Broncho Billy’s love may have been fickle, but Park City has always been true. In the 1914 silent film Broncho Billy’s True Love, Billy leaves his dance partner, Marguerite Clayton, for a back-east girl; but Park City will ever avow Clayton as its earliest film star. While she only lived in Park City for one year, it was the year before her breakout role in Broncho Billy, which led to a career in silent film.
Taking its cue from Broncho Billy, the emerging movie business also was looking elsewhere for love. It was enraptured by the flamboyant red rock scenery of Kanab and Monument Valley, Utah, where westerns were filmed for decades. Park City wouldn’t get its chance to star until 1968, when interior and street scenes for an independent production, The Owl That Didn’t Give a Hoot, were shot on Main Street.
Producer Frank Zuniga may have been late to the ball, but he was enthusiastic. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy seeing your hometown on film, and we hope it may encourage other film companies to utilize this beautiful area for their motion picture locations,” he wrote in a letter published in the Park Record.
The project did encourage growth, and Sunn Classic Pictures began operating in Park City in 1971. Its television adaptation of HG Wells’ The Time Machine was shot on Main Street and used as many local actors as possible. “Businesses also got into the action,” says Dalton Grackle, research, digital services and social media coordinator for Park City Museum. For example, Park City Sports-A-Rama raffled off one walk-on part as a prize.
“They utilized Main Street on several productions,” Grackle says, “and shot around town for popular documentary-style feature films and the television program, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams.”
That jovial mountain man launched the career of Park City’s biggest star, 9-foot-tall, 1,500-pound Bart the Bear, trained by Doug and Lynne Seus in Daniel’s Creek. Bart’s first role had him shaking a raccoon out of a tree in a Grizzly Adams Christmas episode “Once Upon a Starry Night.” He would go on to co-star with Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It.
Park City’s next motion picture moment was the arrival of the Utah/U.S. Film Festival in January 1981. The festival’s choice of date and location was calculated to make it the world’s only wintertime film festival, hoping to use skiing as an enticement to attend.
Three local theaters were the hub of festival activities: Egyptian Theatre (then called The Silver Wheel Theatre), Prospector Square Theatre and Holiday Village Theatre. The event was taken over by the Sundance Institute in 1984 and renamed the Sundance Film Festival in 1991, leading Park City into film festival prominence. It was Sundance that premiered Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, which won the Grand Jury Prize and was later bestowed the Palme d’or at Cannes Film Festival. Other standout submissions over the years included The Usual Suspects, American Psycho and Napoleon Dynamite.
Sundance contributed something else, a spinoff. In 1995, a handful of filmmakers who couldn’t break into Sundance started a guerrilla alternative, Slamdance Film Festival. The very next year, they too had an entry at Cannes and staying power. Slamdance launched the careers of directors like Marc Forster and Rian Johnson and was held in Park City until it moved to Los Angeles in 2024. Now Sundance also is moving outside of Utah to Boulder, Colorado, starting with the 2027 festival.
Park City was getting known for festivals, but not for filmmaking. Then Lloyd took Mary riding through Aspen on his mini bike and everything changed. Because Aspen was Park City Main Street, and Lloyd was Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber.
“I think the explosion [of filmmaking] is after Dumb and Dumber,” says Marshall Moore, vice president of operations and marketing at Utah Film Studios. The 1995 comedy lured a lot of TV commercials to Main Street and brought attention to ongoing productions. “It’s a watershed moment because it’s a high-profile production,” says Moore, “but for every high-profile film there are 10 more that you don’t know about.”
Filming on Main Street was challenging, and space was limited. Big productions that needed sound stages, sets and offices were converting rented warehouses in Salt Lake — something a few forward-thinking filmmakers thought should happen in a dedicated space in Park City. In 2015, Utah Film Studios was built and offers 45,000 square feet of sound stage space and additional office suites, conference rooms and private offices. Upon opening, Utah Film Studios immediately began hosting major productions such as several series by acclaimed producer Taylor Sheridan, including 1,200 consecutive days of production on Yellowstone starring Kevin Costner.
