STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
A documentary feature about a surreal 33-hour standoff between the FBI and an elaborately constructed bomb placed in a Lake Tahoe casino will be shown Thursday at the Sun Valley Opera House.
“I Got Bombed at Harvey’s,” the latest in the Sun Valley Film Festival’s Monthly Movie series, will start at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, March 26, at the Sun Valley Opera House.
The film, which is fresh off the screens at Austin’s SXSW, references an event in 1980 when a bomb packed with 1,000 pounds of dynamite was wheeled into Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe with a handwritten demand for $3 million.
The bomb was so intricate it was considered virtually undefeatable. And the brazen extortion plot was conceived by a mastermind who was convinced he couldn’t be caught.
The story, told through the eyes of the bomb builder’s son, goes beyond a true crime saga to reveal an intimate portrait of a family trapped in the orbit of a volatile domineering father.
And in the hands of co-directors Bryan Storkel and Amy Bandlien, it becomes a story of generational damage and hard-won redemption as the son confronts the PTSD left in the aftermath to reclaim his own future.
Tickets for the 93-minute film are available at https://svffyearround.eventive.org/schedule/69b30fe53c5a763055128a8b.