WESTWORLD, PART 4: A Tour of Old Tucson

We spent our last day in Arizona at the Old Tucson movie studio, an awe-inspiring destination for any western fan. The studio was originally constructed for the 1940 film ARIZONA, starring Jean Arthur and William Holden, and has been used in dozens of films and TV shows since then. Over the years, the look of the place has changed quite a bit. Film productions are generally allowed to make any visual changes that suit their needs, and a massive fire in 1995 destroyed nearly half of the original structures.

Visitors today, however, can still see the foundations of the very first buildings, used in ARIZONA. According to historian Paul J. Lawton, our tour guide and author of two books on the history of the Old Tucson studio, no expense was spared to make this place look as dingy and dangerous as the real Tucson was in the late 1860s. For the sake of comparison, read the following historical narrative by J. Ross Brown and then take a look at the opening scenes of ARIZONA:

“If the world were searched over I suppose there could not be found so degraded a set of villains as then formed the principal society of Tucson. Every man went armed to the teeth, and street-fights and bloody affrays were of daily occurrence. Since the coming of the California Volunteers, two years ago, the state of things in this delightful metropolis has materially changed. The citizens who are permitted to live here at all still live very much in the Greaser style – the tenantable houses having been taken away from them for the use of the officers and soldiers who are protecting their property from the Apaches. But then, they have claims for rent, which they can probably sell for something when any body comes along disposed to deal in that sort of paper. Formerly they were troubled a good deal about the care of their cattle and sheep: now they have no trouble at all; the cattle and sheep have fallen into the hands of the Apaches, who have become unusually bold in their depredations; and the pigs which formerly roamed unmolested about the streets during the day, and were deemed secure in the back-yards of nights, have become a military necessity. Eggs are scarce, because the hens that used to lay them cackle no more in the hen form. Drunkenness has been effectually prohibited by written order limiting the sale of spirituous liquors to three specific establishments, the owners of which pay a license for hospital purposes, the fund whereof goes to the benefit of the sick and disabled who have fallen a sacrifice to their zeal in the pursuit of hostile Indians. Gambling is also much discountenanced; and nobody gambles when he is out of money, or can’t borrow from other sources. The public regulations are excellent. Volunteer soldiers are station all over the town – at the mescal-shops, the monte-tables, and houses of ill-fame – for the preservation of public order, or go their of their own accord for that purpose, which amounts to the same thing.” – Adventures in the Apache Country (1869)



This is Randolph Scott’s first view of Agry Town in Budd Boetticher’s BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE (1958). On the right side of the street is the mercantile building from Sam Peckinpah’s feature film debut THE DEADLY COMPANIONS (1961). To the left are two buildings featured in YOUNG GUNS 2 (1991). A shootout was staged on this same street when Charles Bronson visits Tucson in DEATH WISH (1973). These are the oldest intact structures in the studio.




Here are a couple of panoramic shots of the town square, rebuilt in the 1990s. The mountain peak behind the town hall (first used in the Gary Busey western GHOST ROCK in 2003) is one of the most photographed mountains in film history. The only original building on the square is the two-story white Spanish structure. It was first used in Anthony Mann’s WINCHESTER ’73 (1950), then remodeled for THE LAST OUTPOST (1951) starring Ronald Reagan. The current look is from THREE AMIGOS! (1986).





This mock-up of the mission built for ARIZONA was featured in THREE AMIGOS! and in the introductory wedding sequence of the 1993 film TOMBSTONE. (The rest of TOMBSTONE was shot at a smaller set in nearby Mescal. None of the film, it turns out, was actually shot in Tombstone.) Note the mountain in the background… look familiar?

Just for kicks, here’s another photo of the mountain, taken from a different angle and featuring a completely different set and landscape – from the TV series “High Chaparral.”

And one more (the beauty of Old Tucson is that there are no bad camera angles), featuring the “most photographed train in movie history,” used in Cecil B. DeMille’s UNION PACIFIC (1939), Clint Eastwood’s JOE KIDD (1972) and the Will Smith debacle THE WILD WILD WEST (1999).



