New Role for Chaske Spencer

Chaske Spencer has signed on to play the lead in "Winter in the Blood"

Chaske will be playing the lead role of "Virgil First Raise" in the film adaptation of Winter in the Blood.

About the film:

Virgil First Raise wakes with a shiner and a hangover in a roadside ditch on the hardscrabble plains of Montana. As he rises to face the scorching day he sees a vision of his father lying dead at his feet. Impossible-- his father froze to death in a snowdrift years earlier. The vision fades.

Nursing an old injury, Virgil limps back to the small ranch that he runs with his mother, Teresa, and his ancient Grandmother. Teresa tells Virgil that his young wife, Agnes, has taken his rifle and electric razor and left for town. Virgil seems more concerned about the gun than the girl because, as he tells Grandmother, “it meant something once.”

Virgil is frozen too. Stuck in a numbed-out existence he is haunted by childhood memories-- some happy, some tragic-- of his beloved big brother Mose. The most painful memory is of a roundup the boys attempted just before the onslaught of winter. Adolescent high jinks, a stubborn cow and a freak accident combined to crush Virgil’s knee—- and kill Mose.

The memory of that death, coupled with ridicule from his mother’s hilarious but overbearing suitor, Lame Bull, and Teresa’s warning that there is “no longer a place for you here”, prompts Virgil to leave the ranch on a quest to retrieve his runaway bride and stolen possessions.

Virgil’s search for Agnes in the cowboy-and-Indian towns of Montana’s “Hi-line” leads him to the Airplane Man, an eccentric outsider who recruits him for a murky smuggling operation. Virgil’s payment is a car that runs and a boozy bedroom skirmish with Malvina, a beguiling barmaid. As Virgil and Airplane Man embark on this ill-conceived scheme two mysterious men in suits-- Feds? Corporate goons?—- shadow them.

About the film makers:

Alex and Andrew Smith are the power behind the film. THE BROTHERS SMITH co-wrote and co-directed the award-winning feature film, The Slaughter Rule, starring Ryan Gosling and David Morse, and Amy Adams. Premiering in the Main Competition at the Sundance Film Festival, and continuing on to be one of only two American features to screen at the prestigious 2002 New Directors/New Films series at the Museum of Modern Art. The Slaughter Rule screened at dozens of film festivals, garnering top awards at the Santa Fe, Nashville and Sydney Film Festivals, as well as the Critic’s Prize at the Stockholm International Film Festival. Released in theaters in spring 2003 by Cowboy Pictures, The Slaughter Rule was released on home video by the Sundance Channel, and is currently featured on Showtime, IFC and Sundance cable channels.

KEN WHITE is a poet, screenwriter, and proud member of the Screen Actor’s Guild, who received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. His poetry has appeared in The Boston Review, The Tusculum Review, and is forthcoming in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. His screenplay Blight, co-written with John Jackson Braider, was optioned by Titan films in association with Sony and later by JML films. He has also written screen adaptations of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (with J.J. Braider), and the seminal medieval Irish epic The Tain Bo Cuailgne – The Cattle Raid of Cooley. He is currently working on a new script, The Wereman.

For More Info go to http://www.winterinthebloodfilm.com/