John Scott’s family has been working the same patch of ground near Longview since before Alberta was a province. His grandfather and two brothers emigrated from the Orkney Islands off Scotland and staked a homestead there in 1904, a full year before Alberta joined Confederation. John was born in Calgary but spent every spare moment of his childhood on that ranch, and he still lives and works there today.
From Rodeo Extra to Hollywood Stuntman
After high school, John worked odd jobs, including a stint with an Imperial Oil crew that hauled the first drilling rig into the Arctic Circle, but horses always pulled him back. In 1969, word reached the local rodeo community that the Hollywood Western Little Big Man, starring Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway, needed riders for a shoot near Calgary. John signed on as an extra for 25 dollars a day and impressed the crew enough to be promoted to the stunt team at quadruple the pay. That single job convinced him a career in the movies was possible.
Through the 1970s, John worked nearly every Western that came through Alberta, serving as Gene Hackman’s photo double on Prime Cut, head horse wrangler on Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, and wrangler on Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. In 1974 he co-founded Stunts Canada to promote Canadian stunt performers to American producers, and he spent time in Los Angeles learning the technical side of the trade, everything from rigging horses to managing air supply for underwater car stunts.
Putting Alberta on the Map for Western Films
When Alberta launched its first film commission in 1980, John supported the effort, sitting in on meetings and promoting the province at movie trade shows. The payoff came in the years that followed. For the 1990 Japanese production Heaven and Earth, he wrangled roughly 800 horses for a single sequence, believed to be the largest saddlehorse production ever assembled. That success helped bring Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Unforgiven and 1993’s Legends of the Fall to Alberta, the latter filmed partly on the John Scott Ranch after John and producer Murray Ord spent four years convincing director Edward Zwick to shoot in the province. Legends of the Fall went on to win an Oscar for cinematography.
John eventually turned his grandfather’s homestead into John Scott Productions, a working backlot stocked with period wagons, props and set dressing built to make any Western look historically accurate. More than 150 productions have filmed there over three decades, including Unforgiven and The Revenant, and in 2023 the ranch shared the Location of the Year prize at the Global Production Awards. John also lobbied for years toward the Alberta Film and Tax Credit, implemented in 2021, which he credits with the spinoff jobs a single movie dollar can create across hotels, lumberyards and rental agencies.
A Career That Crossed the Pacific and Kept Growing
John’s reputation eventually pulled him outside Alberta as well. In 1999 he was hired for a horse-wrangling job on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy in New Zealand, a rare instance of him working beyond the province he had spent decades promoting. He returned home to keep building Alberta’s film sector, and today holds 67 official credits as a stunt performer and 51 as an animal wrangler. In 2001 he received the David Billington Award from the Alberta Media Production Industries Association for his contributions to the province’s industry, and he remains a longtime donor to the Alberta 4-H program.
A Stampede Fixture and Western Heritage Keeper
Away from film sets, John has spent decades supporting the Calgary Stampede, supplying and training the horses that walk in the annual parade and once organizing a 150-mile procession of 200 bucking horses into downtown Calgary for the Stampede’s Trail of 2000 event. In the 1980s he founded one of Canada’s first steer-riding schools, a pipeline for three generations of Stampede bronc, bareback and bull riders. His honours include the 2007 Alberta Horse Person of the Year award, induction into the Canadian Stunt Hall of Fame in 2022, and the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal (Alberta), also in 2022. Per his official Alberta Order of Excellence profile, John was inducted into the Order in 2025 for his lifetime of work as a rancher, stunt performer and champion of Alberta’s film industry.
John still operates a working ranch, raising cattle, horses and a small herd of bison, including white buffalo, and he is the father of three daughters and grandfather of seven. Now in his 80s, he is currently working on the third seasons of two streaming series, Billy the Kid and My Life with the Walter Boys, both filmed at his ranch. As he puts it, nobody enjoys getting older, but enjoying the work makes up half the battle.
Next time the credits roll on a Western filmed in Alberta, how many of those horses trace back to a ranch outside Longview?
