arrangements to alter as many as 25 of them for picture.
Historian Addie Roanhorse is also co-owner of the Big Rain
Gallery, which would become Hale's Ballet School, as well as
a central meeting point for several departments, the location
and art departments among them. She even has a small role
on screen. Her first meeting with Mike was a memorable one.
"They were here for a scout," she remembers, "and we
always knew whenever they were in town, like, they'd be
walking up the street in a big group and people would say,
'there go the movie people.'"
Addie was in her gallery when Mike texted to ask if he
could come by with some of the crew.
"I said 'sure,'" Addie says, "and then this huge group of
people comes walking in with Mike to find me just hysterically
laughing because, about two seconds after we hung up, my
smoke alarm began to chirp really loudly which is not an
easy fix when you've got 15-foot ceilings. So there I am trying
to origami this ladder out of a closet and Mike takes the
ladder, quickly climbs up, replaces the battery, comes down
and almost with a wink says, 'I'm pretty handy.'"
Fantasia impressed her immediately and, over the course
of the shoot, became a mentor to Addie and other members
of the community.
"There was a real trust there," she says. "People still ask
me if Mike's going to come back to visit … and not just Mike,
but Andrea and the other members of the team as well."
THE HOLDOUT
The team spent months talking to the other property
owners and were able to sign agreements with all but one.
The lone holdout was a woman they had been speaking with
for six months.
"She couldn't have been nicer all the way from 2019 up
until I sent over our timeline and the bullet points of what
the art department wanted to do," Andrea Keener says,
"and all of a sudden, she goes, 'I have to get my son involved
now. He actually owns the building,' and we were like, 'wait,
what?!'"
The woman's son, unfortunately, did not want to play ball.
"We sat around her lawyer's table," Keener recalls,
"Mike, me, the woman and her son and he just said 'no' to
everything. So out of all those businesses, that was the only
one … and it was right in the middle of our run."
" WHEN MARTIN SCORSESE WANTS TO MAKE A MOVIE, WHAT MATTERS
MOST IS AUTHENTICITY. HE MET WITH OSAGE TRIBAL LEADERS TO
ASSURE THEM HE WAS THERE TO TELL THEIR STORY."
–SLM MIKE FANTASIA