At the far northern end of Front Street is a little white church with an adjoining cemetery. This reminded me of the highest point in Calico ghost town. In my imagination, it could also belong to a Clint Eastwood movie. JOE KIDD (1972) was actually shot at Old Tucson, but most of the buildings used in that film no longer exist, due to the fire. It turns out that this little white church is a fairly new addition. It was a barn until 2000, when the outer frame was enclosed and painted. Now it’s just waiting for a worthy western to come along.




Here’s the mercantile building I mentioned earlier, named in honor of the John Wayne / Maureen O’Hara film MCLINTOCK! (1963).

To further illustrate my point that there are no bad camera angles in Old Tucson, the next photo features the same building from the back side.

The photo below is a panoramic shot of the same building, as well as the ruins of a structure that was built for ARIZONA. The mercantile building and the ruins were used for the climactic shootout in Howard Hawks’s RIO BRAVO (1958) – perhaps the most famous film shot at Old Tucson.

Directly behind the mercantile building is a very small canal, which doubled as the titular river in Hawks’s film RIO LOBO (1971).





This scene wasn't shot at Old Tucson... but it makes me laugh.

WESTWORLD, PART 3: Cowboys, Indians and a Fistful of Dynamite

One of the reasons that Tombstone drew such rough characters is that rough characters were the only ones who could survive in that corner of the Arizona territory in the late 1800s. When the locals weren’t shooting each other, they were fighting off angry Apaches or spending long days in underground caves with pickaxes and dynamite.

We got a first-hand account of the mining experience from an 80-year-old docent at the Copper Queen mine in Bisbee, from which 8 billion pounds of copper were extracted between 1877 and 1975. Our guide worked there from the 1950s until the mine closed down. He told us that all of the tour guides were former miners… but added that this couldn’t possibly go on for much longer, because none of them were getting any younger. Today, most of the people living in Bisbee either have some affiliation with the mines, or they were part of an “influx of hippies” (I’m quoting the official town history, which is printed on a piece of paper that hangs on a fence in front of Arizona’s largest pit mine) who arrived in the 1980s and reinvented the town as “a kind of Woodstock West” (now quoting a Fodor’s travel guide). Sounds strange, but Bisbee is actually very charming. We had lunch at an incredible Mexican restaurant on Brewery Gulch, so named because the brewery there used to let the dregs of its beer flow down the street and into the gutter. Not anymore, apparently…. But this could account for the influx of hippies.

After lunch, we headed east over the Mule Mountains and down into Sulphur Springs Valley, a grasslands farming community that could just as well have been to Middle America. On the far side of the valley, we could see the snow-capped Chiricahua Mountains, but it seemed to take forever to get there. It wasn’t hard to imagine, in such a sparsely populated area, that this was once the hunting grounds of the Chiricahua Apaches. In his book The New Desert Reader, Peter Wild remembers a time when southeastern Arizona belonged not to the frontiersmen but to the Indians: “The Civil War had drained off most of the Federal troops to fight on eastern battlefields. With that the Apaches, who for centuries had preyed on other tribes, then more recently created mayhem by plundering Mexican and Anglo settlers, thought they had driven out the enemy and went wild with whoops of rapine and pillaging. Arizona had become a land of fire and blood.”

During this period, even mail carriers couldn’t get through the valley… until a white settler named Tom Jeffords (later known to the Indians as “Taglito”) contracted to drive a stage between Fort Bowie and Tucson. According to Dee Brown’s book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: “Apache warriors ambushed Jeffords and his riders so often that he almost gave up the contract. And then one day the red-bearded while man came all alone to Cochise’s camp. He dismounted, unbuckled his cartridge belt, and handed it and his weapons to one of the Chiricahua women. With no show of fear whatsoever, Taglito walked over to where Cochise was sitting and sat down beside him. After a proper interval of silence, Taglito Jeffords told Cochise he wanted a personal treaty with him so that he could earn his living carrying the mails. Cochise was baffled. He had never known such a white man. There was nothing he could do but honor Taglito’s courage by promising to let him ride his mail route unmolested. Jeffords and his riders were never ambushed again, and many times afterward the tall red-bearded man came back to Cochise’s camp and they would talk and drink tiswin together.” This story became the basis of the 1951 film BROKEN ARROW starring Jimmy Stewart – often cited as the first Hollywood movie to treat Native Americans respectably. (Any fan of westerns can tell you it wasn’t actually the first of its kind… and some may also argue about how “respectable” it is, considering the fact that the female lead is a white actress painted brown. Nevertheless, it’s a great western.)

