanging outside of a cabin — is one of three feature films Scott has worked on in just the last two years, since his graduation from the University of Texas with a master’s degree in screenwriting.

The movies ­— “The Ballad of Lefty Brown” and “Wildlife” are the other two — are all Montana-made, all independently produced and all carry significant star-power. “The Ballad of Lefty Brown” is led by Bill Pullman and was screened at the SXSW film festival; “Wildlife” is Paul Dano’s directorial debut and stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan; and “Walking Out,” with Pullman, Matt Bomer (“American Horror Story”) and Montana native Lily Gladstone, has garnered critical praise since premiering at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

A pair of Montana brothers, Alex and Andrew Smith, co-directed “Walking Out,” and have written, directed and produced movies in Big Sky country for more than a decade, starting with 2002’s “The Slaughter Rule.” In recent years, more and more producers and directors have taken notice of Montana’s majestic landscapes and diligent crews, bringing a steady stream of big-money and independent productions here. The Montana Film Office lists 27 movies shot in the state from 2011-15.

“So everyone in Montana, everyone has this weird background, just because to stay up here you have to grind a little bit and find your little niche,” Scott said. “But then all these L.A. people come and they’re like, ‘oh, you can be our medic and you can be our outdoor consultant’ so everything’s kind of come back around.

“And even Montana itself is kind of becoming a commodity in the film world that, sometimes, I think, we take for granted. People come and are pretty blown away.”

SCOTT IS a bit of a unique commodity himself, a byproduct of the years he spent making ends meet while trying to sell scripts after graduating from the University of Montana in 2008 with a creative writing degree.

He has credits on both “Walking Out” and “The Ballad of Lefty Brown” as a paramedic (in addition to production credits), a skill he acquired while holding that job for several years in Utah.

“It’s exciting and in terms of story material its boundless,” he said of working full-time as a paramedic. “But I carried stuff really heavy. A lot of guys could laugh it off and I just, I just knew I couldn’t do a 20-year career without it really impacting me.”

Scott coped with his more difficult days as a paramedic through his keyboard, writing occasionally during his time in Utah, but his desire to pour himself more fully into writing brought him back to Montana, his childhood home. Here, Scott worked as a wild land firefighter before taking a job as a bartender at the Great Northern Brewing Co. in Whitefish, a move he confesses hardly looked like a move up the career ladder. But what it did allow was for Scott to pour himself more completely into his passion, and he made a personal commitment to spend 40 hours a week, on top of the bartending, crafting his screenplays.

“Writing, until you pop something big you feel like you’re not successful because you don’t have any money coming in, really,” he said. “But you have to take those steps as, ‘OK, this is a positive trajectory’ rather than ‘I’m unsuccessful.’ Then all of a sudden one day you wake up and you are successful.”

Scott also developed a relationship with Alex Smith, and by 2013 Smith had convinced him to enroll at the University of Texas, where Smith was a professor. As the two grew closer, Scott took a closer look at Smith’s own career, the Montana movies Smith and his brother had made, and it triggered an epiphany that led directly to Scott’s job on “Walking Out.”

“It’s Montana and it’s Native stuff and Montanans and ranchers and beautiful and small,” Scott said of Smith’s work. “And I said this is what I want to do: make Montana movies, live in Montana.

“I don’t need to be rich, I don’t need to be famous, and so just get me on your next project.”

AS HE procures more work on Montana-made movies, Scott has not stopped writing screenplays, and his most recent work is his most promising.

“Body Blows” is the story of Gloria Hemingway, who was born the son (Gregory) of Ernest Hemingway and was a practicing doctor for a time in Fort Benton, Montana, where Scott also spent some of his formative years. Earlier this year his script was named one of 50 finalists for the coveted International Screenwriters’ Association fellowship, an honor that he believes will put the movie on the fast-track to production.

Scott’s plan is to begin shooting — in Montana, of course — next fall.

“I think it’s the first project that I think is as good as any other independent feature right now,” Scott said. “I believe in it, so then it’s just determination.

“And then I’m working on another one right now. You’ve just got to have something in the hopper because you get a lot of rejections. That’s just part of being a writer.”

Entertainment editor Andy Viano can be reached at (406) 758-4439 or aviano@dailyinterlake.com.