[Bev Klingensmith] This is Bing. He is my fourth generation Great Dane. His great-grandma was my first champion. So, I’ve had multiple generations of these guys along with some others ones. Bing is an AKC champion as well. He also has some performance titles. He has some obedience and rally titles and some other titles to go along behind his name too.

DMOTC, Des Moines Obedience Training Club, I enjoy teaching. First place, I started taking classes with my first Great Dane. Most of them are fairly soft, meaning when you’re in training they don’t require a heavy hand, they require firmness, but not heavy hands. 

Well, my love for dogs and photography has probably always been there. So, I specialize in dogs when I do photography, kind of combining my two most expensive hobbies. 

(laughter)

I had work featured in several dog calendars. I have been featured in some international publications. Probably my most common thing is portrait work of dogs and sometimes their owners too. I've been on the cover of one calendar of Great Dane puppies. I have had other Great Danes featured in local commercials, but for the movie one of the producers had emailed me and when I initially got the email I actually deleted it. They were talking about filming in New York and I'm in Iowa and I just didn't think it was realistic for my life. They wanted a Harlequin Great Dane, which is a white dog with black patches. They needed him to be in tact still, which is to not be neutered. And the dog had to have a training in temperament to deal with all the rigors of filming a movie, which is a lot. And I was like, you know, I probably should reach back out and at least try to point them in the right direction. I have several friends and Danes all over the country, so I thought I could point them in the right direction with somebody on the East Coast with a Dane. But through talking to them, I realized it was a really cool sounding project. So, I went ahead and submitted Bing's photos for consideration and they liked him well enough to fly out to Iowa to meet us. So, the film is The Friend. It stars Naomi Watts and Bill Murray. And yeah, so the film deals with grief a lot. It's dealing with Naomi's character. Her mentor, friend was Bill Murray, but he does die and it is by a suicide, so it is kind of a heavy subject and they handled it well. And the dog, Bing, he was owned by Bill's character, willed the dog to Naomi's character unbeknownst to her. And it is very touching. Yeah, I had never been a part of anything like that. I had no idea how movie sets really worked. So, January of 2024 we drove out to New York. They put us up in a house in Staten Island for the three months that we lived there. And we did most of our filming in and around Manhattan. We worked with Naomi in her home. And that was really important that they, you know, it had to look real and Naomi had to be comfortable with him. We started inside and then we eventually progressed to having her walk him outside. Naomi would be walking him and people would come up to her and ask her about the dog and not even realize they were talking to Naomi Watts. And I always thought that was kind of funny. 

Anybody he interacted with, we would do a little advanced prep work with them to make sure they were comfortable with the dog and he was comfortable with them, so he wasn't first meeting them like in front of the camera. A lot of the behaviors he needed, he already had. A lot of it was just general obedience of being able to sit or lay down or do a recall or walk on a leash. However, a lot of people, well that's not very hard. Well, he also had to do that a bunch of times and in crazy circumstances with camera and crew and everything right up in your space and things moving around. So, really the whole filming was very much structured around Bing's comfort and they were very flexible on a lot of that. But it also went incredibly fast, the three months kind of flew by. 

We got to participate in three film festivals. The first one we did was the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. It was really fun to when the credits go and you see your own name in the credits and the whole audience claps when they saw Bing's name. That was really fun. After Telluride, we were home for a couple of days and then took off for Toronto and we did the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival. Going into these private parties with my dog, very surreal. And so we're meeting people like Mark Hamill and J-Lo and Demi Moore. Naomi introduces me to Will Ferrell and I'm just like, this is my life right now? So, pretty much everything Naomi was doing or Bill was doing, we were doing too. We spent about a week in New York. We did the premiere. We did the Fallon show. We did Drew Barrymore, Good Morning America, The View. I really enjoyed our local celebrity status for a while. We did several interviews around here. Bleeker Street, who is the distribution company, they bought out a theater for me to do a special friends and family event. Bill Murray came to that. And then Bill invited us backstage to his concert. And then we went out to the bar with Bill Murray that night too, which was, it was a very surreal experience. 

I don't even think I really could process how that would look and feel and be, even during the filming of the movie. It felt like everything went so fast. We were so incredibly busy. Just very thankful for all the people in my life that allowed this to happen. My husband was here still holding down the fort. And then it came out and you started doing some Q&As and start realizing all of these people are so into my dog and a dog that you love so much, to know that they're going to live on, yeah really cool. 

It was definitely a once in a lifetime experience and opportunity. 

Nash just turned eight and Bing is almost eight, so we have slowed down a little bit on what we do. He still demands his daily runs multiple times and he's kind of exceeded a lot of goals I had. Otherwise yeah, just a lot of lounging and being a dog.