On Saturday, June 28, at the Big Moose Inn on Millinocket Lake, the Maine Woods Film Festival was conceived by the loyal opposition to the establishment of a north woods national park in Maine as a way to poke fun at the gaggle of Hollywood celebrities who seem so hot for the pipe dream conceived by the Concord, Massachusetts-based environmental outfit RESTORE: The North Woods.
..the festival featured a public showing of home videos and photos from people "who live, work and play in the Maine woods.'' Drama and art, indeed. The Cannes Film Festival it ain't, and participants are more likely to arrive in a pickup truck with a gun rack in the rear window than in a chauffeured stretch limo with a bartender serving martinis in the back.
Still, actors and actresses included on a 94-member advisory committee of a dubious outfit called Americans for a Maine Woods National Park have been invited in the hope that a little exposure to local culture might smarten them up about a way of life that they would confine to history's dust bin.
Millinocket Town Manager Gene Conlogue, long a committed opponent of the proposed boondoggle, thinks it would be a real hoot to have Harrison Ford or Ted Danson or Meryl Streep show up at the shindig and go one-on-one with some old lumberjack who has carved a career out of the woods that would be nationalized. He's probably right, although I should point out that once, when I evoked the image of Meryl Streep riding in on a white steed, Lady Godiva-like, to save us from ourselves one wag e-mailed me to say that if such a titillating spectacle should come to pass he'd not only give the Beautiful People their damn park, he'd throw in Portland, to boot.
Film stars serving on a newly formed advisory committee for the proposed 3.2-million-acre park “Yellowstone of the East” extending westward from Millinocket to the Quebec border had been invited to attend- Jeff Bridges, Harrison Ford, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Holly Hunter, Laura Linney, Robert Redford, Ted Danson, Christopher Reeve, Meryl Streep and Sam Waterston.
However others see it another way: Captain D of Captaind.com writes in his commentary: Much of the land RESTORE wants is for sale.Perhaps the only good thing about clear-cutting is that the clear-cut land can be bought cheap. Plenty of land up there can be had for $100 an acre. A billion bucks would be enough to buy all the land and put things in working order.The people at RESTORE have gone out of their way to make their proposal palpable to locals. Residents and businesses within the proposed area would be unaffected. Parts of the area would be designated a national preserve, which means that hunters, trappers, and snowmobilers would be allowed.
The land would be bought from willing sellers. Nobody feels any particular kinship with the present owners. Who could possibly feel comfortable that foreign corporations will have the best interests of the forest in mind? As unpopular as the Federal Government might be, aren't these global megacorporate entities even less likable? It isn't like native Mainers would be made to displace grandma by forfeiting the old homestead.To those of us wondering how to pay the phone bill, a billion is a considerable sum, certainly. But, to put things in perspective, it is about what one B-2 bomber costs. Given a choice, certainly a lot of people would opt for the park. We certainly would.
Oh Goody! Senile Uncle Walter, I'm not wild about Harry, and other ELITISTS!
Gag!