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Mining Movies

Salt of the Earth: The Movie Hollywood Could Not Stop – Steve Boisson (American History Magazine – February 2002)

http://www.historynet.com/

When director Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront opened in 1954, critics and audiences hailed the gritty movie about Hoboken dockworkers and applauded Marlon Brando’s performance as the ex-boxer who ‘coulda been a contender.’ At the next Academy Awards ceremony, On the Waterfront won Oscars for best film, best director, best actor, and best supporting actress.

Another movie about beleaguered workers opened to quite a different reception that same year. Like Kazan’s film, Salt of the Earth was based on an actual situation, in this case a mining strike in New Mexico. Both movies were shot on location with the participation of those who had lived the real stories. And both movies shared a history in the Hollywood blacklist. There the similarities ended. Kazan and his writer, Budd Schulberg, had both named names — identified movie people they said were Communists — when questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Some saw their movie, in which Brando’s character testifies against the racketeers who run the docks, as an allegory in support of informing. The people behind Salt, in contrast, were unrepentant blacklistees whose leftist political affiliations derailed their careers during the Red scares of the 1950s. On the Waterfront was a hit and is remembered as a classic film. The makers of Salt of the Earth struggled to find theater owners willing to show their incendiary movie.

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Salt of the Earth – Full Movie (Mining Movie – 1954)

This information is from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Salt of the Earth (1954) is an American drama film written by Michael Wilson, directed by Herbert J. Biberman, and produced by Paul Jarrico. All had been blacklisted by the Hollywood establishment due to their alleged involvement in communist politics.[1]

The film is one of the first pictures to advance the feminist social and political point of view. Its plot centers on a long and difficult strike, based on the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico. In the film, the company is identified as “Delaware Zinc,” and the setting is “Zinctown, New Mexico.” The film shows how the miners, the company, and the police react during the strike. In neorealist style, the producers and director used actual miners and their families as actors in the film.

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Silver Bears (Mining Movie – 1978)

This information is from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Silver Bears is a 1978 comedy thriller film directed by Ivan Passer and starring Michael Caine, Cybill Shepherd, Louis Jourdan and Joss Ackland. Caine portrays mob accountant “Doc” Fletcher who acquires a Swiss bank and a silver mine but must fight a complex struggle in order to keep hold of them.

Plot summary

Financial wizard “Doc” Fletcher (Michael Caine) persuades his boss, American mobster Joe Fiore (Martin Balsam), to buy up a Swiss bank in order to more easily launder their ill-gotten gains. The impoverished Italian Prince Gianfranco di Siracusa (Louis Jourdan) agrees to act as chairman of the board in order to give it an air of respectability.

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Excerpt from “The History of Mining: The events, technology and people involved in the industry that forged the modern world” – by Michael Coulson

To order a copy of The History of Mining, please click here: http://www.harriman-house.com/products/books/23161/business/Michael-Coulson/The-History-of-Mining/

 

MINING FILMS

One of the earliest mining themed films was Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush made in 1925 and set in the time of the Alaskan gold rush where Chaplin revives his famous Little Tramp role as a gold prospector.

Gold has always had a key role to play in films with mining themes. The classic Treasure of the Sierra Madre directed by John Huston in 1948 and starring Humphrey Bogart and John’s father Walter Huston was one of the finest of the genre of prospectors searching for gold to secure them financially for life and falling out with disastrous consequences.

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Mon oncle Antoine: Of Asbestos Mines and Christmas Candy – by André Loiselle

http://www.criterion.com/

Every decade since 1984 the Toronto International Film Festival has conducted a poll of film scholars, critics, and directors to determine the ten best movies in the history of Canadian cinema. This top-ten list has changed somewhat over the years, as the tastes and preoccupations of respondents have shifted and a few new masterpieces have displaced old classics.

But one thing has remained constant: in all of these polls, one title has invariably topped the list, unmoved by passing trends. It is Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine (1971), which for the last twenty-five years has held the official title of “best Canadian film ever made.” While some might claim that other films are equally deserving of this distinction, no one would deny that Jutra’s bittersweet tale of a boy’s coming-of-age in 1940s rural Quebec is one of the greatest cinematic achievements ever to come out of Canada.

