‘Nomadland’ is an Oscar favorite. Here’s the Kansas Citian who helped make it happen

Update: Peter Spears and his fellow “Nomadland” producers won the best picture Academy Award on Sunday. Read the story here.

Viewers are embracing the itinerant idealism of “Nomadland,” the acclaimed, Oscar-nominated film about a woman who travels around the country while living in a van.

But for producer Peter Spears, that idea was a foreign concept.

“Famously amongst my friends and family members, I was the only Eagle Scout who never managed to go camping,” Spears says.

“Growing up in Kansas, you drive across I-70 to try to get through as fast as you can to Denver or St. Louis. You really aren’t paying attention to the little roads that go off to the sides. I kind of lived my life like that in general, wherever that was. One of the lovely gifts of the movie has been the ability to stop for a moment and wonder what lies down a different path, the road less traveled.”

“Nomadland” is providing a road toward new cinematic rewards for Spears, 55. His previous feature, “Call Me by Your Name,” earned him an Oscar nomination when the indie hit became a long shot best picture contender. On Monday, “Nomadland” was nominated for six Academy Awards.

Spears shares the best picture nomination with the film’s other producers, including director Chloé Zhao and star Frances McDormand (who was nominated for best actress as well). Zhao is also up for best director, adapted screenplay and editing. And the film was nominated for cinematography. Many observers see it as a front-runner in several of those categories, including best picture.

“I don’t feel like it’s a race as much as an opportunity for more people to see the movie than would have seen it otherwise,” says Spears, a native of Kansas City who was raised in Overland Park and graduated from Shawnee Mission South High School. “This is a smallish movie and would in a normal time be only at an arthouse cinema.”

Because of the pandemic, the drama is already available on Hulu, as well as some Kansas City area theaters.

The tale centers on Fern (McDormand), a recent widow whose life is further upended when she loses her job and community after a plant closure turns tiny Empire, Nevada, into a ghost town. Unmoored by family or career, she abandons her belongings, hops in an Econoline van and heads across America seeking seasonal work.

The film has met with near-universal praise (it sits at 94% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), commending the performance of McDormand and writing/directing of Beijing native Zhao. Tribune News Service critic Katie Walsh wrote, “‘Nomadland’ feels simultaneously like both a memory and a prophecy.”

“When Frances and I optioned the book in 2017, it felt like a document of something historical that had transpired,” Spears says.

“Obviously the recession of 2008 — and the story taking place in 2011 — was inherent to this sense of looking backward. But something about it also felt very prescient. I don’t think we could have looked into a crystal ball and seen how incredibly prescient it would become by the time the movie was released.”

How ‘Nomadland’ came to be

Spears became involved with the project when his husband, prominent talent agent Brian Swardstrom, ran across a copy of Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century.” Swardstrom also forwarded it to McDormand, whom he represents. Spears and the actress decided to partner up and find a way to turn the nonfiction book into a narrative film.

“Jessica is an incredible journalist who did a really deep dive into this community, living amongst them for a couple years and picking up itinerant jobs,” he says. “But it focuses primarily as an arc on the story of Linda May, who (plays herself) in the movie.”

Spears, McDormand and Zhao met on the afternoon of the 2018 Independent Spirit Awards, where they were each nominees — for “Call Me by Your Name,” “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” and “The Rider,” respectively. (“Nomadland” is a nominee this year.)

“We all got together over a cup of coffee and talked about the book and the movie possibilities,” he recalls. “Chloé was the one who said, ‘Perhaps the movie isn’t an exact adaptation of the book. What if we did a hybrid where we had real actors with nonperformers?’”

The next day, Zhao jumped in her car and headed for Arizona to do research at the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, the largest gathering of nomads in the world. Meanwhile, McDormand started developing her character.

“Frances had this dream of when she turned 60, she was going to give it all up and hit the road in an RV with a pack of Lucky Strikes and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and change her name to Fern,” Spears says.

“Nomadland” ended up a collision of those concrete and hypothetical tales, a rumination of the displaced surviving in shared places. Filming took the small crew to Arizona, California, Nebraska, Nevada and South Dakota.

