Just a Filmmaker

Carson Reynolds surveyed the landscape through the bug-splattered windshield, wondering why the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota had been chosen for this event. The bland prairie lacked the dramatic setting of the Southwest that he would have preferred. The July sun beat down with little mercy on the litter-strewn parking lot of Big Bats store and filling station, their appointed rendezvous.

He felt somehow different being on this Lakota land. A strange, vaguely disturbing sensation stirred within; or was it just the climate change from California?

Lucas, his longtime soundman, sat beside him in the front of their rented van, reading an article on mountaineering in China while snacking on trail mix and downing gulps of Snapple. A sun bleached metal sign proclaiming, Permits Sold Inside, flapped in the wind.

Once again, Carson questioned whether he should be here. He had promised himself and others, especially Allison, that he would stop accepting documentary projects that were financially marginal. After all, his career was at a stage where he was supposed to be making respectable money and not just collecting awards for artistic achievement. He was hard pressed to justify taking on another documentary that paid little.

A dust-coated Chevy pickup pulled up next to Carson's van, once again disturbing the paper litter that occupied the parking lot. Out stepped Jimmy White Stone.

"Carson, you scoundrel, you made it," Jimmy called out, adjusting the heavy-framed eyeglasses resting on his nose. "I was starting to get a little worried."

"Sir James, keeper of the mighty pen of righteousness, good to see you, my man," Carson replied, climbing out of the van.

The two men embraced. Carson pulled back to better take in his old college friend.

"Damn, how long has it been since we last saw each other?"

"About four years, I believe," Jimmy answered. "That night we had dinner together in San Francisco. That Vietnamese place on Valencia?"

Carson slapped his leg. "Mind like a steel trap. Never forgets the details."

Jimmy, a tall man with a lean build, dressed in a weathered corduroy sports jacket and faded jeans, looked all the part of the bohemian professor. Now well into his forties, he wore a braided ponytail streaked with gray. His expression conveyed his usual pensive mood, one that had become familiar over the years and that signaled a certain intellectual proclivity of Jimmy's that both attracted and annoyed Carson.

"Well, you must be doing all right," Carson said. "Every time I pick up a magazine, it seems your name is under the title of some article. Right? Read you in Time, the Smithsonian, Rolling Stone."

Jimmy shrugged. "Yeah, I suppose being a journalist has worked. Or maybe it's just having an Indian slant on things that allows me to get in print. Hard to say."

"Don't be so fucking modest, you know you're damn good." Carson laughed, slapping Jimmy on the back while directing his attention to the young man emerging from the van. "Now, Jimmy, I know he doesn't look like much, but this is my dear associate and trusted soundman, Lucas."

"Welcome," Jimmy said.

"Thank you. Good to be here," Lucas replied, stepping forward, a crown of dreadlocks, gathered in a loose bundle, cascaded from a faded, backwards-facing baseball cap. "Hope we're not real late. We got kind of delayed at the airport getting all our gear through baggage claim, and then there's getting here. Damn, this place is out there, dude."

"Don't worry, we won't start shooting until tomorrow, if then," Jimmy said casually as he studied the young man. "Besides, time moves at a different pace here than in the rest of the world. I only requested that you get here today so you could settle in. But let's go over to where we'll be filming, check out the generator we rented for your lighting. We can do some of the preliminary setup and planning. It's in sort of an isolated part of the rez, a special power spot."

"This project is so awesome," Lucas said, adjusting his baggy cargo shorts up to his waist. A down vest, cotton sweatshirt, and work boots completed his film crewmember look.

"Awesome?" Jimmy paused, surveying the rolling prairie. "Well, that's to be determined."

"From what you've told me, I still can't believe you talked your elders into letting us film this thing," Carson said.

"It wasn't easy," Jimmy said, narrowing his eyes craftily. "An intertribal medicine circle of this caliber is a major event. But it's imperative to capture this on film, a way to preserve what remains of the old ways."

"Well, we'll see what we can do," Carson responded. Despite the questionable monetary rewards, he felt honored to have been asked to make the documentary by a committee of Lakota elders. Jimmy, who had collaborated with him on films when they were both undergraduates at UCLA, had helped negotiate the commission. Carson was looking forward to working with his old friend once more.

As they rode through the reservation, Carson couldn't help but notice that conditions were far from romantic. Nearly every house or trailer beckoned for repair — cardboard patches over broken windows, blue plastic tarps wrapped over roofs, sagging foundations, and practically no evidence of anything having been recently painted. Carcasses of abandoned automobiles and trucks dotted the prairie. Many people suffered poor health, too, Jimmy explained — diabetes, tuberculosis, and alcoholism fed upon the community with little restraint.

Despite the apparent hardships, however, some young people strolled about with iPods and cheap new hip-hop-inspired attire. Expensive, late-model pickups sat in front of a number of homes, often alongside satellite dishes standing like great metallic mushrooms. To Carson the reservation presented a ragtag community caught in poverty and consumerism.

Early the next day, they drove out to the filming location, a flattened plateau at the end of a box canyon, surrounded on three sides by sandstone mesas. A band of rich green shrubs and cottonwoods ran around the plateau's perimeter.

Even though they had Jimmy's four-wheel-drive truck to haul the equipment, everything had to be carried up a footpath the last hundred yards. To power the lighting they strung large electrical cables along this path from a trailer-mounted generator stationed below.

While Lucas busied himself with the audio equipment, Carson took Jimmy through a refresher on running the second camera and the two-way radios.

"You don't need to worry about the battery pack; you'll get a warning readout in the eyepiece if it's getting too low," Carson explained. "Nearly everything is digital now. Not like the old days."

"Got it," Jimmy acknowledged. "Say, Carson, I again want to thank you for holding the crew to an absolute minimum. I realize having me on the second camera isn't how you'd prefer to work, but this is such a sensitive ceremony. We really need to be as unobtrusive as possible."

"No problem," Carson replied, giving Jimmy a pat on the back.

Later in the morning the medicine men began to arrive, amid great excitement from the growing audience of Lakota people who stood along the edges of the site. Jimmy had explained that hosting this medicine circle had charged the reservation with pride. Carson wondered if it was also a rekindling of old hope.

"What are they doing now?" he asked, watching the...