Substacks
The Long, Strange, Beautiful Road to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Nancy Rommelmann
It’s 1985, and I am 24—a few years removed from smoking cigarettes in front of the Baskin-Robbins in Brooklyn Heights.
I’m in Georgetown, South Carolina, and I jump off the back of the production van and directly into the path of two men wearing Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots. I recognize the older one, his silver hair braided with red ribbon, as the actor Will Sampson, who played Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He is with his son Tim, with whom I will fall in love.
We are filming a PBS miniseries, Roanoak, and Will again plays the role of chief. At six feet, seven inches, he is a commanding presence.
Before becoming an actor, Will, a full-blood Muscogee, or Creek, had been a rodeo rider, a lineman, and an artist. The Cuckoo’s Nest producers had heard about a “big Indian” and tracked him down. After a few days on set of hurry-up-and-wait, Will had gotten back in his pickup and driven away—fuck this noise. But he’d been cajoled back and made history. (The movie remains one of only three to have won the Big Five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay.)
Now it’s early 1987, and Will is very sick. He is mostly confined to a big carved-wood bed in his cabin in Sunland-Tujunga, east of Los Angeles, nestled against the mountains.
We watch what Will wants to watch: the documentary Images of Indians; an interview with Will, in which Tim Giago, who founded the first Native American–run newspaper in the country, asks Will about Indians in Hollywood; and, of course, Cuckoo’s Nest, with Will narrating. He tells us that Jack Nicholson strained so hard during the shock treatment scene, he pulled a muscle.
Tim and I are at Will’s side when he dies in June of that year.
He doesn’t live to see the dream, what he pushed for, what other Native actors will spend the next three and a half decades pushing for: to have their stories told, to tell their own stories, to be portrayed not as caricatures but as fully human. The dream has been building and building, and finally, yesterday, something happened: Killers of the Flower Moon came out. It was directed by Martin Scorsese, and it does what no Hollywood blockbuster has ever done.
Will did not live to see it, but his granddaughter did, and she is part of the industry-wide wave making it happen.
This granddaughter—my daughter—is conceived in January 1989, several months after Tim shoots War Party on the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana. We spend three months on the rez. Everyone knows one another and we meet many locals, including the Gladstone family, at a potluck dinner. Among the kids running around is the Gladstones’ two-year-old daughter Lily.
In 1989, our daughter, Tafv, pronounced Tava, is born in Los Angeles. In Creek, her name means feather.
Dances With Wolves is released in 1990, and Hollywood is flooded with Natives looking for work. They come from Montana, Oklahoma, New York, Canada. Some stay with us in our three-bedroom place in Hollywood. They sleep on our couch. I make dinner—pasta, chicken, whatever. We watch the Lakers games on TV. When one is called for an audition, they all go. The roles are mostly historical—you will have your shirt off, you will ride a horse.
Mostly, they’re just off the rez, and they’re trying to get by, and like all actors, they’re looking, praying, for their big break. But they also want to broaden Hollywood’s idea of Native Americans. They’re tired of being cartoon versions of themselves.
But Hollywood’s not ready. They keep getting told they’re not right for the Folgers commercial, for the sitcom role. What does this mean? Don’t Indians drink coffee?
Maybe it means they need to stop waiting for the industry to see them as living people. Maybe they need to start writing their own material.
By 2001, Tim and I have split, and he’s writing a screenplay called Indian School. The story is based on his life as a full-blood Creek, a star basketball player, as homecoming king at a Native boarding school in Oklahoma. That same year, he reprises his dad’s role in Cuckoo’s Nest, with Gary Sinise as McMurphy, with the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. The production moves to Broadway.
Over the years, he gets parts in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and CSI: Miami and Grimm.
Then, in 2014, he’s diagnosed with cancer, and then he beats it, and then, four years later, it comes back. This time, we know it’s terminal, and Tim moves in with all of us in Portland, Oregon: me; my husband, Din; Tafv and her husband in from New York. On July 7, 2019, Tim and I are watching the U.S. Open when I hear him take his last breath. I wash his body, and after getting him snug in bed, we all lie with him through the night, watching recorded episodes of TV shows he appeared in.
Tafv is unmoored by her father’s death. She attends a memorial outside of Okmulgee, where Tim grew up, just south of Tulsa. A woman named Nan Harjo puts her arms around her and says, “Your dad was my boyfriend at school. We were homecoming king and queen.” Tafv and Nan become friends on Facebook.
The following year, Tafv gets a call from a set decorator she hasn’t worked with in a decade. There’s a set decorator job on a new TV series, and it has a Native theme, and she thought Tafv might be interested. It’s filming in Okmulgee. The creator is Sterlin Harjo. The name sounds familiar to Tafv. She heads to Facebook. Sterlin is Nan’s son.
