Katherine Montgomery
Katherine Montgomery
Katherine Montgomery grew up wanting to write fiction and wound up being accepted to USC for undergrad. “I was lucky enough to go to school in L.A.,” she says. Because “fiction writing isn’t really a job, I wound up working entry-level jobs in both the narrative and doc film spaces. Doing more story work, finding stories and characters, definitely led me into doing this kind of work.” She was especially interested in questions of “best practices and ethics, and I felt like I wasn’t getting that right off the bat through my work experience. I really wanted to spend some time developing those for myself because ethics are really important to me.” While completing a masters degree in visual and media anthropology, she found the strip club location for her thesis film, Big Bons, after spending “a lot of time on forums online and digging around in bizarre corners of the internet. There was this site called stripperweb.com at the time, and I found this wonderful, tiny club run by a second generation of women up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.”
That experience served as preparation for her in-production first documentary feature, Great Alaskan Bush Company, anchored at the club of the same name. Montgomery found the space after more online research. Anchorage, Montgomery says, is “this really unique corner of the world where, because of the male-dominated blue-collar Alaskan economy—oil, fishing, military base—there is a real economic opportunity for women who leave places like Vegas to come and dance there. I really fell in love with the story around the club, too. It was founded in the ’70s by a woman during the oil boom who wanted to create a safe space for sex workers who were subject to pimps at the time. She wanted women to be able to make their own money, and the club is now run by her grandkids.”
A sample scene from the feature offers an intimate and vivid eye on dancer-customer interactions amid the saturated colors of the club’s interior before opening the world up, from the back dressing rooms and after-hour cash counts to the Alaskan landscape beyond. Core character Jamie struggles to keep up with her four children and care for her grandfather in hospice until she meets a new customer who changes everything. “Sex workers often lead multiple lives at once,” Montgomery observes, “which is the beauty of that work. It enables and empowers them to do that, so I wanted to be really mindful about where I did this and with whom, and of privacy concerns for both sex workers and clients. I worked with a club where I really developed these practices for the first time, working very closely with the management, developing practices around individualized consent in a place where people definitely need to be able to say no to having a camera around.”
The project started in 2021, when Zachary Kislevitz—a producer on HBO’s Bama Rush, which Montgomery worked on—watched Big Bons as part of her job interview process for a field producer/supervising archival producer position and encouraged her to expand on its possibilities. (Montgomery’s recent credits include co-producing HBO’s Gloria Steinem doc Dear Ms.) Kislevitz and Rachel Traub subsequently became producers on the project, with Chloé Zhao’s Book of Shadows and 2AM coming onboard the following year. In the process of obtaining financing, the team has learned that they’re representing “what is often considered a fairly untraditional film” because of its deglamorized look at strip club life: “‘Very unique’ are the words we get a lot.” Throughout shooting, Montgomery and Jamie have become friends—“I’m about to go up and see her next month, and I’m going to stay in the trailer in her driveway”—as well as increasingly collaborative: “I’m definitely committed to [the] benefits of the vérité format, but we’re way past pretending like true objectivity is possible in this kind of storytelling. Jamie’s incredibly involved in this process of telling her story. I rely on her to tell me what’s coming up next in her life, and what her ever-evolving dreams are. She is definitely aware of how her story is evolving.” —Vadim Rizov/Image:Ren Pidgeon