The Apaches dubbed the Chiricahua Mountains the “sky island” or “Land of Standing Up Rocks.” It turns out that the rocks in question are actually volcanic. The Chiricahua Mountains took shape roughly 27 million years ago, when the Turkey Creek volcano erupted here and spewed ash over a 1200 square mile area. The ash melted together to form rhyolite. Subsequent uplifting created vertical cracks in the rhyolite, and 27 million years (give or take) of weathering has worn away the weaker areas to create what now looks like a vast collection of natural totem poles. Although IMDB tells me that BROKEN ARROW was filmed in the Coconino Mountains near Flagstaff, I could swear that I saw these distinctive features in the film… maybe just as establishers? I’ll have to go back and watch it again….

BROKEN ARROW was written and directed by a filmmaker named Delmer Daves – who, in my book (forthcoming), is one of the greatest unsung western filmmakers of his generation. I recently reviewed books on two of his contemporaries, Anthony Mann and John Sturges. Mann, who oversaw Jimmy Stewart’s transition into a believable screen cowboy in the wake of BROKEN ARROW, is finally getting his due in academic circles. Sturges is more often acknowledged by filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter, both of whom regard him as one of their biggest influences. Daves has somehow fallen between the cracks, which is a shame because as a storyteller he brought great authenticity to his films – many of which are set in southeastern Arizona, and deal with “the Indian problem.” Among his westerns are DRUM BEAT (1954) with Alan Ladd, JUBAL (1956) with Glenn Ford and Ernest Borgnine, THE LAST WAGON (1956) with Richard Widmark, 3:10 TO YUMA (1957) with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, COWBOY (1958) with Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon, THE BADLANDERS (1958) with Alan Ladd and Ernest Borgnine, and THE HANGING TREE (1959), one of Gary Cooper’s last (and best) films. All of them are worth tracking down… especially THE HANGING TREE. Frankly, it’s a crime against movie-lovers that THE HANGING TREE isn’t available on DVD.

Another western film that came to mind while we were visiting the Chiricahua Mountains was Robert Aldrich’s APACHE (1954), starring Burt Lancaster as Massai, “the last Apache warrior.” The main overlook in the park is named Massai Point, in honor of this warrior who escaped from an Indian reservation in the east after the surrender of Geronimo, and made his way back home. He was never re-captured. From Massai Point, we could also see Cochise’s last stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains on the other side of the Sulphur Springs Valley.

With daylight fading, we made our last stop in Cochise County, at the site of Fort Bowie in the infamous “Apache Pass.” This was the U.S. Cavalry’s stronghold from 1862 to 1886, when they were at war with the Chiricahua Apaches. Unfortunately, we saw the ruins of the fort only from a distance… they can be accessed only by hiking trail, and we arrived too late in the day to complete the round trip before dark. That said, it seems somehow appropriate that the site is not too easily accessible to casual tourists. It reminds us that Cochise County once belonging to a culture that lived at one with the land. The Chiricahua Apaches were constantly on the move, making their home according to the whims of nature… in contrast with their enemy’s stubborn efforts to tame the wilderness. It was only when the U.S. Cavalry adopted the Apache’s methods of guerilla warfare that the southeast corner of the Arizona territory was “civilized.” Fort Bowie was abandoned in 1894.

