When Iowa Falls Foreman Barry Munson was told he’d be performing work on the set of a Hollywood movie being filmed southeast of Eldora in the spring of 1995, the then-young lineman wasn’t sure what to expect.
“At some point, our office was notified that we needed to visit this filming location to do some work,” said Munson. “We kind of had an idea, but of course, I don’t think we really understood just exactly what the film was going to be.”
The film, as he soon learned, was to be the mega-blockbuster Twister which opened the following summer to both critical acclaim and box office success. Earning nearly $500 million worldwide in 1996, it was the second highest grossing film of the year only behind Independence Day.
Thirty years later, the movie is remembered for its heartfelt plot and groundbreaking use of computer-generated imagery (CGI), which earned the film an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
Munson, knowing that the crew would have to return to the location after filming was complete, convinced his foreman to let him run home and grab his camera so he could snap before and after photos.
With camera in hand, Munson and his crew arrived at the job site, an up-until-then dilapidated acreage southeast of Eldora. It was a location the linemen knew well. The crew occasionally ate lunch under the property’s large, shady trees.
“So we get there to this dilapidated acreage and it is just looking amazing,” Munson remembers. “The house is painted up. They’ve got grass mowed. They actually had uncovered a brick sidewalk around the house that had been just covered from years of neglect.
“And it’s like, wow, look at this. The barn was painted all up and everything,” he recalls.
Munson and the crew got to work, taking down an overhead service line so it could be safely buried, providing filmmakers with more picturesque wide shots.
Taking snapshots
Before beginning his work, Munson took pictures, mentally noting his location so that he could return when filming was complete to take pictures from those same spots.
“It was really amazing, the work they had put in because it was our understanding everything was going to get destroyed, which was a shame because this was a grand old house,” Munson said.
Despite initial plans to demolish the home, community advocates were able to convince filmmakers to spare the house and rewrite the final scene. It’s a change Munson believes helped turn the house into the area’s most iconic and well-recognized home.
During his initial visit, Munson also had a chance to meet several of the film’s crewmembers, including special effects experts who constructed one of the movie’s most memorable practical effects.
“I go back behind the house, and I happened to see a guy working on this fence,” Munson remembers. “We got to talking about this fence … and he told me basically that it was going to be a kind of a split rail wooden fence, and it was going to be pneumatically controlled.
“When they start shooting this movie, these actors are going to be running along this fence, and it will start wobbling like this tornado is causing all this. And then behind them, they were going to start shooting these rails up. And he told me, he said, ‘Yeah, we tested those and we had to turn the pressure down because they were shooting them so high it was almost lethal!’”
Today, that scene remains one of the film’s most memorable, with lead actors Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt running out of the adjacent cornfield and along the fence seeking shelter from a class five tornado.
“It was really cool to see that (scene),” Munson said. “I remember watching the movie, and I’m like, I talked to the dude that was making that thing, you know, and operating that thing.”
Scene of the 'storm'
After filming wrapped, the linemen returned to the site to restore the overhead service. For Munson, the experience was slightly surreal.
In addition to snapping trees and demolishing the barn and other outbuildings, the whole property was littered with debris, something Munson says looked so convincing he would have sworn it was caused by a real storm.
“It was just kind of shocking what they did,” he recalls. “I mean, they had a tractor up against a tree and just debris everywhere, like, like a tornado had come through there.”
Thirty years later, Munson says he will still occasionally catch Twister on TV or pull out his photo album and reminisce.
“To have been there and seen all that went on and then to watch the movie and kind of say, ‘Hey, you know, this is rural Hardin County, east of Eldora in this Hollywood blockbuster movie. This is crazy.’ I mean, we were on that set working on that thing, you know? That was just kind of cool.”
