From Powell Projection Booth to Cold War Drama: Wyoming’s Carl Beyer Helps Bring “Reykjavik” to Life

The original story by David Madison for Cowboy State Daily.

Before he was wrangling budgets in Icelandic gales, Carl Beyer was a 13-year-old kid in Powell threading film through projectors at Valley Cinemas — the drive-in, the big house, the arthouse — watching audiences as much as the movies. From the booth he studied the gasps, the laughter, the chatter in the aisle as the credits rolled, and decided he wanted in on that magic. Decades later, the Wyoming native is a Hollywood producer helping put one of the Cold War’s tensest weekends on the big screen in “Reykjavik,” directed by Michael Russell Gunn and anchored by Jeff Daniels and Jared Harris as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Beyer’s path zigzagged in classic industry fashion. He skipped NYU and UCLA for Montana State because they handed him a camera on day one. After school, he worked his way onto sets — think “Barton Fink,” the first season of “Twin Peaks,” “Batman Returns” — before a stall sent him into the high-art, high-budget world of national commercials. He shot everything from trucks to Ronald McDonald, bought a house off Grimace, and eventually realized he missed movies sometime between a product shot and a glass tube with a tampon expanding inside it. That was the cue to go back.

What never left him was Wyoming. He still calls himself a Wyomingite, credits the state’s strange beauty and stranger characters for shaping his tastes, and carries a mental scrapbook of names that sound like tall-tale heroes — Duckie, Red, Cut Across Shorty. The stories he didn’t collect haunt him too, like the quiet Powell man who survived the Bataan Death March and slipped through town on the fringes. That curiosity — who people are, what they carry — shows up in the work he does now.

“Reykjavik” drills into a weekend in 1986 when two rivals almost rewrote nuclear history. The production leaned into authenticity, down to the actual chairs in the actual building where Reagan and Gorbachev met. The winds outside were less cooperative. Forty-five miles an hour is a nuisance in most places; for a kid who grew up under Wyoming skies, it’s just another workday. Producer John Logan Pierson, who has Jackson ties of his own, likes to say the mantra on this show was “best prep wins.” On an island, you can’t buy your way out of problems. You plan, you adapt, you keep moving.

Beyer’s specialty is line producing — the pencil-sharp, boots-on-the-ground job that turns scripts into schedules, budgets into payrolls, and chaos into a shooting day. He’s the one who hires the hundred-odd craftspeople who become a small city, then stretches to five hundred when the circus rolls in. He’s also the guy who delivers bad news with a grin when it’s time to cut the shot everyone loves. He once told Keith Richards to shut the F up and lived to laugh about it. He once drove Billy Idol’s motorhome like it was a grain truck and learned the hard way about long tails and short poles. In Iceland, someone handed him a wide-eyed pony and a helmet and he discovered, painfully, that Western saddles and Icelandic ones don’t share a language.

The new film lands in a moment when nuclear storylines are back on screens and Wyoming’s place in that map is hard to ignore. F.E. Warren Air Force Base and the 90th Missile Wing sit in the state’s backyard; the politics and the hardware are never far away. “Reykjavik” captures the flip side of that power — the fragile, human conversation that can pull nations back from a cliff. Beyer loves the almosts as much as the outcomes. He talks about the scene when the talks nearly killed every nuke on Earth, then stumbled over a single word. Close enough to feel the heat, not close enough to change the world. That tension is the movie.

Ask him what Wyoming gave him and he comes back to opportunity and oddness. The space to try things. The freedom to fail and try again. The appetite for stories that don’t straighten themselves out. He’s still the teenager in the booth, ears open as people file past with fresh opinions. Only now he’s on the other side of the glass, helping build the experience they’ll argue about in the parking lot.

“Reykjavik” is expected next year. The wind will be real. The stakes will be higher than any stunt. And somewhere in the credits, tucked between insurance notices and camera rentals, you’ll find the name of a Powell kid who never stopped watching the audience.