I am happy to announce “Boomtown,” the second film in the Lost and Found Series, has been accepted into the 9th Annual Big Sky Documentary Film Festival! The film will screen in competition for the Big Sky Award and premiere at the historic Wilma Theater on February 20th, opening weekend of the festival.
Yesterday, the Salt Lake City-based blog “Selective Echo” published an excellent article on “Boomtown” and the entire series. Read it below!
“At its peak in the early 1880s, the Horn Silver Mine in Frisco, Utah was cited in the U.S. Annual Mining Review and Stock Ledger as ‘unquestionably the richest silver mine in the world now being worked.’ Miriam B. Murphy, who has written frequently about Utah’s early history, described the town’s story as the perfect setting for pulp fiction:
‘Two prospectors casually discover a rich ore body, a bankrupt financier promotes the venture, the boomtown of Frisco becomes one of the wildest mining camps in the West with a murder or two every evening, a tough lawman who shoots on sight begins to clean up the town, after producing millions the huge mine collapses, and Frisco becomes another ghost town.’
Nearly 125 years after a mine collapse essentially sealed Frisco’s inevitable doom, Utah filmmakers Torben Bernhard and Travis Low scouting the Beaver County area some 15 miles west of Milford completely missed the town’s location on their first pass. As Bernhard recalls, ‘the former boomtown was once home to thousands of people, but is now mostly sagebrush, building foundations, old mining equipment, and scraps of metal. The old charcoal kilns are listed on the National Register of Historic Places [as of 1982] but they are beginning to fall apart as well.’
In their short film ‘Boomtown,’ which premieres next month at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana, Bernhard and Low reconstruct Frisco for a contemporary audience through excerpts from rare recordings of oral histories taken from individuals who had lived in a town that disappeared from the map by the end of the 1920s.
As much as this 12-minute film, which also was produced by Bernhard’s wife Marissa, reflects countless hours of historical and scholarly research, the visual imagery and tape excerpts in ‘Boomtown’ underscore the primal challenge we all face in the lifelong predicament of preserving identity. Like the other four films in their forthcoming Lost and Found Series, ‘Boomtown’ suggests, ‘nobody or very few people know our history but this will change.’
![I am happy to announce “Boomtown,” the second film in the Lost and Found Series, has been accepted into the 9th Annual Big Sky Documentary Film Festival! The film will screen in competition for the Big Sky Award and premiere at the historic Wilma Theater on February 20th, opening weekend of the festival.
Yesterday, the Salt Lake City-based blog “Selective Echo” published an excellent article on “Boomtown” and the entire series. Read it below!
“At its peak in the early 1880s, the Horn Silver Mine in Frisco, Utah was cited in the U.S. Annual Mining Review and Stock Ledger as ‘unquestionably the richest silver mine in the world now being worked.’ Miriam B. Murphy, who has written frequently about Utah’s early history, described the town’s story as the perfect setting for pulp fiction:
‘Two prospectors casually discover a rich ore body, a bankrupt financier promotes the venture, the boomtown of Frisco becomes one of the wildest mining camps in the West with a murder or two every evening, a tough lawman who shoots on sight begins to clean up the town, after producing millions the huge mine collapses, and Frisco becomes another ghost town.’
Nearly 125 years after a mine collapse essentially sealed Frisco’s inevitable doom, Utah filmmakers Torben Bernhard and Travis Low scouting the Beaver County area some 15 miles west of Milford completely missed the town’s location on their first pass. As Bernhard recalls, ‘the former boomtown was once home to thousands of people, but is now mostly sagebrush, building foundations, old mining equipment, and scraps of metal. The old charcoal kilns are listed on the National Register of Historic Places [as of 1982] but they are beginning to fall apart as well.’
In their short film ‘Boomtown,’ which premieres next month at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana, Bernhard and Low reconstruct Frisco for a contemporary audience through excerpts from rare recordings of oral histories taken from individuals who had lived in a town that disappeared from the map by the end of the 1920s.
As much as this 12-minute film, which also was produced by Bernhard’s wife Marissa, reflects countless hours of historical and scholarly research, the visual imagery and tape excerpts in ‘Boomtown’ underscore the primal challenge we all face in the lifelong predicament of preserving identity. Like the other four films in their forthcoming Lost and Found Series, ‘Boomtown’ suggests, ‘nobody or very few people know our history but this will change.’
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