This summer, I took a trip with my family to Niagara Falls. Now for me, a guy raised in perpetually water-starved, drought-stricken Idaho, Niagara might was well be Narnia or Unicorn Land. The idea of that much constant, crashing water all the time is just ludicrous to me. So I leaned into it – literally. When we went on the Maid of the Mist, I rejected the blue poncho in favor of letting the falls plaster me. It was great. As part of doing all the touristy things in the state park, we went to the appropriately branded Niagara Adventure Theater in the visitors’ center and watched the creatively titled Niagara Falls Movie: Legends of Adventure! It’s projected on a largish 45 foot screen in a smallish 314 seat theater with a really nice sound system giving the venue a bigger, more epic scale than it actually has.
The film recreates significant moments in the history of the
falls from Native American legends about the thundering waters and being
documented by French explorers to tales of people crossing the falls on
tightropes or going over them in barrels. The film is pretty much everything
you would expect from a state park sponsored project. It’s handsome with some
really nice cinematography that highlights the natural beauty of the area and
contains shots that could easily be reproduced as prints or postcards for their
composed loveliness. And the script is the expected combination of efficiently
presented historical fact along with florid, rah-rah narration about Niagara’s
beauty and place in history and popular culture.
The film was fine for what it was, but what struck me was
how similar it was in tone and content to the IMAX film my wife and I saw in
Yellowstone Park years ago. Same combo of beautiful pictures and park-approved
propaganda script. With just a little investigation, I found that both films
were made by the same guy, Kieth Merrill, along with about ten other films just
like them, including IMAX films for the Grand Canyon, the Alamo, and Zion
Canyon.
Merrill made an auspicious debut in 1973 when he won the
Academy Award with his first feature, a documentary called The Great American Cowboy. For about ten years, Merrill worked in
Hollywood, writing and directing various projects, many of which centered
around the American west. In 1980, he directed my second favorite Jimmy Stewart
Christmas project of all time, Mr.
Krueger’s Christmas, featuring Stewart as a lonely, slightly delusional
janitor who finds comfort in the true meaning of the season. But in 1984,
Merrill wrote, produced, and directed a 34 minute IMAX documentary called Grand Canyon: The Hidden Secrets, and
that film opened up a subgenre for Merrill that he continued to work on for the
next fifteen years. It was in this field that Merrill earned another Oscar
nomination for 1997’s IMAX documentary, Amazon.
While the movies themselves are a little cheesy and
stylistically either classical or old fashioned depending on your point of
view, I am fascinated by the fact that this subgenre of film exists and that
there’s one guy who is kind of master of it. We often think of movies as a
homogenous thing – big budget things starring Dwayne Johnson or Jennifer
Lawrence that are released in multiplexes and then go to DVD or streaming a
couple of months later. But in reality, there are whole worlds of film that
exist outside of or next to that world. Short, promotional IMAX nature-based
documentaries for state and national park visitors’ centers is one of them. And
if you’ve seen one of them, chances are it was either made by or at very least
influenced by Kieth Merrill.
So the next time you’re at Yellowstone or the Ozarks or San
Francisco, stop for thirty or forty minutes and enjoy the IMAX movie. Casually
lean over to your seatmate just before the credits roll and say, “I’ll bet this
is a Kieth Merrill film.” It will make you look smart.
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