Brian D'Ambrosio
Quick thinking helped Andrew "AJ" Marble play a small but important role in the filming of "Nebraska."
Serendipity sometimes compensates the prepared.
In the case of Andrew “AJ” Marble, the manager of Billings Nursery & Landscaping, his quick-thinking preparedness was rewarded with a small part assisting in the production of the Oscar-nominated “Nebraska.”
Directed by Alexander Payne, “Nebraska” is about a crotchety alcoholic (Bruce Dern) who travels from Billings, Mont., to Nebraska with his son (Will Forte) to claim a sweepstakes prize he thinks he’s won.
The film’s opening scenes were filmed in and around Billings, and one morning around Thanksgiving 2012, crew members sauntered into his Billings Nursery & Landscaping, at 2147 Poly Drive.
“There were a couple of guys who came into the store looking for plants and pictures, and looking for oddities,” Marble said. “I believe they bought the work of some local artists we had here at the time, to use for the movie or as a prop of some kind. And they bought a few house plants, too.”
Soon, the conversation turned to the unusually warm weather in Billings that day and how the absence of real snow meant that mounds of it would have to be trucked in from elsewhere.
“The guys were saying, ‘Hey, this is Montana, there should always be snow here,’ and saying, ‘Well, we didn’t think that we needed to worry about snow in Montana.’ But they didn’t have the snow they needed,” Marble said.
One of the men figured it would easiest haul snow in from Red Lodge. The others agreed. And then Marble spoke up.
“I told them that I thought Red Lodge would be a little more of a challenge,” Marble said. “I also mentioned that my friend at the airport had at least six big piles of it. I knew that there were piles of snow on the runways. So they asked us if we had trucks, and asked us if we would be willing to haul it down to the set.”
Before long, Marble was using a two-ton truck to deliver stockpiled snow to downtown Billings — including a load for one of the opening scenes outside the bus depot on First Avenue North.
“We then got another load and went out to Laurel to use it,” Marble said. “But I guess it was creating too many puddles, and they didn’t use that snow. I got to help with the artificial snow on the Laurel set.
“Obviously, they paid me, and it was a cool deal to help them out.”
Hired under the general job description of “greensman,” Marble was allowed to access the set between duties, where he got a close look at the complicated process of making a movie.
“I got to see the creative process and the interaction,” he said. “It was a well-run ship, everybody knew their place.”
The movie was nominated for six Academy Awards, all of them in major categories, but was shut out Sunday night at the Oscars. It was, however, named Movie of the Year by the American Film Institute.
“It was very cool to learn about movie-making,” Marble said. “I was naïve on just how movies are made. … I didn’t quite understand how much time and energy went in and just how many people collaborate on a film. You never think about a local guy who hauled snow — and there is a ton of those kinds of things.”
Marble, 29, was born and raised in Billings and is a third-generation Montanan. Billings Nursery & Landscaping has been operated by the Marble family since 1952. And this wasn’t the nursery’s first brush with Hollywood.
“My father actually worked on the Tom Cruise film ‘Far and Away,’ supplying plants,” Marble said. Parts of the movie, released in 1992, were filmed in and around Billings.
The day Marble was interviewed for this story, the weather scene was quite different from that November day in 2012. It was a harsh, cold morning and Billings was in the midst of the third-snowiest year on record — 36.8 inches of snow during February alone.
“I just got done removing snow from around the store,” Marble said. “We got another seven inches last night. There is plenty on the ground to shoot a movie today, isn’t there?”
Brian D’Ambrosio is a freelance writer who works with the Montana Film Office.
