More than a decade before film stars started flocking to Sun Valley in the 1930s, a young Hollywood actress named Nell Shipman left the silent movie business in California for the remote shores and surrounding mountains of Priest Lake. But unlike the 1930s glitterati, she wasn’t seeking a glamorous get-away. She came to Idaho to lead her own independent film company with a cast of actors that included her “zoo” of more than 70 wild animals. To say the least, Nell was a woman with big dreams and the determination to make them happen.
Shipman’s professional acting career began when she was cast in a theatrical touring company in 1905 at the age of thirteen. She earned fame as a silent film star when she landed the leading role in the successful 1916 feature, God’s Country and the Woman. Despite the Hollywood studio offers that followed, Nell ultimately chose to strike out on her own. In 1919, she established Nell Shipman Productions with the mission of making films according to her own creative vision.
As producer, writer, and star, Nell led her company to Minnehaha Studios in Spokane to shoot her film The Grub Stake in 1922. When studio filming wrapped, they moved on to Priest Lake for the film’s outdoor scenes, and it was there that Shipman decided to set down her cinematic roots. Years later she described her immediate emotional response to the landscape: “Did you ever come to a place and instantly recognize it as…the one spot in all God’s world where you belonged…Such a spot, so it seemed to me, was Priest Lake, in Idaho…Seeing it was not a case of love at first sight, it was the re-uniting of self with homeland. This was my country. This, the proper setting for my pictures about God’s country.”
The Shipman company lived in Priest Lake for two and a half years, and eventually built a movie studio camp that Nell named Lionhead Lodge. From 1923-1924 the company shot a series of five short films, collectively titled Little Dramas of The Big Places. With Priest Lake as her backdrop, Nell was free to make her Little Dramas using all the elements of her signature style: on-location filming in wilderness landscapes, stunts performed by the star herself, and plotlines that made the heroine the rescuer of the hero.
The Little Dramas featured Priest Lake locals as well as performers from Shipman’s own menagerie of wild animals. Nell was devoted to working with animals respectfully after witnessing repeated inhumane treatment of animal actors on film sets in Hollywood. “I made up my mind…that somehow I would get my own wild animal cast and make actors of them,” she wrote, “without the use of whips, shouted commands, charged wires poked into them, or by boring them with tiresome training.” Nell’s successful bonding approach is revealed in her Idaho films with co-starring dogs, bobcats, and bears.
By 1925, the effects of a changing film industry created a financial strain that Nell’s small independent outfit couldn’t overcome. Shipman left Idaho and never returned. But in her autobiography written shortly before her death in 1970, she remembered Priest Lake as the place where she achieved her artistic ideals while remaining true to her independent spirit. Next year marks the 100th anniversary of Nell’s arrival in Idaho—a timely occasion to celebrate her pioneering efforts in the early film industry and her artistic legacy where the heroine always saves the day.