Some Residents Have Had It - Up To Their Ankles - With Film

A lone bicyclist on Friday pedaled through the ash-covered wasteland that downtown Wallace has become.

“Pretty realistic,” said Carolyn Lashlee, snapping photos of the destruction. She was visiting from Salt Lake City. “We saw all the cracks on the buildings, then we realized they’re painted on.”

Universal Pictures has blanketed Bank and Cedar Streets with fake ash, wrecked cars and building debris. Wallace plays the fictional town of “Dante’s Peak” in the movie of the same name, and the scenes now being filmed are supposed to be after a volcano erupts near the town.

“We just came back from Mount St. Helens, and now this!” said Carol McLay, a tourist from Maryland.

“I didn’t realize how expensive it was to make a movie,” said her sister, Kathy Bader of Seattle.

Universal reportedly is spending about $100 million to make the film, several million of which has been spent in and around Wallace. The businesses closed by the ash got a midsummer vacation at Universal’s expense.

But the filming hasn’t been all sweetness and light.

Jim Spear, a former Wallace city mechanic and father of five, got work on a film crew. But when the movie booted him to hire the son of a film executive, he said, he became enraged. He says movie workers also told him he had to halt an outdoor party, and stopped his son from practicing his trumpet.

It was all too much. On July 2, he called the production office and threatened to blow up the sets.

“I said some things I shouldn’t have,” he acknowledged in a recent interview. He said he meant nothing by it. “Everyone else threatens everyone else around here.”

Universal, however, didn’t take the matter lightly. It had Spear arrested. It also obtained a court order barring Spear from calling Universal employees and forcing him to stay at least 500 feet from the sets. That’s tough, because Spear’s house is 200 feet from a set. He’s pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Less than two weeks later, film crews were shooting at Mirror Lake, near Sagle.

On July 13, a Saturday, fishing buddies Art Swisher and Jim Schiavone got up before dawn, and loaded up their cooler, fishing gear, waders and float tubes.

At 4 a.m., the two fly fishermen headed for Mirror Lake.

Once there, a “Dante’s Peak” worker refused to let them go to the lake.

“Whoever’s doing the movie told them they had leased all the land and they would have to go back,” said a friend of Schiavone’s who declined to give her name. “They’d planned this, they’d gotten up early, and then they couldn’t go.”

Swisher and Schiavone argued to no avail. But they were really upset when Idaho Fish and Game officials told them the movie company had no right to deny access to the lake, filming or no filming.

Fish and Game officials went to the lake to tell Universal film crews not to deny access to fishermen again.

Most recently, Wallace shopkeeper Joyce Frojen filed a lawsuit in small claims court Monday, seeking $3,000 from Universal.

Frojen had battled with filmmakers for weeks, saying the shooting has cut so deeply into the tourist traffic that she’s on the road to bankruptcy. She has since dropped the suit.

Scenes involving the ash will continue through the middle of next week. Filming is expected to be finished by the second week of August.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo