Like others in his profession, director/writer Bruce Neibaur has produced his own starving-artist plot, starring himself, but those days seem long ago and far away.
He has one new IMAX movie in the theaters ("Lewis and Clark") and another IMAX production soon to be released ("India: Kingdom of the Tiger"), and still another movie that has been playing for years in theaters worldwide ("Mysteries of Egypt") that ranks among the biggest-grossing IMAX films ever, at $80 million and counting.
And there's more on the way. Neibaur (NI-ber) will do another National Geographic project, as well as collaborate with Stephen Hawking on a movie about the physicist and his work, and he's got other projects he's considering — Paul Revere, Teddy Roosevelt, maybe even a Thomas Hardy novel.
"It wasn't always like this," says the 46-year-old Neibaur, sitting in the family room of his Draper home.
After a stint as a CNN cameraman in Washington, D.C., he returned to Salt Lake City 18 years ago with the promise of a job at a Salt Lake TV news station. The job fell through, and Neibaur was forced to take temporary jobs filling in for vacationing cameramen to piece together a living.
He also gave himself a full-time job writing screenplays he hoped to peddle. In those days he worked in an upstairs room of his house that he dubbed "the meat locker" because it was unheated. In the winter, he bundled up in a coat, wrapped himself in blankets and wrote on a word processor for eight hours a day. On weekends, he drove to Idaho and cut and hauled scrap iron.
Neibaur almost packed it in and got a steady job — "I had a wife and two kids to support," he says — but his wife Cyndy encouraged him to stick it out, even though it meant a meager living.
"She was a believer," says Bruce Neibaur. "She insisted that I don't cave in for some odd job somewhere. She was saying, 'Hang in there.' "
Happily, he did. Neibaur, who grew up on a farm near Rupert, Idaho, has produced what he calls "docu-dramas" steadily for a dozen years. He mixes his background in drama with his love for history. (He was a history major for a time at Utah State and Brigham Young University.) "Lewis and Clark" is a film you might expect to see in social studies — except you wouldn't fall asleep.
His movie career began with small movies no one else in the business wanted to do, and then the calls began to come. He made a couple of successful family movies — "Wildest Dreams" and "Butter Cream Gang" — and a couple of movies for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to play at church historical sites in Carthage and Nauvoo, Ill.
The Covey Leadership Institute commissioned him to do more films, and then the Hearst Corp. hired him to make a movie to play at the Hearst Castle in California. He made another award-winning family film, "Friendship Fields," and then National Geographic signed him to make "Mysteries of Egypt." More films followed: "Ghost of Dickens Past" (a TV special), "Lewis and Clark" and "India: Kingdom of the Tiger," which he considers his best large-format film.
Along the way, he resisted lucrative offers to write scripts for TV shows. "They make big money, but rarely do those guys break out of that mold," he says. "I'm so glad I didn't do that.
"I get to do some cool stuff."
Commuting from Draper, Neibaur has worked in Africa, South America, the Middle East, India, Thailand, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Europe and Canada. He has roasted in the 120-degree temperatures of India, stalked lions in South Africa at night, froze at the foot of the Himalayas, flown circles around the pyramids, hung out with a night owl named Omar Sharif and worked side by side with bears and tigers.
"Working with the tigers (in India) was incredible," he recalls. "They call them 'trained tigers,' but put that in quotes. We shot one scene of a tiger flashing through the grass as if he were attacking. We finished the shot, but unknown to us, he circled around behind us and tackled the cameraman next to me. That's 500 pounds of Bengal tiger. He was just playing, but I could feel a whoosh of air from the tiger's paw. He took the cameraman right out. Laid him low. Then just kind of licked him and played with him."
Neibaur has found his niche in "docu-dramas," in which he portrays historical events and figures by staging scenes and using actors. It has its own challenges. He shot scenes with Sharif in Egypt while production assistants held back hordes of tourists just inches out of the camera frame who were anxious to see the actor. In Venice he was trying to shoot a turn-of-the-century scene of young William Randolph Hearst while also trying to prevent angry tourists from entering the square.
"We couldn't have anything modern in the picture," says Neibaur. "Just two seconds after I called 'cut,' a tourist ship came right into the background."
Neibaur is a stickler for detail right down to the beads, stitching and aging of Lewis and Clark's costumes. He does much of his own research and utilizes experts for the period he is portraying.
"We were spending all of our time in the water for 'Lewis and Clark,' " he recalls. "We tried to follow as closely as possible the actual expedition route and then, because of dams or farms or modern intrusions, it was necessary to depart from it in places."
Neibaur can scarcely contain his enthusiasm for his next IMAX project: Hawking. He managed to meet with Hawking for two hours, which is a feat in itself and an experience that ought to be included in the movie.
Hawking, who is confined to a wheelchair by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, listened to Neibaur's proposals and questions while he also studied a computer screen that Neibaur couldn't see. As Neibaur tells it, "Later, his assistant told me, 'Most of the time you were talking to him, he was doing equations.'
"He is able to do that until you get to the heart of the matter of what you are saying. You tend to talk to him as if he's in an old-folks home, but he's way ahead of you. Meeting him has been one of the most amazing experiences I've had.
"The fact that he gave us two hours of his time tells you what he thinks of the project. He wants to understand the universe and he wants others to understand it. He wants to educate. The challenge is to do this movie and explain Mr. Hawking's theories and have people get it while also entertaining them."
Sounds like Bruce Neibaur is going to do some more cool stuff.
E-mail: drob@desnews.com