Jason Sperb
Yesterday, I started my trip to Nebraska in preparation for the Alexander Payne project that I’ve been working on for the last few years in general, and the last month in particular. My plan is mostly to just visit many of the locations used in the several films of his set, all or in significant part, in the state (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Nebraska).
Since regionalism is such a key part of this body of work, I wanted to spend a week immersing myself in the geography. It is part research, but also part in search of inspiration as a writer—both to see connections and ideas in person I might not have noticed from a distance (such as how a pro-life discussion in Citizen Ruth was filmed across the street in Omaha from a cemetery where they filmed a funeral for About Schmidt), and to really lock in mentally on the subject of my new project while I have the time to write. The first few months of a new book idea are always the hardest.
I had planned to blog each day of the journey in real time, but that might take more time than I envisioned and present a new set of challenges. For example, I had planned to do this last night in my motel in Lincoln, but it turns out that that place didn’t have wifi. I’d also been on the road for the better part of 15 hours at that point, so I wasn’t ideally motivated to concentrate by then (of course, so many of his films are travel narratives, which is no small part of the point too!). So now I’m taking an hour out of my Lincoln itinerary this morning to sit in a coffee shop to post these thoughts instead of visiting locations from the finale of Nebraska. I think what I will do instead going forward is save it all for more detailed “daily” posts later, when I have more time to reflect on the journey overall.
So, yesterday I only got to two locations, but they pair well. I didn’t even arrive to my first location until after noon because most of the day was just lost to driving here from central Oklahoma, though once I crossed the border from Kansas I immediately got a feel for small town Nebraska following the back roads to my first stop.
I first visited the Pioneer Village in Minden, NE. This was in a deleted scene in About Schmidt (see image above), where Warren (Jack Nicholson) shows up as part of a detour before visiting his daughter in Denver (who doesn’t particularly want him to come anyway). Upon arrival, he’s turned away because they are closed. He skips back to his RV. Scene ends. The fact that is it a "deleted" scene also highlights the notion of what remains on the many different margins of the films themselves (the scene can be found in the extras of the DVD/Bluray versions of the film, but doesn't appear after a quick search to be online in its entirety).
That front entrance is as far as Warren makes it in the scene (a ghostly figure in the shadows--perhaps the owner himself--appears to turn Warren away. If I had more time, I'd go back for more screengrabs).
It was cut, as I understand, for narrative pacing reasons—the “travelogue” element of the film has been established by this point in the film, and its already clear that Warren is trying to kill time on the road before heading to Denver for his daughter’s wedding (he earlier tries to invite himself once he's already on the road, only to be rebuffed).
It always looked like a fascinating little roadside attraction, a peripheral reminder of the frontier past found in so many of Payne’s films, and the scene itself acts as a nice foreshadowing of a key theme in the film—he never quite accomplishes the things he always set out to do. The Pioneer Village has probably seen some better days, but that too seemed to fit Warren himself.
The Pioneer Village in Minden was also supposedly the original intended filming location for the film’s second to last scene (you can watch it here a little before the 1:54:00 mark), where he visits the Archway Museum outside Kearney (which is about 20 minutes to the NW of the other place, on I-80)—a wonderfully poignant scene where Schmidt’s brief encounter with the sacrifices and challenges of pioneer history forces him (after a humiliating and frustrating experience in Denver dealing with his daughter’s marriage) to reflect on the lack of his own meaningful accomplishments in life.
This was my second stop.
The decision to change locations for this scene makes some sense—while the old Pioneer Village is a much more in-depth and substantive museum, an astonishingly endless collection of 19th and 20th century artifacts, mostly themed around the history of technological progress (I somehow spent nearly 2 ½ hours in there, and I thought I was moving briskly), the much newer Archway is definitely much more cinematic (both in terms of production values and in its actual visitor flow, which is itself an idea to pursue further another time). I wondered if the deleted scene where the Village is “closed” was meant as a nod to this original filming plan.
To bring it all full circle, the “Cowards Never Started” plaque was actually made by Schmidt’s production just for the movie, but it still resides inside the Archway—and the slogans were inspired directly by the many similar inspirational quotations sprinkled around the Pioneer Village.
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