When San Francisco threw the switch in the 1880s that lit up its streets and powered its cable cars, copper miners in Butte, Montana were working overtime to meet the nation's growing demand for electrical wiring.
San Francisco's ties to Butte, however, weren't limited to wiring. Native son William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper millionaire, helped finance Butte's Anaconda Copper mines, which turned the ramshackle mining camp into a vibrant industrial city overnight, attracting miners, gamblers and prostitutes from all corners of the globe. It became known as "the town that plumbed and electrified America."
When documentary maker Pamela Robert decided to do a film on Butte, she found access to the miner's community through writer Edwin Dobb, a fourth generation descendant of Butte miners who had delved into that history for a 1996 Harper's Magazine piece, Pennies from Hell. In the end, Dobb, who also teaches at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, co-wrote and co-produced the documentary Butte, America, which recounts the rise and fall of the mining community through the eyes of the miners. It screens at the Victoria Theater this Saturday at 8pm.
Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/inthemission/detail?entry_id=76496--
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