We turned east and drove though Willcox (famous for its apple pie and for b-movie cowboy Rex Allen) and the Dragoon Mountains on our way back to Tombstone, then saddled up to the bar and watched the Super Bowl at the Crystal Palace Saloon. Only fitting, I suppose, that we should end our time in the Wild West with a modern-day tribute to male aggression….


Bisbee

Copper Queen Mine






Chiricahua Mountains









Geronimo

Photograph by C.S. Fly, whose studio sat right next to the O.K. Corral

Fort Bowie

WESTWORLD, PART 2: Guns, Graves and Ghosts

In 1877, an Arizona prospector named Ed Schieffelin was digging in a rocky area east of the San Pedro River known as Goose Flats. It was Apache country and his friends had warned him not to go, saying all he’d find there was his tombstone. Instead he found silver, and lots of it. The rest, as they say, is history. Schieffelin christened his discovery the Lucky Cuss mine; the town that sprung up around it became known as Tombstone.

Today, the town is still thriving. It’s certainly not as lively as it once was – all the tourist brochures boldly declare that this was once the biggest city between St. Louis and San Francisco – but it has managed to avoid the dismal fate of so many other ghost towns in the southwest, due mainly to tourism. Over the years, Hollywood has eagerly championed the legend of Tombstone, “the town too tough to die.”

Even if you’ve never been there, you probably know a few things about it. You’ve probably heard of Boot Hill, the cemetery to the north, where dozens of unlucky gunslingers are buried. (The grave stones are fun to read, as the old-timers apparently had a penchant for rhyming: “Here lies George Johnson – hanged by mistake, 1882 – He was right, we was wrong, but we strung him up and now he’s gone” / “Here lies Lester Moore – four slugs from a 44, no Les no more”) You’ve no doubt heard of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, arguably the most famous showdown in the history of the Old West. Above all, you’re likely familiar with the name of Wyatt Earp, Tombstone’s famous (or infamous, depending on where you’re coming from) marshal… whose reputation suggests that he single-handedly brought law and order to the American frontier.

In a sense, the story of the O.K. Corral begins and ends at Boot Hill. One of the graves is that of town marshal Fred White, murdered in 1880 by a Cowboy named Curly Bill. “Cowboy” refers, in this case, to the infamous Clanton family and their loosely organized gang of outlaws that operated along the Mexican border. White’s replacement as town marshal was Virgil Earp, older brother of Wyatt Earp – a lawman from Dodge City. Both men, plus their brother Morgan and friend Doc Holliday, were involved in a shootout with the Cowboys on October 26, 1881. Three men were killed and buried in Boot Hill: Billy Clanton, Tom McLaury and Frank McLaury. This was neither the beginning nor the end of the hostilities between the two quasi-political factions in Tombstone, and it seems that everyone in town was forced to pick a side. History generally falls on the side of Wyatt Earp, due at least partly to the fact that the Tombstone Epitaph, one of the oldest continuously-operating newspapers in the West, reported the following: “The feeling among the best class of our citizens is that the Marshall was entirely justified in his efforts to disarm these men, and that being fired upon they had to defend themselves, which they did most bravely.”

Hollywood has generally sided with the Earps too, if only because the lionization of the lawmen has transformed the half-minute long gunfight into a modern myth. The pattern can be traced back to Wyatt Earp’s somewhat dubious 1931 biography, written by Stuart N. Lake. Lake opined that “the Old West cannot be understood unless Wyatt Earp is also understood” while asserting that “this biography is in no part a mythic tale.” The book became the basis for roughly two dozen movies including LAW & ORDER (1932) starring Walter Huston as Wyatt (the screenplay was written by his son John Huston), Alan Dwan’s FRONTIER MARSHAL (1939) starring Randolph Scott, and John Ford’s MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1947) starring Henry Fonda. Dwan claimed to have a personal connection with Wyatt Earp, saying that he appeared as an extra in Dwan's film THE HALF-BREED (1916). After Earp’s widow sued Fox studios for inaccuracies in the film, however, Dwan announced that FRONTIER MARSHAL wasn’t supposed to be about Wyatt Earp specifically. (Nevermind that the main character is named “Wyatt Earp.”) Ford likewise claimed that MY DARLING CLEMENTINE had come straight from the horse’s mouth. He told French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier, “I knew Wyatt Earp. I heard the story of the O.K. Corral from him. I was my brother’s assistant director and we made Westerns. The extras were real cowboys, actual friends of Earp’s. He often came around to see them, and so I had a chance to speak to him. He was very tall, a man of few words, remarkably calm. He wasn’t a good marksman, but he was very bold and so he would come very, very close to his opponent before shooting. This is the way it happens in my picture…”

