I went north to Point Barrow in an upbeat mood to do several weeks of reporting for a series of pieces about the construction of the Alaska Pipeline. I came back with a troubling story about the son of a pipeliner who went looking for the last frontier and wound up squandering his money on whores and cocaine. On my last evening in the state, with a layover in Anchorage, I rented a car and drove up to the Chugach National Forest, where I snapped this landscape at three in the morning of a midnight-sun day in June. It is everything the pipeline was not for me. My articles began running on a Sunday; on Monday I received a call from Jennings Lang, then a vice-president at Universal Studios. He was famous as well as infamous: in 1951, when producer Walter Wanger discovered that his wife, Joan Bennett was having an affair with Lang, Wanger shot off one of Lang’s testicles. Lang, who went on to develop Sensurround, the progenitor of surround sound in theaters and home entertainment systems, knew a potential widescreen speaker-shaker when he saw one; he wanted me to write a film based on what I had reported. Six weeks later I was sitting in Lang’s office with my treatment, which hewed closely to the downbeat, lost-dreams story I had written. “Why do you like your movies small?” Lang asked, and proceeded to sketch out his vision. “We start with the Alaska Earthquake,” he said. “Which results in a tidal wave. Great use of Sensurround.” Lang described things in shorthand. Flash forward ten years… Marlon Brandon, a retired general, is bringing the pipeline company into the state… Julie Christie is an out-of-work school teacher forced to become a hooker… Steve McQueen is her emasculated husband, dependent on the project for a job, but becoming ever more disillusioned by its toll on the land and his wife… Oil leaks… Lots of animals dying… And McQueen, at the end, blowing the whole thing sky high… “Do you think you can write that picture, kid?” I did not.

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