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 JAMES FRANCO as hiker Aron Ralston in "127 Hours." |
Hiking the very place where it was filmed
By JOYCE KIEFER
of TheColumnists.com
It’s Academy Awards night. The Best Actor is about to be announced. Instead of panning the nominees sitting nervously in the audience, the camera moves to one of the evening's hosts: James Franco. The envelope is opened and his name is announced.
With his winning half smile he grasps the Oscar and shouts, “This prize for Best Actor should be shared. I’m going to saw this Oscar in half and I’ll keep the top. Then I’ll hire a helicopter and fly to the canyon lands of Utah, circle the area where Butch Cassidy’s gang hid out, and drop the bottom half into Bluejohn Canyon where my character lost his arm. I want to honor the Utah desert as my seductive and fearsome antagonist in '127 Hours.'”
Though it could come true Sunday night, this is an imaginary scenario that Danny Boyle, director of "127 Hours," might have dreamed up for Franco as his reward for his excellent portrayal of Aron Ralston, the real-life hiker who was pinned by a boulder to the wall in a narrow canyon and finally freed himself by cutting off part of his own arm.
Franco would be right: the desert itself is the other lead character. I have hiked in the deserts of Utah and Arizona and know that it has a vivid persona. It lures you with its twisted rocks and striped colors. It draws you by curiosity to the top of the cliff to see a mini-Grand Canyon carved by a snake-shaped river or a sculpted army of human-like formations filling the plain below. And it challenges you to survive by offering too little water or too much.
Its enormously scaled landscape makes you feel alone, even if you’re hiking with someone.
I couldn’t miss “127 Hours”
because I’ve hiked in the exact same territory where the
story takes place and where the exterior shots for "127
Hours" were filmed. I’d heard Ralston’s story
and knew he spent time in St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction,
CO, a town near the Utah border where my husband’s family
lives. The buzz among the outdoor-savvy town people was not about
Ralston’s courage or will to survive but about his foolishness
in not telling anyone where he was going or when he was coming
back. I had to see where he’d been and what he’d been
through, even though self-amputation as movie entertainment puts
me off.
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the narrow channels in Antelope Canyon. |
Director Danny Boyle’s opening fantasy shots made a fine introduction . Once you enter this strange country, anything can happen. Exaggerated color? Shots of crowds that just might break into a Bollywood dance routine? Why not? Add heat, thirst and isolation and anything can happen to the mind.
At the beginning and the end we see the Great Gallery of pictographs in Canyonlands National Park where Ralston stumbled to his rescue. A crowd of larger-than-life wedge-shaped figures face out from the yellow sandstone walls. One figure has bulging eyes; another, electrified hair. They might have been painted 5,000 years ago. They look like they came from outer space. Boyle’s panning shots convey what I felt when I came upon them--creepiness mixed with awe at this face of the desert.
When my husband and I planned our hike to the Great Gallery, I made sure we used all due caution. We chose September to avoid the heat. The day before the hike, I inquired about storms that could cause flash floods. Bill’s brother and family drove us in their high clearance van. As we left I-70 at Green River, Utah, we watched the mileage markers and the cattle fence along Highway 24. When we spotted a break in the fence at the proper mileage, we turned onto a dirt road that ended in a cliff 30 miles later. A small sign warned not to disturb the archaelogical site. We knew we had arrived. My inlaws stayed behind with their 3-year-old grandson. Bill and I were on our own.
We picked our way carefully down the slick rock. I took two quarts of water and finished them off in the five hours of our hike. Ralston had less than two quarts to tide him over five days.
After picking our way across the red tiles of mud in the sticky bed of Barrier Creek, we ran across two rangers. As we chatted they told us they were camping in the area last week when they heard the roar of a flash flood. The next morning they found the cottonwood trees were bowed over and the interpretive signs for the Great Gallery had washed away.
They warned that a flash flood warning was issued again this morning. After driving over 1,000 miles to be here, we decided to keep walking. We enjoyed the frisson of danger.
As we sat in front of the figures, two ravens perched on a ledge above.
Ralston was visited every morning by a raven.
I wondered how Ralston or even Franco could manage claustrophobia. The shots from the actor’s feet up through the spot where he got stuck was enough to awaken mine. A couple of years ago I put my claustrophobia aside to explore the fluted twists of Antelope Canyon, a slot canyon in Arizona by the Utah border . Granted I was safely part of a Navajo-led tour and the canyon was only 1/4 mile long, but it did narrow up to three feet wide in places. Although the sky was clear, I wondered what would happen in a flash flood. In his memoir, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” Ralston says a canyon that narrow can fill up with 10 feet of water in the wake of a sudden downpour.
The s film’s hallucinations of a violent thunderstorm, followed by a flood that almost drowns him is most hikers’ nightmare of a flash flood. Perfect touch: water everywhere but he was unable to fill his bottle.
Fortunately James Franco didn’t have to wedge himself in Bluejohn Canyon to film the scenes that took place there. A set was created in Granite Furniture Warehouse in the Sugar House neighborhood of Salt Lake City. Another touch of familiar turf: I walk past that warehouse when I visit our daughter who lives a few blocks away.
Franco himself made me want to see “127 Hours” because I enjoyed him as the creepy performance artist named – yes – “Franco” in the daytime soap “General Hospital.” And I want to cheer him on to an Academy Award because he’s a local boy, raised in Palo Alto not far from the town where I live.
But my joy in “127 Hours” goes beyond connections to my own experience. It lies in the showdown between a cocky, show-off young man and the desert that teaches him what death is, then life.
Notes: “127 Hours” is nominated for six Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (James Franco), Best adapted Screen Play (Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy), Best Film Editing (Jon Harris) Best Original Score (A.R. Rahman), and Best Song (“If I Rise,” A.R Rahman and Dido and Roland Armstrong)
Six months after Aron Ralston’s accident and rescue, he returned to the site with Tom Brokaw for “Dateline NBC” This show can be found on You Tube in six parts. It was repeated with updates in early February of this year.
©2011 by Joyce Kiefer. The photo from "127 Hours' is courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures. The other photos are the author's property. All rights reserved. This column first posted Feb. 21, 2011.
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