Cryptozoology
You're Getting Warmer...
On the trail of the Sasquatch hunters, director Peter von Puttkamer searches for his own version of the truth

Film Be the Ball It's hard to defend a sport that sucks up water, mows down forests, and sprays herbicides to create an aura of "natural" beauty—yet loads of environmentally conscious people are addicted to golf. Among them is Robert Redford, well-known eco-booster and the director of this month's DreamWorks film The Legend of Bagger Vance. Set in 1931 Georgia, the reportedly $70 million production tells the story of a screwy World War I vet named Rannulph Junuh (Matt Damon), his guru-caddy Bagger Vance (Will Smith), and their quest for the"authentic swing." Redford, who last waded into the deep end of sport with A River Runs Through It, tried to steer clear of the New Age gobbledygook of Steven Pressfield's 1995 novel. The intent, Redford says, "was to try to deliver something to the screen that an audience can feel rather than just watch." Redford wasn't able to address concerns about runaway golf course construction in the film, but he did sneak in a small enviro subplot: The links upon which Junuh plays his soul-saving match are spared from industrial development. The message? "It boils down to finding your true swing," muses Redford. "We all have one and it's very easy to lose, particularly in modern times."  —Jay Stowe

Sasquatch Odyssey, which played the prestigious International Documentary Association's festival and the New York International Independent Film Festival, follows Peter Byrne, Rene Dahinden, John Green, and Grover Krantz—"the four horsemen of Sasquatchery"—who have dedicated their lives to searching for the mythical apelike giant of British Columbia and the Northwest.

"They are eccentric, but not crazy, and they are moving on in the face of a lot of crazies," says von Puttkamer of the four. "They keep running into people who want to tie Bigfoot in to space aliens." In one sequence, Jack Lapseritis, author of The Psychic Sasquatch, sends Dahinden into conniptions with his description of an encounter with "paraphysical interdimensional nature people." Fumes Dahinden: "I'm not interested in Sasquatch in his goddamn mind—I want Sasquatch in the bush!"

Though the documentary includes footage from several Sasquatch expeditions, including the now legendary "Patterson film" (lensed in Northern California in 1967, it depicts what many believe to be a female Sasquatch cavorting in the wild), the real story concerns four obsessed, sometimes grumpy, old men. "It isn't necessarily about Sasquatches," says Betsey McLane, director emeritus of the International Documentary Association, who last year picked the film as a Doctober fest selection, a prerequisite for an Oscar nomination. "It is about the people—everyone can identify with these guys."

Von Puttkamer—who's now at work on Monster Hunters, two new cryptozoologic-themed pilots also headed for The Learning Channel—took 18 months to produce Sasquatch Odyssey. He began the project as a serious study of "wildmen" myths, and although the end result is more arch than anthropological, there's still a message. "We need monsters; we need to know that we have enough forest out there that there is the possibility of Bigfoot," says von Puttkamer, now a believer himself. "If we cut down the forests we are not only cutting down the natural world, we are destroying our dreams."
James Glave

photos: John Sosnovski, David James/Dreamworks/Twentieth Century Fox