Big Timber film club marks 35 years of cinema, community

That’s not a joke. The Big Timber Pioneer ran a photo of the crumbled rubble at Van Drive-in, after the screen’s iron supports were snapped out of their concrete bases by a “near hurricane velocity” storm. Sometimes if you want to keep up with culture on the high, lonely plains, you’ve got to get resourceful.

That’s where the Big Windy Film Club comes in. They’re a loose group of like-minded individuals who live in and around Big Timber — the town’s only Democrats, one suggested, not entirely in jest — who get together to watch movies.

And not just any movies. The club, who have been meeting every winter since 1989 and are now in their 35th year (they took 2020 off), focus on foreign and arthouse movies, the types of things that rarely get theater releases in Montana at all, much less in small towns like Big Timber.

“We had a movie theater,” said Jerry Iverson, who’s been part of this since 1989. “And it would show some interesting films.”

He’s referring to the Sweet Grass Arts Theater, which still shows movies today on McLeod Street in downtown Big Timber. But their palate is inherently limited, and many of the group’s members lived out on the plains, not in town. If they wanted a chance to connect with worldwide culture on the High Plains, all they had was each other.

Jerry is one of the group’s four remaining original members, along with his wife Linda and their friends and fellow married couple Keith Goodhart and Lauren McMullen. Today they’re joined by Charlie French, who joined in 1994; Rich Baerg, who joined in the early 2000s (he can’t remember the specific year, but figures it must have been around when his daughter was old enough to stay home without a babysitter) and Suz and John Marshak, who joined in 2007. There have been 24 official members over those 36 years.

Jerry and Linda are my aunt and uncle. And the first thing you need to know about my aunt and uncle is that they’re cool.

Jerry — he and my dad grew up on a South Dakota dairy farm — is a modernist artist with a college degree in philosophy. He’s got pieces in the Yellowstone Art Museum’s permanent collection. Nowadays he tends to his own Sweetgrass County ranch and the sprawling one next door, but he learned to sheer sheep in New Zealand and did that for years. One of the first photos of us together features him with infant me in one hand and a pair of sheers in the other.

Linda, who came out west from Indiana and married into the Iverson family in 1980, is one of the state’s great landscape designers. If you’ve ever been impressed by some artfully laid out flowers and native plants in this area, you’re probably looking at her work. If you want to see some authentic Linda Iverson designs in Billings, stop by the Northern Plains Resource Council building at 220 S. 27th St.

And her influence didn’t stop with the garden, both she and Jerry have been members of the environmental nonprofit for years, and he was instrumental in the Good Neighbor Agreement, the contract between the Stillwater Mining Company and community groups whose aim is to keep the environment around the mine clean and healthy.

After they married at a dude ranch in the Boulder Valley, Jerry and Linda shepherded sheep 10,000 feet into the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in the summers and settled into the Big Timber area in the winters.

And there’s always the winters. That’s the root of the Big Windy Film Club. They see about 10 or so movies every winter, traveling to each other’s houses no matter the weather. The club usually lasts from January until March.

Spring and summer are off the table because, “everyone gets busy with their gardens and they start lambing and calving,” Suz Marshak said.

“That’s our quiet time,” Linda added. She’s got a great story about trying to drive home after a movie club night when it was 40 below, so cold her headlights wouldn’t work. But the movie they watched was the 1993 French/Vietnamese romance “The Scent of Green Papaya,” and it was so good it was worth driving in the freezing dark.

“We’ll drive through blizzards just to get here,” said Baerg, who lives east of Livingston, the most geographically removed member of the club. “It’s what we look forward to.”

And they’ve been looking forward to it for a long time.

Margaret Augustine, who gave the club its name, “big” and “windy” being the best words to describe the wide-open country around Big Timber, originally put the group together back in 1989. She wrote for the Big Timber Pioneer newspaper, and knew pretty much everyone in and around town. Over the years the group’s numbers have included welders, artists, librarians, ranchers and yes, sheep shearers. 

“She was a free-spirited person, very liberal and kind of controversial,” Linda remembered.

The first group was small, and they watched all the movies that year at Augustine’s house — they had to, she was the only one the group knew with a TV.

And it was a small TV, too, broadcasting grainy, smudgy VHS transfers. But it was worldwide cinematic culture finding a home in a town with just a little more than 1,000 people.

