Williams Lake, BC (back where it all started) –
The Williams Lake Tribune (Feb 12, 2010)

Gaeil Farrar photo

In the Spring of 1985 I was working as a reporter for the Williams Lake Tribune and I was sent into the bush to interview a logger about his “beautiful new machine” that he described as, “a mill on wheels.” After telling me how many jobs his danglehead processor did, and how many men it used to take to do these jobs, he blamed “the damn environmentalists” for putting his friends out of work.
That conversation was the seed for the movie, The Green Chain, and on Feb 6., 2010 — almost 25 years later — a few hundred people have shown up at the Williams Lake Community Centre on an impossibly sunny Saturday afternoon to see what kind of stories a former reporter for the Tribune is telling about them on-screen.
I wasn’t this nervous about the audience at the world premiere. I remember from my time in Williams Lake that this is a crowd that will tell you exactly what they think and they’re more than capable of interrupting the movie to heckle it if it doesn’t ring true.
Almost as soon as the lights went down, it was clear the audience was tuned into every word. They laughed at every joke the movie’s logger told — the idea of building houses “out of baby seals and whale bones” was a big hit. And there were a lot of knowing chuckles when our logger, played by Scott McNeil, made his crack about loggers with missing fingers.
Eighty-seven minutes later there was a wide-ranging forty minute Q&A session about the movie and about Williams Lake.
Part of the discussion was about how realistic the movie seemed. Some audience members thought The Green Chain was a documentary, others claimed they knew the actors were actors throughout the film, but my favourite response was from a man who worked in forestry who said he went back and forth on whether it was a doc or a drama and finally realized it didn’t matter and he was going to stop worrying about that and enjoy the ride.
I should note that this conversation has been a staple of almost every festival the movie has played and the only times I’ve seen the film when audience members haven’t ended up debating whether it was fact or fiction were at a handful of screenings where the person introducing the movie made a point of mentioning it’s fiction. On a few occasions programmers have accidentally slotted this as a documentary.
But the idea that people in the town that was a huge part of the inspiration for the unnamed town in the movie believed the characters rang true was a bigger thrill than the ecoforester who told me he liked The Green Chain better than Avatar (you think maybe the sequel can feature seven monologues about logging on Pandora?)
One woman who’d grown up in Haida Gwaii territory thanked me for getting across the anger people felt when logger Grant Hadwin chopped down “the Golden Spruce.” She told us the story of the albino raven that appeared not long after the Spruce died and how that gave people hope too – until the raven was electrocuted.
Passions ran high about the issues and the stories definitely pushed buttons. One audience member who works in a mill didn’t want to cut the tree sitter’s tree down, but he did want to shoot him with a paintball or two.
After the screening it seemed like everyone in the audience lined up to buy either a copy of The Green Chain — Nothing is Ever Clear Cut (my new book that collects both the movie’s screenplay and 22 interviews on the real life issues facing our forests) or Never Shoot a Stampede Queen – the memoir about my adventures as a cub reporter at The Tribune. But mostly they wanted to share their own stories about working in the woods, horror stories about the bark beetles gnawing their way through the Cariboo and the fights to keep the logging industry — and their community — alive.
Special thanks to the Williams Lake Film Festival – aka the tireless Krista Wiebe — for her determination to bring the movie home to Williams Lake and for her efforts to raise money to help children with learning disabilities.