LANDER — People who want to play the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” trivia game have a surprising way they can boost their personal score to a mere two degrees. All it takes is a simple coffee run to the Lander Bake Shop anytime the owner happens to be taking orders or chatting with customers.
Brian Harms recently bought the Lander Bake Shop, a classic small-town hangout where locals trade gossip over lattes and hikers fuel up on croissants.
It’s a town better known for trailheads than red carpets, but Harms’ resume reads like a Hollywood highlight reel. He spent decades in television and film, including stints as art director and production designer, with a front-row seat to making some of America’s most-watched shows.
Now he’s pouring all that experience into coffee, croissants and building community back home in Lander.
That’s high-caliber, creative talent returning home to invest in Main Street, but you won’t see any sign of the Hollywood plot twist as Harms cheerfully takes your order or asks you how your food was. He is low-key about his Hollywood years.
You’d have no clue he once worked directly with Kevin Bacon for three weeks on the television series “The Closer” while he was its art director.
Or that he spent more than a decade shaping the entire look and set of “Grey’s Anatomy,” America’s longest-running primetime medical drama, which recently clinched its 23rd season.
Other movie credits Harms can claim during a 20-plus-year career include the independent film “Life of the Party,” television movie “Protect and Serve,” NBC drama “Las Vegas,” and TNT crime drama “Leverage.”
Not A California Transplant
Harms is not a Hollywood transplant, however. He’s a native son, born and raised in Lander.
He grew up doing music, football, basketball, and track when he was in school, and skied at Jackson Hole any chance he got.
“We would mow lawns all summer to afford the season pass in Jackson,” Harms told Cowboy State Daily. “And then we’d drive to Jackson to ski.”
Coming out of high school, Harms figured his best bet was to shoot for a job with Wyoming Game and Fish.
“I wanted to be outdoors,” he said. “I wanted to be active. So I majored in biology resource management.”
But he also happened to earn a music scholarship from Central Wyoming College in Riverton, which put his feet on an entirely different path.
“I was a biology major doing all these music classes and groups to fulfill the scholarship requirements,” he said with a chuckle. “I was in the concert band, the jazz band, and the jazz choir. And then working in the recording studio and doing sound for the theater.”
Once the theater program found out his dad was the woodworking teacher for shop classes in Lander, Harms was drafted for set building.
That’s when he began to realize where his true interests might lay.
“I had almost enough credits to graduate biology, but more than enough to graduate music,” Harms said “So I got my degree in whatever that was, general arts and sciences with the music concentration.”
That summer, he worked for the Idaho Repertory Theater and then went to Missoula, where he built a set for the Montana Repertory Theatre.
Still, it’s a long way from the Idaho or Montana Repertory Theater and television shows like "Grey’s Anatomy."
More Grit Than Glamor
There were no great leaps to fame or fortune for Harms. Instead, it was a series of small, incremental steps — more grit than glamor.
It also took a huge leap of faith.
After his first summer gigs went so well, Harms kept chasing opportunities to stretch his skills and widen his world.
He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Missoula with a focus on scenic design, then packed up his portfolio for a major job fair in Chicago.
It was run like a science fair. Harms set up a display of his work, then left the room. It was a cattle call where you only met anyone if they chose your table.
Harms was nervous the entire time this was going on. But he ultimately got a call back for 13 different grad schools.
The one he picked, though, wasn’t the one who wooed him the strongest. It was the woman who made him explain all his decisions and talk about his process.
“It wasn’t like interrogative,” Harms said. “It was inquisitive. So it was a really great conversation.”
Finally she told Harms that she would allow him to come to her school only on one condition. He had to come visit it first.
That spring break, Harms did just that. He drove all the way to Pennsylvania from Montana — and broke down partway there.
“I had to rent a car in Kansas City to finish the trip,” he said with a chuckle. “So I went to Penn State, and it was fantastic, It was just the best program. I just won an alumni award last year where they flew me and my wife out for a big, big award.”
A Naive Leap Of Faith
After grad school, Harms did regional theaters in Illinois and New York. Then he returned to Montana, where he met his wife.
By now, the itch to try Hollywood was too strong to ignore. The couple saved $4,000 then loaded up their car and moved to California.
