The Making of American Loggers

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in Millinocket who’s not in front of the TV or watching the show at the bar on a Thursday night,” says Erik Sulcs, supervising producer for the reality show American Loggers.

But Millinocket folks aren’t the only ones captivated by the show. The Discovery Channel reality show has a huge following, catapulting Maine logging and trucking industry brothers—Danny, Eldon, Rudy, Larry, Gary, Jeff, and Wayne Pelletier—onto the national stage.

The reality-based series is the brainchild of TV producer and Bangor native Sean Gallagher. A veteran of the Discovery Channel and TLC, Gallagher knows what it takes to create a successful docudrama. Three years ago, after cofounding his own company, Half Yard Productions, he came up with the idea for a reality show based in the rugged Maine woods.

As a boy in Bangor, Gallagher had always been fascinated with the log-lined mystique of the Golden Road, which runs from Millinocket to the Canadian border through the great north woods. Gallagher thought the no-frills, think-on-your-feet lifestyle of Golden Road truckers would make good television, and started doing research for a show about Maine’s logging industry. He was pointed toward Pelletier Brothers Inc., a group of seven brothers running a logging and trucking operation. As soon as Gallagher met them, he knew he had found the perfect characters for a compelling reality series.

“American viewers are drawn to them as a family,” Gallagher says. “Couple that with the danger of their job and you’ve got people’s attention.” But Rudy and Eldon Pelletier weren’t so sure. The two brothers are the heads of Pelletier Brothers Inc., and were surprised when Gallagher approached them about doing a show.

“It was a tough decision,” Rudy says in the Franco-American accent that’s recognized throughout northern Maine. “We didn’t know these people. They could make us look just as bad as they could good. We’re not actors—we get up in the morning and do our job.” Rudy also worried that there wouldn’t be enough action happening on a daily basis to sustain a show.

“They don’t understand that others are blown away by what they do every day,” Gallagher says. “I think they thought we were crazy to want to do a show about them.”

The Pelletiers decided to allow a production crew to spend a week filming them to create a short video to pitch to the Discovery Channel. Once the week was over, Rudy and Eldon figured they’d never see the crew again.

It usually takes two to three months for a production company to hear back from a network on their pitch. The go-ahead from the Discovery Channel came in a scant two weeks. No one could believe it—especially the Pelletiers.

The Discovery Channel gave Half Yard Productions enough time and money to create six episodes. They were so well-received, they were green-lighted for another four. The next big vote of confidence came at the end of season one, when American Loggers was signed on for a second season.

American Loggers is filmed on a rotating schedule of two weeks on and one week off, with a crew of about 15 people. It’s not a typical shooting schedule for a reality show, but one that Rudy and Eldon insisted upon to have some respite from the film crew.

Rudy and Eldon also insisted on seeing a rough cut of each show before it went on air. “It took them awhile to trust us,” Gallagher says. “But after the first rough cut they saw what we were doing and were more comfortable. I want to do the brothers right, the industry right, and the state of Maine right.”

The American Logger film crew is split into two groups—one that covers the goings-on at Pelletier Brothers headquarters on the Golden Road and the other one based 75 miles north at Telos, at the Pelletier logging camp.

Each crew has a director of photography, assistant director of photography, audio specialist, associate producer, and an assistant. As supervising producer, Erik Sulcs oversees both crews. “Traditionally, a supervising producer is a logistics position,” Sulcs says. “My position here is unique in the fact that it’s story driven.”

Sulcs is responsible for helping shape the story line for each show and making sure there is enough footage from the woods crew and the town crew to make it flow. “I’ve got to make sure anything that happens in the shop is linked to the woods and vice versa.”

Sulcs came on staff during shoot three in American Loggers’ first season. He’s one of the only crew members from season one who is working on season two.

