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St. Helens

Catalog Number
VA 4057
-
Primary Distributor (If not listed, select "OTHER")
Release Year
Country
VHS | SP | Slipcase
95 mins (NTSC)
N/A | N/A | N/A
N/A | N/A
St. Helens (1981)

Additional Information

Additional Information
it really happened!

One Day, The Pristine Mountain Became Lethal ...

The True Story of Harry Truman ... One Man Against the Volcanic Eruption of the Century!

The Movie... The Largest Explosion Ever!


Ernest Pintoff--jazz trumpeter, painter, animated cartoonist, film theorist--directed his first dramatic feature, Harvey Middleman, Fireman, in 1965. Since that time, Pintoff has refused to be stylistically pigeonholed, turning out everything from comedy concerts (Dynamite Chicken) to spoofish T&A exploitation (Lunch Wagon Girls). St. Helens takes Pintoff into the realm of docudrama, using film clips of the May 18, 1980 eruption of the eponymous volcano to lend credibility to his dramatic re-enactments. Art Carney plays Harry Truman--not the President, but a real-life stubborn old codger who refused to leave his St. Helen's vacation cabin despite the oncoming natural disaster. Carney brings so much vitality to the proceedings that it seems a shame Pintoff couldn't alter the facts and provide Truman with a happy ending. Appearing fleetingly in St. Helen's are Ron "Superfly" O'Neal, Albert Salmi and Nehemiah Persoff.


St. Helens, aka St. Helens, Killer Volcano, is a 1981 film directed by Ernest Pintoff and starring David Huffman, Art Carney, Cassie Yates, and Albert Salmi. The film centers on the events leading up to the cataclysmic 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state, with the story beginning on the day volcanic activity started on March 20, 1980, and ending on the day of the eruption: May 18, 1980.


The entire movie was shot on location in Bend, Oregon and at Mt. Bachelor in Central Oregon's Cascades.
The "Mount St. Helens Lodge" in this movie was Elk Lake Lodge located approximately 30 miles from Bend along Cascade Lakes Scenic Byway.[1][2]
Film production crews utilized facilities at the Inn of the Seventh Mountain (Seventh Mountain) resort for lodging and production offices.
The eruption images of Mt. St. Helens were sourced from actual file footage of Mount St. Helens, much of it sourced from ABC News, KOMO-TV in Seattle, and KATU-TV in Portland.
The setting for Spirit Lake was actually a lake west of Mt. Bachelor named Sparks Lake. In the movie, both Bachelor and the South Sister (of the Three Sisters Volcanic Chain) served as Mount St. Helens.
Highway 504, known now as the Spirit Lake Memorial Highway, in the movie was actually Oregon State Highway 46 (Cascade Lakes Highway).
The sequence of photos during the depiction of the May 18, 1980 eruption showing the north face of Mt. St. Helens self-destructing were taken by an amateur photographer at the Bear Meadow campsite 11 miles northeast of the peak. The photographer, Gary Rosenquist, became a household name shortly following the eruption, and his photo sequence was widely used by the scientific community to reconstruct the events that led to the eruption.
One of the movie's associate producers, Seattle filmmaker Otto Seiber, nearly lost his life in a filming expedition on Mt. St. Helens - shortly after the May 18, 1980 eruption. His film crew had been dropped off by helicopter on May 23, yet as they filmed the devastation, their compasses started acting up due to the magnetic field differences in the ash. This resulted in them getting lost, and nearly killed by the 2nd large explosion on May 25. Brief clips from the documentary titled "The Eruption of Mount St. Helens", one that resulted from that expedition, and a previous one several weeks before the eruption, were included in the movie.
Filming of the movie began in November 1980 and was finished by April 1981. It aired during the one-year anniversary.
Gerri Whiting, sister to lodge owner Harry Truman, served as a historical consultant in the movie. According to Truman's sister, Harry Truman and David Johnston were indeed friends and spent some time together.
One of the movie's writers was Larry "At Large" Sturholm, a Seattle TV personality famous for humorous local news stories. Larry was murdered in 1989 before his subsequent screenplay Shadow Games could be completed


Release Date: June 1983


Distrib: Panzer Films

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