First Class Movie Crews Busily Transform Metaline Falls Into A Setting For Post-Apocalyptic Film

Mayor Lee McGowan sat on a bench in front of her historic landmark hotel and marveled as Hollywood construction crews gave her town a new “old look.”

“You know, that’s gone up just since I’ve been sitting here,” McGowan said last week, waving her magazine at a newly framed bowling alley in the city park.

It’s next door to the mock post office that actor-director Kevin Costner will use in his new movie, “The Postman.” Filming is to begin here in mid- to late May, as soon as shooting in Bend, Ore., is finished.

McGowan said she’s become a “street person” since Warner Bros. rented the lobby of her Washington Hotel.

The lobby, ordinarily McGowan’s personal art studio, now houses the “Postman” art crew. Their designs are turning Metaline Falls and nearby Boundary Dam into several post-apocalyptic villages.

“It’s after a nuclear holocaust in the Third World War and this postman is trying to keep hope in this small community by delivering the mail,” explains John Beacham, a sixth-grader at Lillian Bailey Elementary School.

“And it just so happens that our town looks like a nuclear bomb hit it,” classmate Boone Hogan added helpfully.

Many adults find Metaline Falls a charming town now that it’s no longer covered with dust from its now-defunct cement plant. Instead of remaking the town, the movie carpenters have deftly touched it up as though they were applying makeup.

They’ve added a few architectural embellishments here and there, a lot of raised storefront facades, a picturesque frontier-style church, and a false-front newspaper building to fix Main Street’s gap-toothed smile.

“Almost everybody has been really amazed at the changes in the buildings, how fast it has all gone up - and wishing it could be left that way because it looks so much better,” said Carrie Kurlow, the town’s real postmaster.

The most remarkable structure in the movie will be an amorphous, four-story collection of apartments perched on the sheer face of Boundary Dam. It’s an uncanny modern version of ancient, gravity-defying Anasazi cliff dwellings in the American Southwest.

The village is being built on a “spray deck” about 80 feet from the top of the dam and more than 100 feet above the rock-studded pool at the bottom.

No one knows what enemy the long-vanished Anasazi Indians feared when they built their unapproachable cliff houses, but Costner must contend with marauding survivalists. They destroy civilization so badly that even a mailman commands respect.

After being robbed by bandits, Costner dons the jacket and bag of a long-dead postman. By popular demand, he develops a postal network among isolated communities. It’s a sort of Pony Express because automobiles and most other machines no longer work.

Several Metaline Falls residents expressed relief that their Hollywood guests abandoned a plan to cover paved streets with dirt to accommodate the horses.

Because of all the horses and the frontier architecture of some of the movie sets, some residents speculate that the film will be a sort of Western of the future.

Eager to learn more, they’re buying up and passing around copies of the book by David Brin on which the movie is based. The only copy at the Metaline Falls branch library is constantly checked out and there’s a waiting list, manager Lynn Barnes said.

While there’s some ambivalence about the movie itself, there’s none about the movie makers. People like them.

The movie crew has been friendly, courteous and helpful, several said.

Sixth-grade teacher Tom Barnes said movie officials were quick to embrace school district plans to incorporate the movie into classes ranging from wood shop to language arts, even math.

George Kubota, owner of the Metaline Trading Co., also likes the Hollywood folks he’s met. Their friendliness compensates for their seeming inability to make up their minds.

“They’re pretty unpredictable people,” Kubota said. “They have something explained and set up, and then they change it.”

He’s happy, though, about all the hardware the movie is buying from his store, which has always had an apocalyptic frontier appearance.

Eva Gayle Six, artistic director of the Cutter Theatre, relishes the constant changes of the movie-making preparations.

“It wouldn’t be a creative process if it didn’t change constantly,” she said.

Part of the movie will be filmed at the Cutter, a landmark high school building that has been turned into a performing arts center. The theater’s plush new seats will be removed and the neat new paint job will be redone to make the place look shabby.

The movie crews were handed a much bigger problem Tuesday when Boundary Dam started spilling water a couple of weeks sooner than expected. The 27 carpenters and laborers working on the cliff dwelling are getting drenched by the spray.

The spill will be continuous for as long as necessary to alleviate a severe flood threat on the Pend Oreille River - probably until the middle of June, dam operator Robert Smith guessed. So far, only one of two giant spillgates is open.

“If it gets bad enough to where we have to start spilling out of both gates, then I believe their work will probably be shut down,” Smith said.

Lack of housing in the isolated region has been another big problem for the movie company. Local officials say the movie has about 125 workers on the job now and expects to bring in as many as 490.

That’s almost 100 more than the combined populations of Metaline Falls and nearby Metaline. The movie company helped renovate the 52-unit Pend Oreille Apartments to acquire rooms and has rented just about all the other available housing in the area.

Even so, some workers will have to commute 53 miles from Colville and about the same distance from Nelson, British Columbia. Starting May 15, the Metaline Falls border crossing will be open 24 hours a day to accommodate the movie workers.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (2 Color)

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Story and photos by John Craig/Staff writer