By the time he directed Mon oncle Antoine, Claude Jutra (1930–86) was already a well-known filmmaker in Quebec. The son of a renowned Montreal radiologist, Jutra was a gifted student who had completed medical school by the tender age of twenty-one. He never practiced medicine, though, for his passion had always been cinema, and he devoted all of his spare time and energy to the seventh art. Encouraged by his family to pursue his artistic vision, he started making shorts when he was still a teenager, and before turning twenty had already won a Canadian Film Award for best amateur film.

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Mon oncle Antoine – Full Movie (Mining Movie – 1971)

Mon oncle Antoine by Claude Jutra, National Film Board of Canada

 This information is from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Mon oncle Antoine is a 1971 National Film Board of Canada (Office national du film du Canada) French language drama film. Québécois director Claude Jutra co-wrote the screenplay with Clément Perron and directed what is one of the most acclaimed works in Canadian film history.

The film examines life in the Maurice Duplessis-era Asbestos region of rural Québec prior to the Asbestos Strike of the late 1940s. Set at Christmas time, the story is told from the point of view of a 15-year-old boy (Benoît, played by Jacques Gagnon) coming of age in a mining town.

The Asbestos Strike is regarded by Québec historians as a seminal event in the years prior to the Quiet Revolution. Jutra’s film is an examination of the social conditions in Québec’s old, agrarian, conservative and cleric-dominated society on the eve of the social and political changes that transformed the province a decade later.[1]

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Mackenna’s Gold – (Mining Movie – 1969)

 

This information is from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Mackenna’s Gold is a 1969 western film directed by J. Lee Thompson, starring Gregory Peck, Omar Sharif, Telly Savalas, Camilla Sparv, and Julie Newmar. It was photographed in Super Panavision 70 by Joseph MacDonald, with original music by Quincy Jones.

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Heck Allen using the penname Will Henry, telling the story of how the lure of gold corrupts a diverse group of people. The novel was loosely based on the legend of the Lost Adams Diggings, crediting the Frank Dobie account of the legend (Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver) in the Author’s Note.

Plot

An old legend tells of a fortune in gold hidden in the “Cañon del Oro,” guarded by the Apache spirits. Along with several others, a man named Adams found it when he was a young man, only to have the Indians capture and blind him, leaving him stranded in the desert after killing his companions. Years later, Marshal MacKenna (Gregory Peck) wounds an old Indian shaman named Prairie Dog (Eduardo Ciannelli) who tried to bushwhack him; Prairie Dog subsequently dies, despite MacKenna’s attending to him.

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Gold – Full Movie (Mining Movie – 1974)

This information is from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Gold is a 1974 thriller film starring Roger Moore and Susannah York and directed by Peter R. Hunt. It was based on the 1970 novel Gold Mine by Wilbur Smith. Moore plays Rod Slater, General Manager of a South African gold mine, who is instructed by his boss Steyner (Bradford Dillman) to break through an underground dike into what he is told is a rich seam of gold.

Meanwhile he falls in love with Steyner’s wife Terry, played by York. The film was only released as part of a double bill in the United States and is nowadays notable only as a period piece, being part of a propaganda effort to make Apartheid South Africa look ‘glamorous’ to European and American audiences.

Plot

The film begins with a tunnel collapse at the Sonderditch mine, in a scene that establishes the courage of Slater and his chief miner, ‘Big King’, and the bond of trust between them. This is contrasted with the contempt with which some other white managers treat the black miners.

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Does reality TV’s gold boom suggest an end to soaring prices? – by Colin Campbell (Maclean’s Magazine – February 5, 2013)

http://www2.macleans.ca/

Gold Rush fans may not want to change the channel just yet

Reality television’s latest obsession is gold. Jungle Gold, Gold Rush, Bering Sea Gold and Gold Fever are all shows documenting miners’ efforts to dig up flakes of the precious metal worth $1,700 an ounce. The last time TV was so caught up in a trend it was in the house-flipping genre (Flip This House, Flip That House), which seemed to hit its peak just before the U.S. housing market crashed. Is there a similar warning sign in the TV gold boom? Does all the mainstream fascination with gold suggest an overinflated interest and price?

