I grew up in Colorado, at the exact point where the Rocky Mountains crash into the Great Plains. As a teenager, casual hangouts would often involve untamed foothills and tumbling mountain creeks. When my friends and I would joke that “last night was a movie,” we’d only be half kidding. There’s something innately cinematic about Colorado’s geography.
Colorado is a transportative and rare place, shifting rapidly between wind-scoured deserts and dense, high-altitude forests. When I return to that environment, I feel insignificant. I shrink under Colorado’s huge bowl of blue sky. I turn transparent in the thin mountain air. It’s hard to live in Colorado without getting a little cinematic and sentimental about your own life. The land itself evokes the same feeling as a great film.
That raises one serious question — where are the movies? It’s impossible to name a relevant film overtly set in Colorado. You’d think that the state would have a mile-long list of cinematic love letters. Colorado could quite plausibly be a visual shorthand for the West in the same way Midtown Manhattan is for urban America — but it isn’t.
When I go home, I wander through the foothills and picture Colorado on film — glaciers and cliff dwellings, prairies and ghost towns. It would look pretty damn good. So why is Colorado still waiting for its defining movie moment? North Dakota has “Fargo,” John Hughes’ films celebrate Chicago, “Lady Bird” brings love to California’s Central Valley. What’s keeping Colorado out of the movies? And what might we gain from getting the state into them?
My guess is that to Hollywood producers, Colorado isn’t special enough to warrant a trip. If a script requires a desert or a mountain, it can be found in California. If they want something different, they venture one state over to Arizona or north to Vancouver. I imagine that Angeleno filmmakers choose states at random when they write Westerns. Sure, “Brokeback Mountain” takes place in Wyoming, but it could’ve just as easily been set in Colorado. There’s no personal touch, no nostalgic angle. Most films set in the American West don’t feel particularly connected to the geography they inhabit. You can tell that the filmmaker and the land don’t love each other. Of course, Colorado isn’t in the movies. People from Colorado don’t make movies at the same rate as Californians or Chicagoans or New Yorkers. Most wealthy filmmakers see the Western United States as “flyover country” — an interchangeable blank canvas to project genre onto. Big cities and big money get to decide what America looks like, turning the American West into one colorless, transposable swath of land. This approach saps filmmakers of their own creative personhood, leaving American film culture poorer for it. It’s up to our generation of filmmakers to upend that.
The wonder I feel when I’m home is the same love others feel for Louisiana or Oklahoma. It’s not special, it’s just cinematically underrepresented. We can gain so much nuance and humanity by letting filmmakers celebrate their hometowns. If you’re an artist who loves your home, and your home happens to be somewhere uncharted in the cinematic mainstream, you still deserve to set your stories there.
If I ever have the opportunity to make a movie, it’s going to be a Colorado picture to the bone. I’ll fight for specificity and nuance. I want my hometown streets and hilltops in the film — not Hollywood’s. It’ll inevitably be an uphill battle, but it will undoubtedly result in a richer story. My connection with Colorado led me into this crusade, but I know every person has their own specific entry point. No matter where you’re from or how you make your art, make it for yourself. Make it for your hometown. Don’t bow to cliches or “relatability.” We need more America on screen. We need your America.
Film Beat Editor Lola D’Onofrio can be reached at lolad@umich.edu.
