St. Helens (film) - Production

Production

  • 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.
  • 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.

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