Just before the start of the first feature-length film, Mike Scholtz stood at the barn door looking at a makeshift parking lot, grass with roped-off barriers on what would ordinarily be the lawn.
"There's numbers 300 and 301," he said as a twosome on a motorcycle parked.
A record-setting audience turned out Friday for the first night of the Free Range Film Festival near Wrenshall. The event mixes dozens of indie films, organic popcorn and a nearly 100-year-old barn. The festival, in its ninth year, continues with the first session running from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. today, followed by more films starting at 7 p.m.
Scholtz had double reason to be counting people: He's one of the event's organizers and his documentary, "Wild Bill's Run," which already won an award at the Seattle Independent Film Festival, got its first local screening. Audience members responded well to the cues of the hour-long story of Willow River snowmobile adventurist-turned-outlaw Bill Cooper.
"I like it when they laugh," he admitted, leaned against the ticket booth.
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The story includes footage from two attempts at a trans-world snowmobile trip made by seven men in the early 1970s, then recent interviews with members of the crew. It segues into the mysterious circumstances of the expedition leader Bill Cooper, who got into shady business after the second failed attempt, disappeared and was considered one of the U.S. Marshals' most wanted. He is believed, officially, to be dead, though his body has never been found. He's also believed, unofficially, to be still out there somewhere, maybe Northern Canada.
After the screening, Scholtz introduced four members of the expedition who were in the audience for the screening. The crew fielded questions ranging from the science involved with shooting 16mm in temperatures that dipped to 75 degrees before zero, to the logistics of hauling hundreds of pounds of supplies, to whether they struggled with any medical conditions while attempting to sled from Minnesota to Moscow.
"We were frost-bitten all the time," Dick Lucken said. "You just got used to it."
For audience-member Lindsay Lajiness, seeing the film was a way of piecing together the bits of stories she had heard growing up. Her father, Bill Juntunen, was the cinematographer for the first expedition.
"It put a whole new light on my dad in a good way," she said. "I felt really proud. Not just that he's my dad, but overwhelmed by the gravity of what was at stake."
Scholtz said he was happy about the audience's response to the film, especially the way they oohed when organizer Val Coit announced that some of the stars of the film were in the barn.
The four expedition members met with individual audience members after the screening and signed posters from the event.
"That's my only disappointment," Scholtz said. "That Bill Cooper didn't show up."
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