Portrait of an American mountaineering film maker

Back in the day:Young Oakley with Pa.

Oakley Anderson-Moore isn’t the stereotypical film-industry type. Young and petite with fair skin, fiery red hair, and tortoise Ray-Bans, her attitude is more down-to-earth than Hollywood. But Oakley’s ambition, vision, and dedication may soon be gaining her a place in the spotlight.

As I sat with Oakley in a Costa Mesa cafe, she told me about her art—filmmaking—her creative process, and the documentary project that’s taken over the last four years of her life. Oakley’s feature-length documentary, The Last Wild Mountain: Portrait of the American Climber, is now in the final editing stages. The film follows ‘60s and ‘70s rock climbers to tell a countercultural history of sorts, asking the question: What happens when people say no to a life they don’t want, and take off to the fringe of society?

Inspired by her rock-climbing dad’s crazy stories, Oakley—a Lake Forest resident—took her UCSD film degree and decided to hit the road and see if they were true. She and her crew travelled the country in a Volkswagen van to interview more than 50 rock-climbing legends for the film, including Royal Robbins, Warren Harding, and Jim Erickson. What she has ended up with is a unique story of adventure and humanity.

When the interviews ended, her real artistic process began: Editing the stories with archival news footage, music, and her own narration to create a cohesive piece that tells a bigger story about the political and cultural climate of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Although Oakley loves writing, theater, and photography, she chose film as her medium because of its unique storytelling ability.

“When you make edits in a film, you’re controlling exactly where the audience looks,” she says. “You cut to a close-up of someone’s face, you put in the music. The way you edit is sort of made to parallel human thought, and we’re so clever; film works with that cleverness.”

One example of Oakley’s understanding of that is her choice to add in small text jokes into the film, a move she says breaks with the normal documentary format: “The film reaches out to the audience and says ‘Hey! I know you’re there!’” she explains. But despite its playfulness, the film also showcases a technical skill and attention to detail. For the interviews, she and her crew set up special lighting to give the subjects a glow as if they were lit by a campfire, mimicking the way the stories would have been told originally. The ability to capture what is normally an intimate, oral storytelling tradition in an artful way has earned Oakley props from the rock climbing community.

“Documentary is rewarding in the sense that there are so many people out there that have such amazing stories and no one to tell them to, no voice or vehicle to have those stories heard,” Oakley explains. “I mean, why go to all the trouble of making up a fake world with fake characters when there are so many people and stories that you just can’t make up? The people and their layers are already real.”

Although Oakley says she’s had little time to think of her next project, film has won her heart.

“I think all storytelling is everyone just trying to share the experience of being a person and existing—a relatively lonely phenomenon,” she explains. “You never really know what it’s like to be someone else, and that’s what art is all about, trying to share that experience. Film is just a new form of doing that.”

The Last Wild Mountain screened at the American Alpine Club Library in Colorado this January, and Oakley hopes to enter it into film festivals this year. For more information and to watch clips and trailers, visit rockadventuremovie.com.

Alexandra Baird