confluence of our political satire group, The Montana Logging and Ballet Co., my art, and a film star that sparked a film company. The story starts in the tiny high school in Joliet, Montana in the Montana Logging and Ballet Co.’s early days when we performed a concert for the town’s students. It just happens that TV and a film star of the 60’s, Patrick McGoohan (who once turned down the James Bond role) came to see the show. He was quite moved by the show and he and his wife took us all to dinner. There he announced that this was the best comedy he’d seen and he wanted to join our group. Well Patrick is a great Irish classically-trained actor and we were a bunch of backwoods yahoos; there’s no way we could meld our talents onstage. So we instead formed a film company, so he could do “star” work and the four of us Montana boys could provide background antics to his films. Patrick really liked all of us and wanted to feature us in various ways. (Like he wanted me to be the lighting designer for his upcoming film adaption of Ibsen’s Brand.)
He also took a shine to my mom, who was a playwright. In 1979 Patrick starred in a TV series called Rafferty, for which Mom wrote a number of scripts. During the process she communicated with G. Daniel Walker, a rather famous man serving life in a California prison for murder, who’d written a number of Hollywood scripts and was interested in the project. They exchanged fascinating letters for months discussing script possibilities.
As excellent as Rafferty was, featuring Patrick as a socially-isolated but brilliant doctor, the series was canceled early. Patrick suffered from alcoholism that increasingly made him an unreliable partner in the film world. His decline swept our nascent film company and our tiny Hollywood dreams into the dustbin of history. It was a fun dream while it lasted, but that wasn’t long enough to even get ourselves in trouble. Who knows what cultural trash was lost forever in the smoke of that collapse?
