Funny story from Craig Johnson.
I thought you might enjoy this:
From Craig Johnson, writer of the Longmire books:
“I watch your show.”
I was sitting in the airport, or what passed as an airport, in Bethel, the town that is pretty much acknowledged as the toughest in Alaska. I was awaiting the next of my charter flights that would take me back to Anchorage after spending a week on the Kanektok River near Qhinhagak in the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge. There were three other people in the waiting room with a television blaring the cartoon channel. A man slumped on one of the wooden benches that looked as if it might’ve been stolen from a church, another was on the pay phone attempting to arrange a ride somewhere, and the third was an older native woman in a fur-trimmed, down-filled parka.
“Excuse me?”
She was heavy-set, with large, brown eyes that held a softness. “I heard you tell the woman at the desk your name; you’re the one that writes The Longmire.”
She said it the way I’d heard other natives refer to both the books and the TV show in an economy of language I had to admit, worked. “Well, the books—not the TV show.”
“I’ve read one of your books.”
“Which one?”
“The one in the mountains with the big man.”
Hell is Empty. “Virgil?”
“Yep.” She studied me, a little dubious. “It was scary.”
I nodded. “Most aren’t as frightening as that one.”
She smiled and gestured toward the blaring screen on the wall. “Do you help with the show?”
“Some.”
“Did you help cast Lou Diamond Phillips?”
“Not by myself, but he got my vote.”
“I like him.”
“Me, too.”
“There is only one thing . . . ”
I braced myself for the upcoming battle, having had it with numerous people who wanted to know why we hadn’t cast a six foot-four (Lou is six feet tall), native actor (Lou is part native) with hair down to the middle of his back (Lou would be happy to but he has other jobs during the year which require different lengths). “And what’s that?”
“Why would you cast a man who is Inuit as a Cheyenne?”
I stared at her for a moment, running through Lou’s pedigree, varied as it is, and was pretty sure that Inuit wasn’t in the mix. “I don’t think he’s Eskimo . . .”
She nodded to herself. “Yes, I saw him in a movie once, Agaguk. He was very good.”
I thought back to Shadow of the Wolf, the movie from the novel by Yves Thériault, an esoteric film Lou had done with Toshirô Mifuni back in the early nineties. In the film as well as the novel, Agaguk (Lou’s character), a young Inuit man, is accused of killing a white trapper and must flee for his life. “No, I think that was just the character that he played in the movie.”
“No, his Yupik was very good.”
Remembering my wife using her phone in France to record both Lou and Robert Taylor speaking French, I felt as if I had to break the news. “I think they dub the films after they make them.”
She continued to nod, ignoring me and satisfied in her knowledge. “Yes, his Yupik was as good as mine.”
“Uh huh.” I wondered if she thought that Mifuni, Jennifer Tilly, and Donald Sutherland were Inuit, too.
“The movie was better than the book, but they left out one of my favorite parts—the one where the old woman is chewing on the polar bear penis.”
Like I said, Bethel's a tough town.
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