Reservation Dogs, which Sterlin has co-created with Taika Waititi (director of Thor: Ragnarok and Jojo Rabbit) starts shooting during the pandemic. It’s about four teens, the “rez dogs,” on the fictional Okern reservation, based on real-life Okmulgee. The actors, some of whom have never acted before, are goofy and funny and sly and scared. They do adolescence, rez-style.
On that first day of shooting, Tafv recalls Sterlin gathering the cast and crew in a circle.
“We are going to have a blessing for this shoot,” he says, and then the drum comes out and a hundred people stand and weep. Tafv weeps, too. Tafv broke down, because she sensed they were about to do something that had never really been done—playing themselves—and that they were doing this with and for and because of those who’d come before, like Will, like Tim, all their relations.
The series opens with the manic rat-a-tat-tat of Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, but it also knows how to slow down, to deal with the very hard: the suicide of a best friend, the death of the grandmother who raised you.
The series is an audience favorite from the get-go. The critics love it.
“Reservation Dogs Is as Fresh as It Gets,” The Atlantic pronounces. The Guardian declares the show “a stereotype-smashing, Tarantino-esque triumph.” Vox’s headline says: “ ‘Reservation Dogs’ is groundbreaking. It’s also incredibly funny.” And on and on.
People in Okmulgee and tribe members feel immediately connected to the show. Mvto mvto, they tell Tafv—“thank you,” in Creek—and offer whatever they have in their homes.
It’s 2021, and on the last day of shooting season 1, Sterlin gathers the lead actors by the bed of a production truck.
“We came here to tell a story that’s never been told like this before,” he says. “It’s heavy shit that we’re talking about, but we’re also talking about it in a way that we’re laughing about it. It’s the way we do it as Native people, how we handle this shit and have always handled it.”
At a honky-tonk bar that night in Tulsa, I hang out with Zahn McClarnon. We have not seen each other since he and Tim lived together twenty-five years earlier. Zahn works steadily now, as a featured regular on Westworld. Soon, he will be cast as the lead in the series Dark Winds.
We talk of those who came before. I’m too shy to tell him that the character he plays on Rez Dogs, the tribal policeman Big, is my favorite.
In 2022, Rez Dogs is set to film an episode featuring a grandmother spirit, but two days before, the actress gets Covid.
“You’re up, cuz,” Sterlin tells Tafv, who is preternaturally disposed to not be on camera. No, she thinks, I’m a set decorator. I don’t act.
Her protests go nowhere. She will play the spirit who visits a woman in jail, the mother of a boy who committed suicide, the fifth “rez dog.” The woman is played by Lily Gladstone. Their scenes together are, by turns, silly and anguished. And Lily is luminous, a great actor in full possession of her talents, her voice, her story.
I later tell Tafv that the last time I saw Lily she was a toddler, how her parents served up a feast on the Blackfeet rez.
“Aw I love that story!!!” Lily texts Tafv, as she hops between Paris and a photo shoot somewhere else (London? New York?) for the cover of British Vogue with Leonardo DiCaprio—her co-star in Killers of the Flower Moon.
“It’s been wonderful on the last few projects to not feel like the sole Native in a creative space whose de facto job it is to educate, along with being there to act,” Lily later tells me. “We are always stronger in-community, and it’s been amazing seeing the community create and influence these spaces together.”
Sterlin decides to cap Rez Dogs after season three, the show’s fans notwithstanding. Everyone knows he’s already accomplished something transcendent. Tafv was right; it’s never been done before. I ask her, will Sterlin do more dramas and sketch comedy, as he’s been doing for decades?
“I think he wants to do a horror movie,” she tells me, shortly before the series finale is shot. Again, she will play the spirit, sent to reassure Lily’s character that she has what she needs, she always has, to keep the connections going.
“One hell of a send off,” my daughter posts on Instagram. “Mvto Rez Dogs family for bringing me home.”
Nancy Rommelmann is the co-host of the podcast Smoke ’Em If You Got ’Em and writes the Substack Make More Pie. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) @NancyRomm. Read her last feature, “The Woman Who Stood Up to the Porn Industry—and Won.”
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Yesterday, U.S. officials arrested Ismael Zambada García, or “El Mayo,” cofounder of the violent and powerful drug trafficking organization the Sinaloa Cartel, and Joaquín Guzmán López, a son of its other cofounder. That other cofounder, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, or “El Chapo,” is already incarcerated in the U.S., as are another of El Chapo’s sons, alleged cartel leader Ovidio Guzmán López, and the cartel’s alleged lead hitman, Néstor Isidro Pérez Salas, or “El Nini.”
In a statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland said: “Fentanyl is the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced, and the Justice Department will not rest until every single cartel leader, member, and associate responsible for poisoning our communities is held accountable.” El Mayo has been charged with drug trafficking and money laundering.