“It’s a transient business—most of the people that work in it are freelancers,” he says, and adds that it doesn’t help when they’re trying to build relationships with the brothers. “It’s difficult to work with the Pelletiers in this regard—it’s a big cultural gap. They’re all about family up here and relationships. We need to build up a level of trust with these people or we can’t get things that we need from them on camera.”
It’s not easy for the Pelletiers, either. “The hardest part is having them around all the time,” Rudy says. “When we’re busy or stressed, it’s hard because they want to be right close up.” It’s this drama that ultimately sells the show.

For each of the two seasons, the crew began filming after the spring mud season in late May. The brothers are busiest during the coldest months of the year. Trucking is a large part of the Pelletier Brothers’ business and, ironically, the Golden Road is easiest to traverse when it’s iced up and smooth. The trucks are heavy and the tires have chains so they don’t slip and slide around on icy roads like normal cars. And because of the snow pack, the drivers don’t have to worry about blowing a tire on a nasty pothole.

Unfortunately, for the television crew, winter is the hardest time to film in northern Maine. The crew made a trip to Brewer this past fall to get geared up for the harsh cold. They bought special cold-weather boots, full-on face masks, and thick Carhartt pants and jackets to make their jobs a little more bearable.

But even with their winter gear and SUVs with 10- ply tires, the film crew often can’t drive directly to the work site. “We have to walk everything into the woods,” Sulcs says. “When it’s 40 below and the snow is deep and we have to walk a mile into the woods in the dark to sit there and film these guys, it’s hard! You’re so cold!”

The equipment, too, suffers in the cold. The crew has special heating blankets, cases, and batteries for the cameras, but when the temps dip below zero they don’t work much longer than 20 minutes before freezing. And just because the days are shorter in the winter doesn’t mean the crew works less. “Our shooting days are not limited to exposure,” Sulcs says. “We have some big lights up at Telos that we need to bring out on occasion.”

Even Rudy admits that the film crew is made up of hard workers. “They’re there with us every day, no matter what,” he says.

The film crew has to work quickly at each shot to get what they need before irritating the loggers. These guys, after all, have a job to do. “We can’t hold these guys up,” Sulcs says. “We can’t spend half an hour lighting a truck when some guy’s getting paid by the load. Timing is everything. The Pelletiers or other employees aren’t going to take a lot of time out of their day to explain something to you.”

And there are some employees that simply don’t want to be on camera. It creates some animosity between them and the film crew that the producers have to work around. “Sometimes there might be a key person like a mechanic who gets sent up to the woods because a truck broke down that we need to film. We have to try to smooth talk these guys to see what we can do to get them on board.”

With hundreds of acres of area to capture on film, it’s easy for people to hide out from the film crew if they don’t want them around. “The geography is one of the biggest challenges,” Sulcs says. “At any given time if one of the guys doesn’t want to be on camera they get lost and we can’t find him. We’ve driven up in the woods sometimes 300 miles a day just following these guys around. The hardest part is finding them if they don’t want to be found.”

One of the hardest people to get on camera is Larry Pelletier, the fourth son and foreman at the Telos base camp. One of the main characters on the show, Larry makes sure his guys are cutting, hauling, and processing the lumber out in the woods as efficiently as possible. Sulcs calls him “Mercury.”

“Larry moves really fast. He’s probably the biggest Pelletier size-wise, but he moves so quickly,” Sulcs says. “There’s a lot of ground for him to cover, up in the woods. He’s pretty impatient with [the TV crew], but he knows we also need to get his side of the story.”

And how does the crew figure out what the story is going to be? Series producer Greg Smith, who works out of Washington, D.C., likes to keep it as organic as possible, letting the day’s activities shape each episode.

Sulcs makes it a little more precise. Sulcs, along with associate producers Supriya Vasanth, Arjun Rao, and Jeff Allen, meet with their main characters—Eldon, Rudy, Larry, and Jeff—to find out what they have going on for the week. “Very rarely does the story stay the same from that meeting to the end of the two weeks of shooting,” Sulcs says. “It always shifts, and that’s the challenge of doing this kind of television.”

The crew likes to catch friction between the brothers—it makes for good television. “You’re not going to get seven brothers running a business like this where everyone’s happy all the time,” he says. “We get involved to an extent, but oftentimes the guys will drop into French. Once we know that’s happening, we know it’s something they need to argue amongst themselves about and it’s not for us to shoot.”