Spears remembers preparing to film a key scene: “We’d been on the road for many weeks and months in the arid area of the desert, and finally we made it to California and the northern coast. It was the first time all of us were together in a domestic setting because we’d been in vans on the road. Brian, my husband, came to visit the set that day by chance.”

The scene called for McDormand’s character to spend Thanksgiving at a newfound friend’s home. For this cozy gathering, Spears got to enjoy acting in the sequence opposite his Oscar-winning star as a character named Peter.

“The best part of moviemaking is a family that’s created and the family you find along the way,” he says.

Actor and producer

It’s a throwback to his initial days in Hollywood, where he moved in 1988 to pursue acting after graduating from Northwestern University. He eventually stayed busy in episodic TV, including featured roles in “Friends” and “Quantum Leap.” He made a similar appearance in “Call Me by Your Name,” which starred Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer. Spears played a family friend whose on-screen husband was portrayed by the author of the novel.

But Spears emphasizes he’s not intentionally producing pictures merely so he can act in them.

“It just sort of comes by happenstance,” he says.

“In ‘Call Me By Your Name,’ it was the result of another actor who didn’t show up, and I could fit the suit they needed him to wear. In this case, since we weren’t a big crew, we all wear multiple hats. As producers, we’re often helping with art direction or locations. So we all did lots of different things, and every once in a while, you get grabbed because ‘we need bodies.’”

While the 2021 Oscars, to be held April 25, may be entirely conducted as a virtual ceremony, Spears did attend in person when receiving his previous nomination.

“At Shawnee Mission South, we’d all get together in the theater department to watch the show. So to be there that many years later with a project was very cool,” he says.

“I think my favorite memory of the Oscars was just walking in. Even though you’re not supposed to have your phone on, I had secretly turned mine on as I walked down the aisles in a ‘Candid Camera’ kind of way, showing a lot of the other folks who were there. My kids and family back home were getting this FaceTime feed.”

Regardless of the amount of nominations and awards his film earns, Spears is most appreciative of how such honors put a relatively modest feature (made for $5 million) on viewers’ collective radars.

“As I’ve seen on social media, I’ve been stunned by this sort of democratization of people seeing the movie. And it’s not just an arthouse crowd that’s seeing it — a whole spectrum of folks are having this experience and having the movie resonate with them,” he says.

It is certainly resonating during awards season, coming up a winner with AFI, the Golden Globes and several film critics groups (including the Kansas City Film Critics Circle). And it is resonating with audiences.

Spears admits it wasn’t until he watched the movie with an audience that the full impact of it reverberated with him.

“I understood it was about community, but I don’t know that I understood how much it was about kindness,” he says.

“The message of the movie is compassion. It’s about finding one’s way and finding sanctuary to oneself but also the need for community and that shared human experience that connects us all.”

Does he believe America is as kind as it used to be?

“People are responding to the kindness in the movie in a way that feels like they were hungry for it,” he responds.

Once the awards season winds down, Spears begins work on an adaptation of Christopher Castellani’s novel “Leading Men.” He describes it as a chronicle of Tennessee Williams and longtime lover Frank Merlo (who died of lung cancer at age 40), focusing on the time they spent as expatriates living in Italy and while making “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

“What I’m interested in for the projects I develop is the universality of the story,” he says. “Like with ‘Call Me by Your Name,’ some would say it’s a queer romance on first look, but what most people came to ultimately realize was it was really just a story about first love. There was a universality to that which wasn’t so different.”

The same can be said for “Nomadland.”

“It’s a very specific story of these people living in this very specific way,” Spears says. “When you read about it, it’s like, ‘Gosh, it feels so other.’ Then you see the movie, and you’re like, ‘It’s not so other. It feels like me. I know these people. Perhaps I am these people.’”

Jon Niccum is a filmmaker, freelance writer and author of “The Worst Gig: From Psycho Fans to Stage Riots, Famous Musicians Tell All.”

This story was originally published March 15, 2021 at 10:12 AM with the headline "‘Nomadland’ is an Oscar favorite. Here’s the Kansas Citian who helped make it happen."