“It’s funny looking back just how naive and hopeful we were,” Harms said. “That $4,000 barely got us into an apartment there. By the time you paid the deposit — they want first month’s, last month’s rent and that was about all in just to get into the apartment.”
Hollywood, meanwhile, did not roll out any sort of red carpet for Harms. He started out with jobs that don’t make any headlines. He drafted for other designers, did some model building, and took as much non-union television work as he could get.
All of the jobs were long on hours and short on certainty.
“I would do three days of drafting for this show,” he said. “They would do like two weeks of model building.”
His first big break was a show filming under the title “Glory Days,” as an independent film.
“I wasn’t in the union, so I wasn’t eligible to work on union shows,” he said. “But that small film started non-union and I was on it for more than 30 days before they flipped.”
It was a common industry tactic to start non-union to save money, Harms learned, then flip once filming began to avoid picketing.
And it finally gave Harms his ticket into the union. All he had to do was pay six weeks of his salary for his initiation fee. That was a tough leap considering Harms’ work to date had been mostly odd jobs.
“But all the guidance was when you get the opportunity, you better take it, even if it’s going to be a big financial hit, because it’s going to pay off,” he said. “And coincidentally, that movie starred Ellen Pompeo.”
The movie was one of the last things she did before taking a role with "Grey’s Anatomy."
“From that point on, I was eligible to apply for all of these jobs,” Harms said. “And my first union TV job was what we call blue-collar TV, like with Jeff Foxworthy.”
Matchbox Theater With Kevin Bacon
The Kevin Bacon connection came a little later on the set of the “The Closer.” Harms had been brought on as an art director in 2006, which stars Kyra Sedgwick, who is married to Kevin Bacon.
As a result of that, he met Bacon many times. But he also worked with him closely for three weeks when Bacon directed one of the episodes.
“It was a fun one,” Harms said. “Because the episode had like a kind of car chase scene. It wasn’t like a high-speed car chase, but it was just one car cutting off the other car. So we were trying to work through all the logistics of the scene and the camera angles.”
Harms built out the entire set first using Matchbox-size cars, which had him calling it Matchbox Theater from that point on.
Being the art director meant Bacon wasn’t just a name in a party game. He was someone Harms worked with every day on the complex production puzzles they were trying to solve day by day. Sets had to be built, dressed, and redressed and locations transformed into believable backdrops for tense interrogations and high-stakes chases.
Working on the set of “The Closer” helped establish Harms in Hollywood, but has also created a fun piece of trivia that few people can match. He’s just one degree from Kevin Bacon.
A Shot In The Dark
The COVID-19 pandemic put Harms out of work — like a lot of others in the film industry.
“I went back to my portfolio and put together a mailer — a little mini portfolio with a DVD of some of the stuff I’d done,” he said. “And I spent quite a bit of money to put all this together and to send them out to try and get some new introductions and get a job.”
Harms waited weeks and weeks, but nothing seemed to come of it at all.
“Eventually, I got back to some work,” he said. “Then, one day, I get a phone call from this gentleman who said he’d been holding on to this thing for a while.”
Harms hadn’t sent the portfolio to this individual originally, but someone else had shared it with him.
The man turned out to be with "Grey’s Anatomy," and he invited Harms to consider joining the production design team.
“They were replacing their art director,” Harms said. “And they had just finished season five, so I came in and had the interview and had a second interview with their producers and then got hired. So I started season six as the art director.”
Domino Days
As “Grey’s Anatomy” Art Director, Harms worked on roughly 150 episodes before stepping into a larger role heading up Production Design, where he did at least another 150 episodes before deciding it was time to return home to Lander to help care for his aging parents.
The schedule for the show was relentless. A typical episode was shot in about 10 days, but a new shoot started every eight days.
“So you’d have a crossover of double days where you’d have two film crews and sometimes more,” he said. “So you might have one crew out on location, one crew on this stage, or this crew’s on this stage, and their next set’s being finalized here.”
With seven sound stages, that gave Harms just enough room to stay ahead of an ambitious shooting schedule set up like a series of dominos. Tip one over, and they’d all fall down.
“These were massive, massive spaces with multiple sets on stage,” he said. “So the moving pieces — it’s enormous.”
'Hey, You’re Lenny Kravitz!'