Some analysts on Wall Street, at least, seem to think gold’s wild ride may be nearing its end. This week, Morgan Stanley lowered its gold-price forecast for the year by four per cent, to $1,773. Late last year, Goldman Sachs cut its target price for 2013 to $1,800 an ounce from $1,940, citing an improving U.S. economy. “The risk-reward of holding a long gold position is diminishing,” it said.

Gold is the ultimate safe-haven investment and has enjoyed an incredible rise in recent years. A decade ago, gold was worth little more than $300 an ounce. Since 2000, it has gone up every year for 12 years (a record) and in each of the three years after the 2008 crash, gold prices peaked to hit record highs. That gold might be finally losing some of its shine suggests fear of riskier investments may be ebbing. The S&P 500 index last week, for instance, cracked the 1,500 mark for the first time since 2007.

Not everyone is convinced the gold rush is finished just yet. Morgan Stanley said that despite its price cut, it still remains “bullish on the gold-price outlook,” citing an ongoing commitment in the U.S. to low interest rates and government stimulus spending in the face of “a below-par recovery.” Many central banks are also still buying gold. As Goldman admits, “calling the peak in gold prices is a difficult exercise.”

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Time to fight back against Hollywood’s [mining and oil/gas industry] misinformation – Gwyn Morgan (Globe and Mail – January 21, 2013)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Hollywood hates big business. Movies portraying corporate leaders as greedy villains have been common for decades, but the film that inspired today’s movie makers had its roots in British Columbia. That was the 2003 documentary The Corporation, written by a University of British Columbia law professor, Joel Bakan.

It featured a procession of leftist luminaries, including Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky, uttering views such as that corporations turn citizens into “mindless consumers of goods that they do not want” and that “the problem comes from the profit motivation.”

Hollywood’s attack has escalated to the point where many films feature an anti-corporate “moral” message, the most popular of which portray industries as uncaring pillagers of the environment. The plot of James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster Avatar featured a greedy mining boss intent on destroying an ancient forest inhabited by native humanoids on the distant planet of Pandora to mine a precious mineral called unobtanium.

Animated films for children also follow the lead; consider 1992’s FernGully: The Last Rain Forest, in which fairy folk help stop a logging company from destroying their forest home.

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‘Ghost Mine’: Digging for ghosts – by Rob Owen (The Oregonian – January 14, 2013)

 http://www.oregonlive.com/oregonian/

Click here to view the first episode: http://www.syfy.com/videos/Ghost%20Mine/vid:2618988

Syfy’s “Ghost Mine” takes two popular cable TV reality genres — dirty jobs and paranormal investigations — and mashes them together.

Instead of sending Oregonians into Alaska, as Discovery Channel does for “Gold Rush,” “Ghost Mine” brings the action to eastern Oregon as miners and ghostbusters work side by side at the Crescent Mine near Sumpter, about 30 miles outside of Baker City.

The six-episode first season was filmed in the Elkhorn Mountains this past summer. Cottage Grove’s Dick Secord Jr. (also known as “Greybeard”) was among the miners recruited. His specialty is working old mines and finding gold previous miners have left behind. He calls it “detective mining,” the kind of work he’s done with his 82-year-old father for decades. Secord said it was his first time being filmed for a TV show.

“After a day or so you don’t notice (the cameras),” he said. “You’ve got to keep an eye on the (crew) because you don’t know what’s going to fall where.” Stranger still was the presence of paranormal investigators.

“My first thought was, I couldn’t quit laughing,” Secord said of the “Ghost Mine” premise. “We’ve got hundreds of hours underground and I guess we’re pretty closed in. I’ve got my nose forward looking for one thing and there’s a lot of stuff we overlook, stuff you block out. It was very interesting. I learned a lot.”

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Energy industry slams Matt Damon fracking film as Hollywood fiction – by Kelly Cryderman and Carrie Tait (Globe and Mail – January 4, 2013)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Calgary — A blend of engineering and geology hardly makes for a Hollywood blockbuster. But the latest movie about hydraulic fracturing – yes, there’s more than one out there – has an A-lister taking shots at the controversial practise.

The film – Promised Land , co-written and starring Matt Damon – opens Friday, but the energy industry’s supporters are already fuming over how they have been painted as the bad guy. The movie, they argue, is full of scare-mongering rather than facts. And they say Hollywood has done just the same: made judgment calls without having all the necessary information.

