Mount St. Helens 'changed my life,' says Camano filmmaker
Forty years ago, Michael Lienau was 20, a young man bent on a moviemaking career in Hollywood. Mount St. Helens, and his survival there just days after its catastrophic eruption, rewrote that script.
“Mount St. Helens is what changed my life,” said Lienau, now a 60-year-old filmmaker and father of nine living on Camano Island. “It was very humbling.”
Lienau is the producer and director of “The Fire Below Us: Remembering Mount St. Helens,” a 1997 documentary which aired on National Geographic’s Explorer TV series. Global Net Productions, the company he heads, also created “Cascadia: The Hidden Fire,” featured on PBS, and a number of other films.
He’s a good storyteller focused on real-world disaster and survival — with a compelling tale of his own.
By 1980, Lienau’s camera work had already been aired on TV news. Raised in Klamath Falls, Oregon, his love of filmmaking started at age 9. He used a Kodak Brownie 8mm movie camera. By 17, he was shooting news footage for KVAL, a TV station in Eugene. And there were those big-time Hollywood dreams.
“Then May 18 happened,” Lienau recalled Tuesday.
A once picture-perfect 9,677-foot peak in southwest Washington, often called the Mount Fuji of America, St. Helens blew its top when it erupted on May 18, 1980.
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