By Michael Miner
Goldring is a Chicago-based actor who makes commercials and was sent west to serve his union as a strike captain. He knew his mission would be arduous, but he didn’t expect a brush with death. “The road got narrower and narrower,” he says. “There were boulders and trees in the road. Big huge ruts.” Luckily, at the wheel of the Lumina was an icy-nerved stunt driver out of Portland, Oregon, named Michael Hilow, and riding shotgun was Mary McDonald-Lewis, a gritty voice actor from Portland who’d brought a map of the back roads. “We drove 20 miles through Deliverance country and got out,” says Goldring.
Goldring was new to the area, but McDonald-Lewis explains that “myself and several activists had been dogging the scab production for the Chevrolet 2001 auto launch for several weeks across the breadth of Oregon and into Idaho. By the time we got to Idaho the production-company crew was profoundly demoralized by our tenacity. We’d disrupted their shoot everywhere they went. They had me arrested in Tillamook, Oregon, and yet I kept coming back, and actor activists from across the nation kept coming back. Then we got to Idaho. By this time the production company was desperate. It had taken them two to three times as long to get what footage they have. It cost them time, it cost them money, and it cost them quality.”
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The doughty Lumina finally carried them back to the highway, and the SAG band pressed on to the next location, a quarry at the end of Nip and Tuck Road deep in the wilderness. McDonald-Lewis says, “That’s where we discovered the reason they didn’t want us there. They were putting union drivers behind the wheels of the Chevrolet cars on a scab shoot.
For a rustic, Roskelley has a respectable grasp of the animosities that arose in places like Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York and made their way to the middle of nowhere he oversees. “This is a pissing contest, to be really honest with you,” he confides from Challis, the Custer County seat. “I understand where they’re coming from. They want to stop the shoot.” But, he says, the back roads the Lumina conquered don’t even require a four-wheel drive to traverse. “This wasn’t a life-threatening issue. I guess when you’re an actor you can pump everything up. There’s people’s houses back there. There’s a ranch back there.”
Back in Chicago, Danny Goldring hasn’t found it easy to stir up interest in his eerie tale. “There’s hardly any leverage,” he muses, contemplating the media. “All the bills are paid by advertisers, so it’s hard to get the word out.”
