Knowing that actor Jack Black is portraying you in a new movie is “more than a little freaky,” says veteran birder Greg Miller.“It’s wildly surreal and really hard to fully comprehend,” he said.The 53-year-old Miller, who lives in Sugarcreek in Tuscarawas County, finds the prospect of being portrayed by Black in the comedy The Big Year strangely conflicting.“On one hand, I just want to pinch myself … and it’s exciting,” he said. “On the other hand, I’m ready to crawl into a hole and hide. … It’s really a scary and potentially embarrassing thing.”Black will play Brad Harris, a Miller-like character, in a 20th Century Fox film about extreme bird-watching that opens Oct. 14. It also stars Steve Martin and Owen Wilson.Others in the cast include Rashida Jones, Anjelica Huston, Jim Parsons, JoBeth Williams, Brian Dennehy, Dianne Wiest and Corbin Bernsen.The director is David Frankel, who has directed The Devil Wears Prada and Marley and Me. Filming was done in British Columbia, the Yukon, Florida, California, Alabama and New York.The movie about three obsessive birders is “quite accurate, right down to the embarrassing details,” said Miller, who was the movie’s birding consultant for three weeks of filming last May in Vancouver. Miller read the script to check every bird reference and made some suggestions to the filmmakers.He was an extra in crowd scenes, wearing his red Ohio State University cap. He said he cannot divulge stories from the set or movie details because of a confidentiality agreement.The film is loosely adapted from Mark Obmascik’s 2004 book, The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature and Fowl Obsession (Free Press, $25). But what results is a fictionalized tale about three friendly birding rivals who follow their dreams and deal with midlife crises.In one interview, Frankel said The Big Year is a “bromance” or buddy movie with a dose of joy for nature.He told Birds and Blooms Blog that the movie portrays birders accurately and respectfully. It looks at competitive birders with warmth for their ambition and obsession.The book is the story of how Miller and two other birders — contractor Sandy Komito from New Jersey and retired executive Al Levantin from Colorado — pursued birds that most people have never heard of in what bird-watchers call a Big Year, an attempt to spot as many species of birds as possible in a calendar year.Record featThat year, 1998, Komito recorded 745 species and that’s still the record. Miller got 715 birds and Levantin, 710.The three men, traveling on their own, tromped through waist-deep mud in Florida’s Everglades, investigated Texas garbage dumps, searched for owls in the frozen Minnesota woods, sailed to spot ocean-going birds that rarely come ashore, rented a helicopter to search Nevada’s mountains for one reclusive bird, scoured Arizona canyons for Mexican birds and traveled to remote Alaskan islands.There are just over 300 Americans who have seen 700 birds in their lifetime, much less in one year, says the Colorado-based American Birding Association.The exceptionally high totals in 1998 were attributed to a strong El Nino and storms that blew Asian birds ashore on western Alaska’s Attu Island.There are loose Big Year rules set by the American Birding Association. You can count birds spotted or heard in the United States and Canada but not Hawaii, the Bahamas, Greenland, Mexico or the Caribbean. About 675 species are typically found in the designated area.Big Years rely on the honor system: No witnesses or photographs must be produced as evidence. There are no prizes, just bragging rights.The key to doing well is to move quickly and chase down rare avian visitors from Mexico, Asia and Europe. It requires dedication, planning, tenacity, hard work, birding skills and lots of luck. It also costs money. Komito spent an estimated $140,000; Levantin, about $60,000; and Miller, more than $31,000.Miller traveled more than 130,000 miles, maxed out five credit cards and borrowed money from his parents. At one point, he lived on pretzels and peanut butter for three days. He paid off the last credit card in 2004.In 1998, Miller was newly divorced and chasing birds was his personal therapy. It was harder back then, Miller said. He did his Big Year with no cell phone, no laptop computer, no GPS gear. Today, getting timely word about rare species is easier with social media and websites with rare bird alerts, he said.That Hollywood picked up on the story is no big surprise, said Miller, a computer programmer. The book was optioned to DreamWorks Studios in late 2004, but little happened. The film rights were acquired in 2009 by 20th Century Fox.Miller was thrilled to be hired as the birding consultant. He was known on the set as the Bird Guy.The movie does “a nice job capturing the book’s charm,” Miller said.Miller said he was impressed by the filmmakers and the crew seemed impressed by him. “They would come up to me and say, ‘So you’re THE Greg Miller,’ ” he said with a laugh.StarstruckHe even went birding with Black, other cast and crew members in Vancouver’s Stanley Park before filming started, although the initial Miller-Black meeting got off to a rocky start.Black approached Miller and introduced himself. The star-struck Miller just froze, unable to even respond to Black’s introduction.Black seemed more interested in scoping out Miller and seeing what makes him tick than in spotting birds in the rain. “He said I was the first real-life person that he’d ever had to really emulate,” Miller said.Miller, who grew up in
Holmes County and began birding as a youngster, said he actually got a few movie crew members hooked on birding.There’s even an original tune called, what else, The Big Year. It was done by Avram Shaff, a film crew member and musician who relied on Miller’s memoirs for the lyrics. The country song didn’t make the movie, but it is available on iTunes.Miller, who survived a 2001 bout with leukemia, appears at bird festivals and still does some guiding. He said he is hoping to get through the final editing and appear in the film as an extra. He is also hoping for a consulting credit at the end of the movie. “Those are my vanity goals,” he said.He hopes to go to Hollywood for the premiere, although he has heard nothing yet about opening night.He intends to wear a tuxedo, although he threatened to come dressed as bird-watcher.Miller has a website and birding blog at www.gregmillerbirding.com.
Bob Downing can be reached at 330-996-3745 or bdowning@thebeaconjournal.com.