Long before Yellowstone became a cultural phenomenon, Taylor Sheridan was simply a customer whose hat Trent Johnson had made through the Western horse-show world at the Cactus Classic in Arizona. Today, Sheridan is best known as the writer, director, and producer behind Yellowstone, the television series that brought contemporary Western storytelling to audiences around the world. Sheridan was Taylor Sheridan even then, Trent says, “but not this Taylor Sheridan.” There was no Hollywood introduction or carefully orchestrated connection between the two. There was a hat, and, a few years later, Sheridan went looking for the man who had made it.
In 2015, Sheridan tracked down Trent’s phone number through mutual friend Matt Kimes, co-founder of Western apparel brand Kimes Ranch Jeans, and called him on a Friday night. At the Johnson house, it was family movie night, and Trent was downstairs with his family when the phone rang. Sheridan told him he was working on a film called Wind River with Jeremy Renner, the Academy Award-nominated actor known for The Hurt Locker and Marvel's Avengers films, and wanted Greeley Hat Works to make the hats. Trent’s response was decidedly less Hollywood. “Cool, bro,” he remembers telling him. “Yeah, it’s family movie night. I’ll call you back Monday.” Then Trent Googled Taylor Sheridan. “Oh snap.”
Sheridan sent him the script, Trent read it, and soon the hatmaker who had taken the call from his basement in Greeley was on a plane to Utah. He spent four days around the production, studying the people who would wear the hats. For Renner’s character, authenticity came down to a detail most viewers would never consciously notice: where the actor’s hands naturally touched his hat. Trent photographed Renner handling it so he could see where fingers met felt and where wear would realistically accumulate. If the hat needed to look lived in, Trent did not want someone randomly adding dirt until it looked old. “I wanted it to be real, not just dirty,” he says.
It was a small detail, but one that captured the way Trent approached an unfamiliar world. A movie set might have been new territory, but the standard was not. The hat needed to look as though it belonged to the person wearing it. It worked. In May 2017, Sheridan called again, this time with another project. “Hey man, I’m doing this TV show called Yellowstone.” Trent remembers giving him a hard time about the idea of television before Sheridan sent him the script for Season 1, Episode 1. Once he started reading the story and the names attached to it, his reaction changed. “This is legit.”
Sheridan bought him a plane ticket back to Utah, and Trent packed based on his previous four-day trip for Wind River. What he had failed to notice was that Sheridan had purchased him a one-way ticket. The quick trip Trent anticipated became a much longer immersion in the world being created around Yellowstone. He spent days around the production and evenings going into town for dinner with the group, getting a firsthand look at the people and details shaping Sheridan’s contemporary Western world.
There were moments when the absurdity of where his career had taken him was impossible to miss. One of the people sitting around those dinner tables was Academy Award-winning actor Kevin Costner, who would portray ranch patriarch John Dutton in Yellowstone. Trent still tells that part with the self-deprecating humor that runs through many of his celebrity stories. Sitting at a table with Costner, he jokes, was a reminder that nobody was looking for the hatmaker from Greeley. But the joke hid a real shift. Trent was no longer watching the Western world of film and television from Colorado. He was inside it, seeing how actors moved, how they wore their hats, and how Sheridan wanted the world of Yellowstone to feel.
The relationship did not end with those early days of the series. Greeley Hat Works’ work continued within the Yellowstone world. What began with a hat made for Sheridan at an Arizona horse show had grown into more than Trent could have anticipated when his phone rang during family movie night.
Looking backward, the progression runs from the Cactus Classic to a hat for Taylor Sheridan, from Matt Kimes passing along a phone number to Wind River and Yellowstone. None of it began with an attempt to get into Hollywood. It began because someone remembered the hat Trent had made and wanted to find him again.