No Country For Truth Tellers
Akiywa the rescued Wild Horse & James Anaquad Kleinert scouting in the San Juan mountains of Colorado.
No Country For Truth Tellers - The Book -
Hau Everyone,
We are releasing our Book: No Country For Truth Tellers a chapter at a time here and on our Substack page.
Chapter 1 – T H E I NJURY
I lay on the ground screaming, hands clutching my shattered knee. Two seconds earlier I had been in the air, shooting a stunt for a National Champion Sportswear commercial at the peak of my athletic prime. One wrong moment was all it took. My patellar tendon was completely severed; my quadriceps had rolled up in a ball in my upper thigh. I stared at my leg, the joint suddenly without a kneecap. The view of a knee joint without a kneecap was hideous, the pain excruciating. I took deep, shaky breaths, trying not to slip into shock.
The career I had been building in the film industry had just blown up with the explosion in my knee. I now know it’s true that everything happens for the right reasons. This traumatic injury would take me on an irreversible journey deep into the heart to American Indian culture, where I would reclaim a lost part of myself and begin to walk the dangerous path of an activist. I could not have fathomed the love that awaited me, nor that I would befriend a family of wild horses, and that the threat posed to their way of life would become the focus of my work as a documentarian. I had no idea that their fight for survival would be mine as well, or that this fight would take me from the Southwest to Federal Court, where my case would set precedent in American law.
But at that moment, the only thing on my mind was the numbing agony I was in. The stunt coordinator finally showed up with an Ace bandage and a bag of ice to freeze my pain. I’d had many injuries while skiing World Cup as an aerial freestyle skier; prior to this, my other patellar tendon had been partially torn, and my left ankle reconstructed, no to mention the concussions, bumps and bruises that are inevitable in high impact sports. My freestyle ski career had been an endless struggle to break into the world’s Top Ten in order to make a living
Along the way I’d picked up a camera, a yellow Sony Sport Cam, and shot some ski footage and interviews with my teammates about what it was like to be an athlete on the World Cup freestyle ski tour. It was my first documentary, called Living It. My dreams of Olympic success had been squashed by my injuries, so I decided to start over in the film business.
I studied theatre and film at the University of Utah for a few years, and performed on the ABC show Extreme in 1994-95. After receiving my Taft Hartley induction into Screen Actors Guild (SAG), I moved to LA. I was working the LA hustle, picking up side jobs as an athletic trainer while studying at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, and working for Norman Seeff’s production company. Norman was a legend in the art world. He’d grown up during Apartheid in South Africa, where he practiced medicine before moving to the United States. His photography got noticed while he was living in New York, and he grew to become one of Rolling Stone Magazine’s top photographers. He later opened his own studio in LA, where he had conducting over 500 ‘Sessions’—poignant interviews with influential celebrities—over the course of his career. I met Norman when he hired me to instruct his son one Christmas in Park City; he noticed how steady my shots were as I filmed his son skiing down the slopes, and he invited me to come to California to be a part of his company. I learned a great deal from him watching him conduct his Sessions; Norman had a gift for asking just the right questions to guide his guest into the deepest reaches of their expression, and he always had soft lighting, fine food and wine for his celebrity subjects, who would open up to his every question about their inner creative lives. He became an exacting and compassionate mentor to me, and encouraged my development as a cinematographer and director—at the time i was divided between acting, stunt work and learning behind camera skills.
When I informed Norman of my accident his voice was stern. “So, what are you going to do now?” he asked. “I’m going to get healthy,” I assured him, feeling the shame and the weight of this setback. It had taken every resource I had to move to LA; I had just begun to have some success, establishing myself in prime time TV shows, films and commercials as I worked with Norman and his team. I was beginning to enjoy my new passion; now I had to swallow the hard fact that this injury could be the end of my career.
I waited for hours in the UCLA emergency room; to pass the time I chatted with a construction worker who’d come in for chest pains. He was from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and missed the beauty of home. I grew up in Wisconsin; we spent several hours reminiscing about the Great Lakes. At last the doctor, a young orthopedic surgeon, appearedto diagnose my injury and told me what I already knew—I needed surgery urgently. They put my leg in an immobilizer to prevent any movement of the joint, and told me to leave the ER as I could not stay any longer, due to policy.
I called my friends to see if someone could come get me and everyone was busy. Typical LA. I crutched out to the parking lot where the stunt coordinator had parked my Subaru and struggled in behind the wheel. Driving a stick shift in LA traffic with a leg immobilized from ankle to groin is nearly impossible, but I managed.
I was finally able to get a hold of Bad Bob, a World Cup skiing buddy who told me I could crash on his couch until I figured things out. Knowing I would not have anyone to care for me in LA, I decided to fly back to my childhood home west of Madison, the little farming town of Mt. Horeb. Bad Bob drove me to LAX and I crutched onto the plane. I flew from a warm, sunny February day in southern California to the sharp freeze of a subzero Wisconsin winter. After ten years roaming the American West, the globe, and the fantasy world of Hollywood, I was back to the harsh reality of living with my parents, financially broke, with a bum leg.
No Country For Truth Tellers available here: https://www.jamesanaquadkleinert.com/book -
James Anaquad Kleinert - Producer/Director/Cinematographer/Writer
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