They watched six movies that year, including John Sayles baseball drama “Eight Men Out,” Ingmar Bergman’s three hour long “Fanny and Alexander” and Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise.” Jarmusch, an American master who stays at the periphery of mainstream culture, capturing those who fall to the edges, is a particular favorite of the group — they’ve watched most of his films, including “Mystery Train,” the marquee movie from 1990s lineup, which increased to 10 films.

Big Timber didn’t have a video rental place at the time, but Augustine tracked down a catalog for something called the Home Film Festival, a sort of proto-Netflix that would send you movies through the mail.

When French joined he was deputized as the keeper of the massive Home Film Festival catalog, which contained descriptions of the many films they offered and instructions on how to order them. They’d rent the films under his name and all pitch in to pay for the prices, which could be around $20 per movie, including shipping.

They were using VHS at the start, slowly transitioned into DVDs around the turn of the millennium and now stream everything, going to each member’s house depending on what service they’re subscribed to. The Big Windy Film Club has been through generations of physical media at this point.

They always meet before the schedule kicks off to figure out what to watch this year, everyone nominating some films and agreeing which ones to pick. They don’t always agree, but it’s nice to get to see something you wouldn’t normally pick. It forces you out of your artistic comfort zone into some place that could be pretty rewarding.

“We’re trying to see other parts of the world, other perspectives, that sort of thing,” Baerg said.

“A lot of our films have some history to them,” Linda added.

Roughly 10 or so a year for 35 years means they’ve watched north of 300 films, not counting the few repeats of movies so beloved by the group they get encore showings. A particular favorite is “Babette’s Feast,” a 1987 Danish film about a church cook who decides to spend her lottery winnings on a lavish meal for all to enjoy: highlighted by turtle soup, champagne and cailles en sacrophage, whole quails stuffed with foie gras and truffle and baked in a pastry case. It is a film that believes fiercely in the power of art — this time in the form of food — as a cultural unifier. You can see how it’d be a big hit around here.

It’s not a coincidence that the club always plans their film-going year around a big party featuring a turducken, a Frankenstein food product comprised of a deboned chicken inside a deboned duck inside a deboned turkey. The group are pretty selective on who they let in, but on turducken night all sorts of people are invited; 28 is their record turducken attendance.

Linda keeps a file folder with lists of all the films they’ve seen, itemized by year. Some of them even include short reactions — her one word reaction to “Grizzly Man,” was: “Crazy,” a perfect snapshot dwarfed only by her two word reaction to “Pink Flamingos:” “Oh god!”

They had a personal collection to that last one, the masterpiece from filmmaker John Waters, whose high camp films are so outrageous they’ve earned him the honorific “Pope of Trash.” John Marshak, who grew up in Vermont, once gave the film’s star Edith Massy (better known as “Edie the Egg Lady”) a ride to the Sleaze Convention in Wilmington, Delaware.

One member did walk out of that “Pink Flamingos” screening. But for the most part, they’ve kept it steady. And personal connections abound with the films they show. Novelist and screenwriter William “Gatz” Hjortsberg (whose collaboration with Ridley Scott on “Legend” you can catch at the Babcock this Saturday) was a member, and once hosted a screening of “Angel Heart,” a Mickey Rourke, Robert De Niro vehicle based on a novel Hjortsberg wrote.

Hjortsberg died in 2017, one of three former Big Windy Club members who are no longer around. Augustine died in 2004, and Baerg’s wife Mikelann Caywood-Baerg passed in late 2023.

The film screenings sometimes include a meal, and even when they don’t there’s plenty of talking and catching up before and after the movie. This isn’t just an excuse to watch a film, it’s a chance to get together, to remember and to create and celebrate a community. When trying to remember showings and meetings of the past they’ll interrupt each other and piggyback stories on top of one another. So much has happened it’s imperative to get it all out.

They night they let me tag along, the Marshaks hosted. In a house stuffed with art and knickknacks (John loves frogs, Suz loves elephants, they both love birds, and you’ll find plenty of all three at their place) we shared a meal and talked about the history of the club. Afterwards we went upstairs to watch the movie, fitting everyone where they can, crowding onto easy chairs, couches and kitchen chairs.

This week’s was the 2020 documentary “Jimmy Carter: Rock and Roll President,” which prompted quite the discussion about the politics and life of the late leader. Baerg’s dog Gus sat calmly through the whole movie, as if he was watching with us (they’ve yet to invent Letterboxd for dogs, but someone should).

Afterwards everybody split, easily able to brave the cold because of all the warmth inside.

“Everything was delightful,” McMullen mused. “The company, the food and the show.”