BOOMING OPENING

These are the opening minutes of the film BOOMING.  I made it in 1980, just as the Reagan era was beginning.  Times reporter Molly Ivins had written an article about a treeless company town, composed entirely of mobile homes,  on the Wyoming plain in winter.  The reason for the town's existence?  Open-pit uranium mining.  At the time, this was one of the few reserves within the continental USA that could be mined to fuel our nuclear power plants, which were then still popular as a form of alternative energy.  Young men right out of high school could make big money driving tractors and scrapers and dump trucks at these mines.  Impact studies were conducted in the communities where these mostly young miners landed, filling the bars at night, indulging in petty crime, and overextending the capacity of traditionally sleepy little towns.   

The film played at the Park City Film Fest (which the next year became Sundance), the Denver Film Fest, and the Edinburgh Film Fest, among others, and on some public television stations.

THE FULL FILM CAN BE VIEWED HERE https://vimeo.com/122494057