Bacon’s not the only ultra famous star Harms worked with during his long-running Hollywood career.
“You never knew who might walk onto the set,” Harms said. “So one day, I walk in and there’s Lenny Kravitz sitting in the director’s chair.”
Kravitz is a Grammy-award winning American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and actor.
Harms couldn’t resist saying, “Hey, you’re Lenny Kravitz!”
Kravitz said simply, “I know.”
Another person he saw frequently was Debbie Allen’s sister, Phylicia Rashad, best known for her iconic role as Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show.
“The only other person I’d say was as famous or more famous than Kevin Bacon was Denzel Washington,” Harms said. “He directed an episode of 'Grey’s,' so I got to spend weeks with Denzel.”
Working with Washington was an amazing experience, Harms said.
“He’s a storyteller to his core,” he said. “Like he would — because again, I spent like full days with just hours and hours with him — and we’d like walk through a set and we’d be waiting for Debbie to finish filming something. So we’d just be hanging out.”
While they were waiting, Washington would often tell stories to pass the time.
“He’d talk about an uncle of his, but you’d see, as he’s telling the story, he just transforms,” Harms said. “It’s just natural to him. So I would just be transfixed.”
Bacon, in contrast, was higher energy, “just a positive fun guy.”
“He played for our wrap party for ‘The Closer,’” Harms said. “So like at the end of the season, they had a talent show. So you could go and perform your talent, but you were up against Kevin Bacon and the Bacon Brothers.”
A Place In History
Harms describes his Hollywood days as a mix of adrenaline and hyper-focus.
Working with people like Washington or Bacon didn’t change the fundamentals of his job, but it still added something of an edge to everything, sharpening his focus.
As did the knowledge that he was working on a show like "Grey’s Anatomy," which is still a cultural touchstone in America.
“I think the nice part about it is, we knew it while we were in it,” Harms said. “And what was fun was we used to have a Thursday lunch screening every week and the crew, we’d cater lunch, and show the episode on a big screen. That way we could enjoy how it turned out with the team.”
It was a celebration each time.
“From what you originally built and intended, it only gets enhanced at every level,” Harms said. “Like when the visual effects are applied, when you get all of these components coming together, it’s very rarely a disappointment. It’s like ‘Wow, that really came together.’ And you add the music, and it’s always that much more evocative.”
Sometimes You Can Go Home
Harms didn’t forget his roots in Hollywood, though. He came back home regularly, including every summer.
It was while sitting with his dad on the back porch one summer night that he realized it was time for a change in his life.
“It became very evident that I might never get the opportunity to have any more conversations with him,” Harms said. “He had Alzheimer’s and it was really progressing. I just realized how short, how limited the window was at that point.”
He decided that night when he went back to LA, he would ask his boss to start looking for his replacement.
“Both of my parents died within a year of that,” Harms said. “But I was able to be here. That was a really heavy winter, and there was a lot of snow. I shoveled a lot of snow and took my mom to her appointments and the grocery store and spent time with my dad.”
Somewhere in that timeframe, the Lander Coffee Company drive-through came up for sale, and Harms decided he wanted to buy it. If he was going to stay in Lander, he needed something to do.
Then the owner of the Lander Bake Shop, who had been helped him get started with the Lander Coffee Company, decided to sell out as well.
“A lot of it enhanced what we’re able to do with the drive-through,” Harms said. “And logistically, it would help support just storage and preparation and all the things you have to do to keep these businesses running.”
Now his bake shop and drive-through together serve hikers, locals, and tourists in downtown Lander, giving Harms a different kind of production to run — one built around coffee, conversation, and community.
Harms doesn’t yearn for Hollywood at this point, though he still designs a few things on the side to keep his “design muscles” working. He also catches up on new episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy” often.
“The things I miss about LA are the live music and restaurants,” he said. “But I’d rather just travel to other places and see live music and try different restaurants.”
Lander, he has decided, is his home, and where he wants to use his talents from here on out.
All of that to say, anyone who wants to win the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game of life won’t need plane tickets to Hollywood any time soon.
A simple cup of coffee and a few minutes at the counter with Brian Harms, the hometown Wyoming kid who helped build one of television’s most iconic worlds, is all that it will take.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
