Idaho Gov. Butch Otter (R) acted out a small role in a 1990’s Western shot in his state, but he probably never expected that it would later be edited into a film described as soft-core porn.
The Idaho Falls Post Register reported Friday that Otter had a credited, speaking role as a corrupt sheriff in what the paper described as a “low-budget horse opera.” The Idaho Statesman had reported back in 1993, when the shoot began, that Otter offered his horses to the film crew and then was given a bit part because director John Harwood was so impressed by his authentic Idaho looks.
Then the film company, Western Image Group, went bankrupt, according to the Post Register. The rights to the film, originally title “Roundup,” were sold and the project was re-edited and released in 1997 as “A Time To Revenge.”
Another unrated version was released in 2003, which the newspaper described as featuring “more than 10 minutes of sex scenes that can only be described as soft-core pornography — simulated sex with women shown in full frontal nudity.”
Spokesmen for Otter told the Post Register on Wednesday that those sex scenes didn’t appear in the original script. They said the governor had no knowledge of them until contacted by the newspaper.
“We don’t know that the same people making it when the governor was involved in it had anything to do with the product that got on the street,” Otter spokesman Mark Warbis said. “We don’t know what happened to it and there was no reason … we should know that.”
The Post Register pointed out that Otter only appears in three scenes — one of which has his character break up a bar fight — and is fully clothed in all of them.
Otter was quoted by the Idaho Statesman in 1998, when the film got its foreign release, as joking that the bit part would raise his international profile.
“I fully expect somebody to come up to me and say, ‘Sheriff Butch!’ Sheriff Butch! I want your autograph,’ ” he said at the time.
