It was late on a humid August night when Noah Hutton ’09 and his one-person camera crew found themselves crawling through a wheat field in western North Dakota, trying to sneak some footage of a drilling rig. They set up their camera behind some mounds of dirt at the edge of the field, hoping not to get arrested for trespassing. This, Hutton says, was one of the best parts of his summer.
Rewind the better part of a year. It all started with The New York Times article, published in January 2008—“Oil in North Dakota Brings Job Boom and Burdens.” Beneath the headline is a picture of a heavy-set bearded man standing in front of an impossibly blue sky, while in the background an oil rig dips into the stark, flat landscape. The article is short, little more than a modest profile of small towns affected by the recent oil boom, but it was enough to grab Hutton’s attention.
He started doing some research, and found that two years prior, the United States Geological Survey estimated there to be more than 200 billion barrels of crude oil resting in a previously unreachable formation beneath western North Dakota. With new drilling techniques available and fuel prices continuing to skyrocket, small towns in North Dakota became the site of a mad scramble for land rights and mineral deeds.
And so, while the rest of us were sleeping through our winter breaks or traveling to warm and exotic locales, Hutton boarded a plane for North Dakota. He scoped the scene in Stanley, a small town caught in the throes of the burgeoning oil boom. Perched on the brink of economic, cultural and even environmental overhaul, Stanley proved the perfect subject for a study on the local effects of the energy crisis.
“It was ripe for a film,” Hutton said.
Hutton spent the next few months writing a proposal and scraping together funds for a documentary on the North Dakota oil boom. Unable to secure a grant in time, he and his brother hit up individual donors—mostly friends and acquaintances—and raised just enough money to cover transportation and living expenses for five weeks.
Although Hutton is not a Film Studies major, he has worked on other documentary films and directed a film by the Wesleyan Film Co-op last year. Hutton and a film crew of a couple of friends flew out in late July to film their documentary, which is tentatively titled “Town of Oil.” Despite the recent influx of money and workers, they found Stanley’s small-town character largely intact.
“We were surrounded for miles by farmland—canola, peas, wheat and now oil derricks,” Hutton said. “The only place to stay was a small motel on the edge of town, and we ate at the same small café on Main St. every day.”
They found the people to be mostly friendly, even taking the filmmakers out for karaoke on Saturday nights.
“Some shied away from the camera,” Hutton said. “But most were happy to talk to us.”
It was a different story with the oil companies.
“We were routinely turned away from attempts to talk to company officials and workers, but we persisted and eventually filmed an interview with a group of rig workers, or ’roughnecks’ as they’re called,” he said. “And on the last day we finally got to take the camera on a drilling rig.”
Despite what may sound like a “Roger & Me” dynamic between the filmmaker and his big business muse, Hutton’s assessment is remarkably evenhanded. He emphasizes the benefits of the boom for the rig workers, the residents of small Dakota towns and even us—the fuel-guzzling public.
“More than anything else I was surprised by how positive this oil boom could be and is right now in many ways for the people of North Dakota,” he said. “There are certainly hard feelings that are out there about the outsiders coming in, about farmers not owning the rights to the minerals below the surface of their land—but as a whole this is going to not only help the economy of a small agricultural town but it could, if the state builds some more refineries, also help relieve the burden of soaring gas prices.”
The documentary is now in the final stages of editing. Hutton plans to send it to film festivals in the coming months and hopes to schedule a Wesleyan screening next semester. Ultimately, he hopes his audience will seize on the humanistic thread of the documentary’s narrative.
“The largest transfers of wealth on our planet are tied to oil,” Hutton said. “This film hones in on one small town in America and tells the story of how a resource found miles beneath the earth affects human life on the surface, from the farmer who is now able to pay his bills to the oil worker trying to make a new life in North Dakota.”
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