“Limit of Wooded Country” writer Steven Rinella’s incredible new show premieres on the Travel Channel, January 9. Gonna be extremely good.
Francis Ford Coppola’s advice: reduce your script down to one word, filter decisions through that single, focused sieve.
Alright.
The Limit of Wooded Country: frontier.
Today’s greatest explorers could be the scientists. Maybe they always have been. They benefit from having dead-on motivations: they have something to prove.
There they are, lurking 600 feet beneath the Alps, aiming cannons against one another and firing bullets so strong that when they hit, they rip black holes into matter. There they are, launching 12-ton chunks of polished glass into space to view the rim of the universe. The faster their guns, the better focused their lenses, the deeper into the past they can travel. And then, last week The New York Times reports that scientists are at the bottom of the world cutting trenches into ice caps because it’s only there that they can find bits of matter as old as the sun — locked inside the ice.
It’s the same thing that’s going on with this Alaska movie we’re doing, and how the central journey of our characters — two brothers — is to go north until the continent ends. The brothers are going further into oblivion, faster down the river, deeper into the cold because here is how these things work: get far enough, and you won’t have arrived at the end, you’ll have arrived at the beginning.
Grant and James sit in the rain, soaked and miserable. James looks worse-off than his brother.
GRANT: I’ve been thinking on this: what’ll happen now is you go down and tell them everything I did. Tell them how I killed that guy, tell them how I forced you back up here until you were able to get away. That’s what we’ll have to do.
JAMES: I ain’t gonna do it.
GRANT: Don’t tell me that. You go back, you tell them that that’s what happened.
James looks down. Grant tries to get James to look at him but the young man won’t. The rain continues to pour.
GRANT: Let me see that jacket a minute.
James takes off his jacket and gives it to Grant. Grant puts it in his pack. Grant starts walking away.
James follows him. Grant whips around.
GRANT: Keep your goddamn distance from me!
James stops. Grant keeps walking. James waits a bit, and then follows far behind like an obedient dog routine.
musk ox, North Slope of Alaska
Here’s the movie we’re going to make. Two brothers from southeast Alaska get wrapped up in a murder, and escape north into the bush to get away from the police. Along their journey, they begin to formulate a plan about where they’re headed. Their dad, now deceased, had once been a legendary Alaskan figure, an adventurer and miner who had gold mines hidden around the state. Of all of them, there was always one mine up in the Arctic, a sort of frozen Xanadu at the edge of the frontier, that held the greatest fortune. Dad had always talked about taking his sons up there and mining out its millions of dollars. Their inheritance, essentially. But the old man died before they ever went. With winter approaching and the police closing in, the two brothers decide to find this desolate Arctic mine — and the shelter and food that will likely be up there as well — to hide up there, and get rich and live off the fat of the land in total isolation.
But along this epic, thousand-mile journey, the brothers diverge on whether the old man was right about this mine, or whether he was just a grandiose liar and fraud as some people used to claim. If the brothers get up there and find nothing, they’ll die from the elements. Fending off starvation, getting caught, and the dangers of the wild, the brothers’ journey becomes as much about the mine as it is a search for the legacy of their father, and whether the spirit of the American frontier still exists.