Park City got another bit part, too. In one Yellowstone scene, a character leaves a building on the Bozeman University campus, played by the Park City Library.
Now the town that was once considered too far from Salt Lake is considered convenient. “It’s easy to get between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, and there are lots of great locations to shoot around the studios,” says Moore. One of the most recent projects filmed in Park City is the original HBO movie Mountainhead directed by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong and starring Steve Carell, Jason Scwartzman, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef.
Locals also have gone beyond the role of extras. Olympic alpine skier and four-time U.S. national champion Kaylin Richardson wrote the 2021 Christmas comedy, Mistletoe Mixup, which was filmed in and around Park City.
“It was such a positive experience that I was determined to film the opening sequence of my dreams at my home mountain, Deer Valley,” Richardson says. That dream came true for her 2024 production, Marry Christmas.
“The film community in Utah is phenomenal, and whenever we shot on location everyone was accommodating and enthusiastic,” Richardson says. Looking to the future she adds, “I cannot wait to bring another project home to Utah!”
Egyptian Theatre
The 1922 discovery of King Tut’s tomb kicked off a nationwide craze for Egyptian-themed theaters, starting with Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Architectural Nile fever then spread across the country, inspiring the Mary J. Steiner Egyptian Theatre on Park City’s Main Street.
The Egyptian, adorned with lotus leaf motifs, scarabs and hieroglyphics, opened on Christmas 1926. Construction was supervised by an Egyptologist. Inexplicably, the theatre’s gorgeous exterior was covered with a characterless flat facade in 1963 and renamed The Silver Wheel Theatre. The Egyptian was restored to its former glory in 1981 and none too soon as its appearance in Dumb and Dumber drew many filmmakers to Main Street.
Local Timeline of Important Film Events
1957 Walt Disney Presents: Rusty and the Falcon (TV)
1968 The Owl Who Didn’t Give a Hoot (Film)
1974 The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (Film)
1974 Utah Film Commission established
1977 The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (TV*)
1978 The Time Machine (Film)
1979 The Osmond Family Show (TV*)
1981 Sundance Institute established
1981 Utah/U.S. Film Festival moves to Park City
1984 Sundance Institute takes over Utah/
U.S. Film Festival operations
1990 Touched by an Angel (TV*)
1991 Utah/U.S. Film Festival renamed the Sundance Film Festival
1992 A Midnight Clear (Film)
1994 Dumb and Dumber (Film)
1995 Extreme (TV)
1995 Slamdance Film Festival established
1995 Park City Film Series established
2014 Utah Film Studios established
2014 Cloud 9 (Film)
2013 Blood and Oil (TV)
2016 Wind River (TV)
2018 Hereditary (Film)
2018 Yellowstone (TV)
2024 Marry Christmas (Film)
2025 Mountainhead (Film)
*one episode
Bart the Bear
It was 1976, and a handful of Hollywood hopefuls — including a hawk, a few wolves and a skunk — were working on their first big movie in Provo Canyon. The animal actors and their human handlers, Doug and Lynne Seus, were on location filming Baker’s Hawk with Burl Ives and Clint Walker.
As the owners of Doug Seus’ Wasatch Rocky Mountain Wildlife, the Seus were USDA-licensed and inspected caretakers of several exotic animal actors, and their dream was to make the big time.
“We knew if we were really going to make it in our dream of having animals and doing movies, we’d need to get a bear — and a big one,” says Lynn. When a baby Kodiak came up for adoption from the Baltimore Zoo, the couple’s dream came true.
Doug lovingly trained Bart the Bear on a 77-acre property outside Park City. Bart starred in more than 100 projects including movies like Clan of the Cave Bear and The Great Outdoors; TV shows including “Game of Thrones”; and numerous commercials and documentaries. In 1998, Bart and Doug shared the stage with Mike Meyers, introducing the winners for Best Sound Effects Editing at the 70th Academy Awards. Bart died at age 23 in 2000. The historic Avon Theater in Heber City hosted the Bart Film Fest last November.