Hollywood has used its broad reach to try to persuade the masses before. James Cameron’s Avatar was interpreted by some as a potshot against the oil-sands industry. Documentaries such as Thank You for Smoking chastized tobacco companies and their lobbyists, and Super Size Me went after fast food businesses. Gasland , released in 2010, criticized natural gas players and famously showed someone lighting tap water on fire. The energy industry, experts say, must battle Promised Land or risk losing ground in the fracking debate. The audience for Promised Land , after all, is full of folks who have not spent years figuring out how guar gum and water can be mixed together to shatter previously impenetrable rocks.

“There’s a lot of misinformation in any story,” Deborah Thompson, principal of communications and executive consultancy DT Communications, said. “It doesn’t matter if it is as contentious as this, in any story for any company, regardless of whatever industry they are in, you have to correct misinformation. While that doesn’t sound terribly Hollywood sexy, that’s what you have to do.”

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The North should prepare itself for a prime-time TV gold rush – by John Doyle (Globe and Mail – December 12, 2012)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

My prediction for 2013 is the victory of the proletariat.

Okay, all righty, maybe that’s not going to happen. So let’s stick with possible trends for 2013. Here’s a trend that is not entirely unrelated to the victory of the proletariat – the North.

News arrived recently that Discovery, the fabulously successful U.S. cable channel, has ordered up its first scripted project, and that drama project is called Klondike, based on Canadian writer Charlotte Gray’s book Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike.

Among those involved is Ridley Scott, the English director and producer responsible for the movies Alien, Blade Runner and Black Hawk Down, among other titles. In a press release Scott says, “Klondike was the last great gold rush; one which triggered a flood of prospectors ill-equipped, emotionally or otherwise, for the extreme and gruelling conditions of the remote Yukon wilderness.”

Indeed. But what matters, too, is that the decision to make Klondike follows on the ratings success of Discovery’s reality series Gold Rush (seen on Discovery Canada, Tuesdays, 9 p.m., Saturdays, 11 p.m.). Now into its third season, the series follows the key workers at four mining companies as they dig for gold in Alaska.

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Hollywood Far North: How Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie are becoming moviemaking centres – by Linda Barnard (Toronto Star – July 14, 2012)

The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

SAULT STE. MARIE, Ont.— Heather Graham, costumed in a skin-tight floral dress and cherry-coloured stilettos, is whipping up chocolate soufflés under the watchful eye of fellow actor Joe Mantegna. What would the workers at D.D.I. Seamless Cylinder make of their former workplace?

As L.A. film publicist Steven Zeller put it as he opened the door to what was once a fire extinguisher parts manufacturer on the outskirts of Sault Ste. Marie: “Welcome to Hollywood north-north.”

The empty factory became a sound stage in May for darkly comic thriller Compulsion and temporary home to a pair of elaborate New York City apartment sets inhabited by obsessive-compulsives played by Boogie Nights star Graham (who fancies herself a TV chef) and The Matrix’s Carrie-Anne Moss, whose character is an emaciated, bitter former child star. The film is a remake of South Korean director Cheol-su Park’s 301, 302.

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Filmmaker favours Sudbury for filming – by Kevin Priddle (Sudbury Star – April 14, 2012)

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

If Alfons Adetuyi — a Sudbury Secondary graduate turned internationally renowned filmmaker — has his way, he’ll be back in Sudbury as early as next year to start shooting the second film in what he calls his ‘Africa Trilogy.’

“I guess I could give you some hints (about the new film),” Adetuyi said in a recent interview with The Star. He says the film is set around a particular event in 1971 and is called Dreams of the Moon. “So maybe you have to find out what happened in Sudbury in 1971,” he said while laughing.

In July 2010, Adetuyi returned to Sudbury for the first time in many years to direct the first film in his trilogy, High Chicago, which was written by his brother Robert and produced by his other brothers, Amos and Tom.

High Chicago is set in a small mining town in 1975 and follows the story of a man who’s a gambler, drinks a little too much and has given up on a dream he hatched while serving in the navy: to build drive-in movie theatres in Africa.

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