U.S. officials exploited rifts in the cartel to get Guzmán López to bring El Mayo in. The successful and peaceful capture of the two Sinaloa Cartel leaders contrasts with Trump’s insistence that the U.S. must bomb or invade Mexico to damage the cartels, a position echoed by Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance and increasingly popular in the Republican Party. Mexico, which is America’s biggest trade partner, staunchly opposes such an intervention. Opponents note that such military action would do nothing to decrease demand for illegal drugs in the U.S. and would increase the numbers of asylum-seekers at the border as their land became a battleground.
Trump seems to think that governance is about dominance, but that approach often runs afoul of the law. Today the Justice Department reached a $2 million settlement with former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who became the butt of Trump’s attacks after their work on the FBI investigation into the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Trump’s Department of Justice released text messages between the two journalists. Today’s settlement appears to reflect that the release likely violated the Privacy Act, which bars the government from disclosing personal information.
Tonight, speaking to Christians at the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump made his plans to become a strongman clear: “Get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians…. Get out, you’ve got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
This chilling statement comes after Trump praised autocratic Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán in his speech at the Republican National Convention last week and then publicly praised China’s president Xi Jinping for being “brilliant” because he “controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” It should also be read against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States that a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his “official duties.”
The Harris campaign reacted to Trump’s dark statements by ridiculing them, and him: “Tonight, Donald Trump couldn’t pronounce words [he mispronounced “landslide” as “land slade], insulted the faith of Jewish and Catholic Americans, lied about the election (again), lied about other stuff, bragged about repealing Roe, proposed cutting billions in education funding, announced he would appoint more extremist judges, revealed he planned to fill a second Trump term with more criminals like himself, attacked lawful voting, went on and on and on, and generally sounded like someone you wouldn’t want to sit near at a restaurant—let alone be President of the United States.
“America can do better than the bitter, bizarre, and backward looking delusions of criminal Donald Trump. Vice President Kamala Harris offers a vision for America’s future focused on freedom, opportunity, and security.”
Harris continually refers to Trump as a criminal in her speeches, but her campaign has taken the approach of referring to him and J.D. Vance as weirdos. On Tuesday, Minnesota governor Tim Walz said, “These guys are just weird.” Senators Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Brian Schatz of Hawaii recorded a video together about Vance’s “super weird,” “bananas,” and “offensive” idea that people with children should be assigned additional votes for each child, making their wishes count more than people without children.
As J.D. Vance continues to step on rakes, the “weird” label seems correctly to label the MAGAs as outside the mainstream of American thought. Today, Vance doubled down on his denigration of women who have not given birth as “childless cat ladies” but assured voters he has nothing against cats. In addition, a video surfaced of Vance calling for the federal government to stop women in Republican-dominated states from crossing state lines to obtain abortions.
Mychael Schnell of The Hill reported today that while MAGA Republican lawmakers like Vance, a number of House Republicans are bashing his selection as the vice presidential candidate. “He was the worst choice of all the options,” one said. “It was so bad I didn’t even think it was possible.”
“The prevailing sentiment is if Trump loses, [it’s] because of this pick,” another said, a sentiment that suggests Vance will be a scapegoat if Trump loses. Considering what happened to Trump’s last vice president after Trump blamed him for an election loss, Vance might have reason to be concerned.
Last night’s “Answer the Call” Zoom has now raised more than $8.5 million for Harris; the organizers thanked Win With Black Women “for showing us how it’s done.” Today the Future Forward PAC, which had threatened to hold back $90 million in spending if Biden stayed at the head of the ticket, began large advertising purchases in swing states for Harris.
Carl Quintanilla of CNBC reported that a week ago, those on a phone call of more than 400 people from Bank of America’s Federal Government Relations Team believed that a Trump victory was a “foregone conclusion.” Now that conviction is gone. “[T]here’s been a palpable sentiment reversal.”
The Harris campaign announced that it will launch 2,600 more volunteers into its ground game in Florida, a state where abortion rights will be on the ballot this fall, likely turning out voters for the Democratic ticket. The volunteers will write postcards, make phone calls, and knock on doors.
Today, Vice President Kamala Harris filled out the paperwork officially declaring her candidacy for president of the United States.
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/us/sinaloa-cartel-ismael-zambada-custody-report/index.html
https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/mexico-surpasses-china-us-biggest-trading-partner-exports/
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/10/gop-bomb-mexico-fentanyl-00091132
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/26/peter-strzok-lawsuit-settlement-00171498
https://www.vox.com/culture/363230/jd-vance-couch-sex-hillbilly-elegy-rumor-false
https://thehill.com/homenews/4793818-vance-vp-trump-house-republicans/
https://ballotpedia.org/Florida_Amendment_4,_Right_to_Abortion_Initiative_(2024)
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Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.
→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”
→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.
That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.
And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.
Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”
→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.
Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.
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