The Pelletiers’ ability to speak French (they’re of French-Canadian descent) is a handy tool when you don’t want the majority of America to know what you’re talking about. “There are boundaries between us,” Sulcs admits. “The brothers are not open books, and we don’t want them that way. Otherwise, where’s the mystery? Sometimes it’s more dramatic because of what we don’t see.”

During the “down week,” there is always somebody from the film crew who stays in Millinocket just in case there’s something to capture on film. Most people head back home to work on other projects, but Sulcs heads to Washington, D.C., Discovery Channel headquarters, to help edit the episode.

“There’s not much I’m not going to know about logging after this show is over—whether I want to or not,” he says. And even though Millinocket, Maine, is about as far from Washington, D.C., as you can get, Sulcs loves working on American Loggers.
“You’re outdoors in Maine—you know it’s gonna be fun,” he says. “I’ve been able to learn about and go to a different part of the country that I haven’t spent a lot of time in before. It’s really great.”

The camaraderie between the crew and their subjects has been rewarding for both sides. The crew lives together during the two weeks of shooting in rented homes and apartments in Millinocket. They plan excursions like whitewater rafting and hiking Mt. Katahdin.

The Pelletier family also invites the crew to hang out during off-hours. The crew was invited to a Halloween party and they all dressed up as a Pelletier. Supriya Vasanth, the only female crew member, went as matriarch Lena Pelletier.

With the second season of American Loggers primed to focus more on the family and a bit less on the business, the wives and the kids will be getting more face time on camera. “Discovery wanted to set up these guys in the first season showing what they do—a lot of action, a lot of roads, a lot of danger,” Sulcs says. He’s trying to gain access to film at Maine Maritime Academy where Dustin, Larry’s son, is currently studying. The American Loggers wives will also play a bigger role in the second season. “The wives of most of these guys are as tough if not tougher than the men, to be honest with you,” Sulcs says.

The third generation of Pelletier men are making their way in the business and the show. Jason, Rudy and Lisa’s son, is the oldest of the third generation. After graduating from UMaine, Fort Kent, he started working for the family business full-time and is currently the foreman at their Fifth St. John base camp operation. “It’s kind of funny to say that I’m only 29-years-old and I’ve worked in the woods for almost 20 years,” Jason says. “The hardest part about working for your family is that you have the extra pressure of not letting everybody down. If you mess up, you’re not just letting down your boss, you’re letting down your father and uncles.”

Matthew, Danny and Louise’s son, works at Fifth St. John full-time with Jason. Aaron, Eldon and Judy’s son, works at Telos base camp. When Dustin, Larry and Tina’s son, is home on break from Maine Maritime Academy he helps out at Telos as well. Incorporating these three protégés more is a goal for season two. The Bonecrusher (see sidebar) will continue to be an important part of the second season.
Soon, even the locals will get a chance to get into the act: The Millinocket film crew will have even more fodder once the American Loggers Bar and Grill opens up in downtown Millinocket in February.

“This is a new revenue stream that Rudy and Eldon especially have been looking into,” Sulcs says. “I think they’re looking to bring more awareness to the Millinocket area. You take a look down Main Street and it’s not exactly booming. I hope for the Pelletiers’ sake and the town’s sake that this is able to be some kind of magnet.”

The show has certainly brought tourists into the area. People from Maine and across the country and Canada come to the Millinocket area to fish, hunt, hike, and camp. The Appalachain Trail ends right here on Mt. Katahdin. But people also come to meet the American Loggers. Every other day or so in the summer, people stop by to get their picture taken with their favorite characters. Rudy recalls a guy from New York drove all the way up to Millinocket on his vacation just to shake hands with the brothers.

But bringing awareness to the logging industry and rural Maine is worth it to the brothers. “The real goal of the show is to try to educate people about what logging is all about,” Rudy says. “Hopefully when people go to Home Depot and buy a two-by-four, they’ll now know where it comes from.”