The Big J Burger on State Street here could hardly be mistaken for a hip Hollywood club. But on Saturday afternoon, a 16-year-old wearing moon boots and a T-shirt with the slogan “Vote for Pedro” jumped out of his seat and began mixing it up on an improvised dance floor. With a boom box blaring behind him, he shimmied between the restaurant's tables to the 1999 dance hit Canned Heat while more than 100 people whooped and cheered.
The dancer, Bryan Demke, from Fort Worth, Texas, was recreating a pivotal moment from the 2004 cult movie Napoleon Dynamite which was filmed in Preston. And the crowd attending the second annual Napoleon Dynamite festival loved it. “You rock!” shouted a young girl, raising her mobile phone to take a picture. “I love you, Napoleon!” added another, blowing the dancer a kiss.
“I thought the movie was stupid,” said a smiling Craig Smith, who showed up with his brother Gordon and teenage son Kyle. “But that kid is killing me.”
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More than 300 people traveled from as far away as California and Connecticut for the chance to embrace their own inner Napoleon. The movie, written by the husband and wife team of Jared and Jerusha Hess, was directed by Hess, a native of Preston who lives in Salt Lake City. Now Preston, with a population of 5,000 in the mostly rural county, hopes to capitalize on the film's cult status.
Other towns have done the same and prospered. Field of Dreams turned little-known Dyersville, Iowa, into a tourist haven when that movie was released in 1989. Now about 65,000 people visit yearly. The Santa Ynez Valley in California became a popular vacation spot after Sideways was released two years ago. Even Metropolis, Illinois, experienced an increase in visitors after Superman Returns was released in theaters last month.
Preston, however, may be the unlikeliest backlot in recent memory. Napoleon Dynamite was filmed for US$400,000, featured no Hollywood stars and won no big awards. But the film, distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, struck a chord with moviegoers, particularly college students, garnering US$44 million at the domestic box office.
“Some of the people here don't like it, but they are accepting it,” said Penny Christensen, the executive director of the Preston Area Chamber of Commerce, who organized the first festival after 15,000 visitors stopped by her office last year asking for a map of the movie's sites. “I mean, why shouldn't we show off our town?”
Napoleon Dynamite is the story of an awkward small-town outsider trying to survive high school. He is a member of the Future Farmers of America (called FFA) where he is milk taste-tester. He eats tater tots for lunch in the school cafeteria, plays tether ball and dances alone in his bedroom after school. Napoleon finds newfound popularity after he shows off his Michael Jackson moves in the school auditorium, helping his friend, Pedro Sanchez, win the election for class president.
Gordon Smith, a fire sprinkler salesman, drove an hour and a half from his home in Utah to attend the festival with his daughter, Mariah. Like his brother Craig, he did not care for the movie at first, but it took on a new meaning after several viewings.
“I can relate to it,” he said. “In high school it's the cool kids and everybody else. I was part of the ‘everybody else' crowd. But in the movie the geeks, like Napoleon, support each other. You know, there was a very good message.”
The movie also made local stars of some of Jared Hess' family friends, including Dale Critchlow, the 76-year-old cattle farmer who was signing photographs for fans lined up along State Street in downtown Preston on Saturday.
“I was putting hay in the barn when my daughter brought Jared over and said, ‘Before you say no, listen to what he has to say,”’ said Critchlow, recalling when Hess asked him to play Lyle in the film “He said, ‘I have a favor to ask. I want you to be in my movie.’ I said, ‘What do I have to do?’ Jared said, ‘Shoot a cow.’ I said, ‘Huh? OK, I can do that.”’
Critchlow did not really shoot the cow and he was not paid for the scene. (None of the locals said they were paid.) Instead what he gained was celebrity.
“I have never had that kind of attention in my life,” he said, as several onlookers listened intently. Just last week Critchlow said the cow's owner called and asked him to pose for a photograph, gun in hand, with the cow. The owner, he said, wants to sell the cow on the Internet.
While Critchlow was a favorite of autograph seekers on Saturday, fans at the festival dressed up as more recognizable characters from the film. (None of the main actors, including Jon Heder, who played Napoleon, attended.) At a look-alike contest held Saturday night at the Preston High School Auditorium, there were five Napoleons, two Rex Kwon Dos (a character who teaches Napoleon and his brother Kip self-defense) and one each of Pedro, Kip and Deb, a classmate with a crush on Napoleon.
“If you don't get it, you just don't get it,” said Ryan Grisso, who dressed up as Rex in red, white and blue star-spangled pants, a patriotic kerchief on his head and a blue knit shirt with the name “Rex” stitched on it (he came in second). On Friday Grisso arrived from San Francisco with his wife, Coline, and mother-in-law, Lila Ludahl McConnel, who lives 563km away in Caldwell, Idaho. He said they would have attended the festival last year but his wife was having a baby.
During the tater tot eating contest — where entrants were given 450g of the crispy potato lumps to down — Grisso's mother-in-law playfully slipped a few tots down the front of her green shirt. “I told them I wasn't playing to win,” McConnel explained with a laugh after the shirt-stuffing was witnessed by a judge. “I know it's silly, but it's terribly fun.”
But what is fun can be profitable too. Demke, the Napoleon impersonator, earns money performing at football and basketball games. What he liked best about being Napoleon was what any awkward teenager craves — the ability to speak without ridicule. In January Demke said he was performing at a basketball game between Oklahoma University and the University of Texas when an attractive woman wearing a tiara asked for a signed photograph. “I thought, ‘What kind of idiot wears a tiara to a basketball game?”’ he recalled.
So, channeling Napoleon, Demke posed the question. “She laughed,” he said, then introduced herself as Jennifer Berry, the new Miss America. “I felt so stupid. She thought I was playing in character. I was grateful she was a fan of the movie.”
But while visitors wholeheartedly embrace all that is Napoleon Dynamite, some in Preston fear the movie portrayed them as backward and unsophisticated. And not everyone in the mostly Mormon town likes the throngs of tourists showing up to take photographs of their favorite movie sites.
“I thought it was funny, but I was concerned people would think it was a hick town,” said Monte Henderson, a cattle farmer who was in the Happiness Is Scrapbooking store on Friday with his wife, Linda. “I have to admit I related to it, though. I mean, I was part of the FFA.”
Linda Henderson added: “I drive a school bus and I can't tell you how many times we've had to tell the kids to reel their little rubber men in from out the window,” referring to a scene where Napoleon threw a rubber doll attached to a string out a bus window and watched it bounce on the pavement.
If the festival thrives, it will be because of Christensen at the chamber. This year's attendance paled compared to last year's 6,000 attendees. Already the town is considering scrapping the US$10 admission. That would be a boon to the likes of Tyra Andrews, winner of the tether ball game, who practiced all year and showed up at the festival with 10 family members.
But what would really give the festival a jolt is the same thing many in Hollywood would like to see: a blockbuster sequel. (The studio has not decided whether to go ahead or not.) Joyce Williams, who owns Happiness Is Scrapbooking, said she recently was talking to a customer service representative from Hewlett-Packard who asked her where she lived. Williams said she told the agent “where Napoleon Dynamite was made.”
“Oh, I know that place,” the representative exclaimed. “My kids love the movie. We'd love to come visit.”
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