Preston, Idaho: The town of 5,000 behind independent cinema’s first 21st-century phenomenon
When most of us think about independent movies, we think of slow, ponderous, often experimental cinema that doesn’t necessarily provide thrills.
Some people run for the exits the minute the word ‘indie’ is broached, fearing that they are in for three hours of staring at wheat (not a dig at Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, which is a masterpiece), but in reality, a huge chunk of indie movies are just low-budget crowd-pleasers, the kind critics often don’t even bother to watch.
Naturally, they are not all destined for Cannes or the Criterion Closet, but that doesn’t make them any less successful, which the found footage phenomenon of The Blair Witch Project proved making nearly $250million off the back of only $35,000, alongside other wildly victorious titles outside the studio system, such as the 1974 slasher classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles about a team of green sewage heros led by a raggedy rat.
A heyday for this low-budget corner of the film world was the early 2000s, with varied hits like the 2002 romantic comedy My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the biblical epic The Passion of the Christ, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, and the erotic body horror Crash breaking through to the general public, but the greatest of them all, and the one that probably hits hardest with a certain subset of young millennials, is 2004’s deadpan comedy Napoleon Dynamite, directed by Jared Hess, who co-wrote the script with his wife, Jerusha Hess.
The film follows high school nerds in a small, dusty town in middle America, where Jon Heder plays the titular nerd who loves ligers, participates in the Happy Hands Club, and gets bullied by his uncle Rico, and somehow, he is less of a dork than his brother, Kip, played by Aaron Ruell, who tinkers with electronics and “talks to hot babes” in chat rooms all day.
Throughout the film, Napoleon unsuccessfully flirts with girls, including the equally nerdy Deb, played by Tina Majorino, and goes all out to help his new best friend, Efren Ramirez’s Pedro, win the election for class president, even throwing caution to the wind and busting out a dance to Jamiroquai’s ‘Canned Heat’.
The town in which all of this goes down is Preston, Idaho, a teeny dot on the map where the director went to high school, and in a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, Hess revealed that most of the film is pure autobiography, as not only was it shot in his actual high school, but the main characters are all based on his own family.
“Napoleon was a hybrid of all the most nerdy and awkward parts of me and my brothers growing up,” he said, “[And] Jerusha really was like Deb growing up”.
Preston has steadily grown over the past two decades from 5,000 inhabitants to 6,000, and while it’s not exactly a bustling metropolis, it does boast an annual rodeo and a yearly car show. Plus, any Napoleon Dynamite fans who find themselves in Southeast Idaho will have a field day scurrying around to all the familiar landmarks, such that someone created a map of all of the filming locations from the movie just for this purpose.