His story may or may not be true. (I spoke with one Tombstone resident who loudly insisted that MY DARLING CLEMENTINE is the most “ridiculous” of all the Tombstone movies, because it shows Wyatt and Doc Holliday “not getting along.”) Either way, these films solidified the legend – making it difficult for future filmmakers to deviate from their “facts.” In his book Inventing Wyatt Earp, Allen Barra does an admirable job of untangling facts and fiction in these films and others including Jacques Tourneur’s WICHITA (1955), John Sturges’s GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL (1957) and HOUR OF THE GUN (1967), and the recent double-dose of TOMBSTONE (1993) with Kurt Russell and WYATT EARP (1994) with Kevin Costner. Autographed posters for these two latest incarnations appear everywhere in Tombstone, and the films themselves seemed to be in constant rotation at our hotel and the local saloon.

Upon arrival in Tombstone, we took a mule-powered stagecoach ride through the dusty streets. Our driver gave us a short town history and dropped us off at the back of the O.K. Corral, where we watched an elaborate reenactment of the gunfight and listened to Vincent Price narrating a “Historama” program that utilized 16mm reenactment footage and a hand-made diorama. As a horror fan, I was thrilled to hear Price’s voice, but it seemed a little odd since (as far as I know) the actor was only in two westerns: Sam Fuller’s gothic THE BARON OF ARIZONA (1950) and a lackluster South African remake of YELLOW SKY called THE JACKYLS (1967). Then again, the history of Tombstone is generally morbid and some of the locals do interpret the notion of “ghost town” literally (there’s a haunted stagecoach tour that runs at night)… so I guess it’s appropriate.

One of our most interesting stops was at The Bird Cage Theater, advertised as “the most haunted place in America.” 26 people were killed there in 8 years and, unlike most of the tourist stops in town, The Bird Cage still looks more or less the way it did in the 1880s. In fact, there are a few rooms in the basement – only recently opened to public view – that literally haven’t been touched since 1889. If this isn’t creepy enough for you, the theater also proudly displays advertisements for the local undertaker (“Why walk around half-dead when we can bury you for only $22?”), the hearse that carried the Cowboys to Boot Hill, and a rare mummified freak of nature (“a member of the family of nerrids that inhabited the China sea many centuries ago”). I think we can say that the town lives up to its name.


Boot Hill Cemetery, looking down into Tombstone


Allen Street (then and now)


Wyatt Earp's house on Fremont Street

Henry Fonda in MY DARLING CLEMENTINE

Kirk Douglas (as Doc) and Burt Lancaster (as Wyatt) in GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL

Val Kilmer (as Doc), Sam Elliot (as Virgil), Kurt Russell (as Wyatt) and Bill Paxton (as Morgan) in TOMBSTONE

Kevin Costner in WYATT EARP

WESTWORLD, PART I: Sand, Rain and Blood

If anyone’s wondering why I haven’t posted on this blog for the past few months… I blame Hollywood. I’m working on a new film studies project that goes hand-in-hand with a crash course on western movies, and I’m completely immersed. So immersed that when L. suggested we should take a vacation, the first place that came to my mind was Tombstone, Arizona. And because she’s an extremely good sport, she didn’t scowl.

On Saturday morning, we jumped in the car (not my car, which mysteriously failed to start due to a “computer short”) and headed east… into a monsoon. I know I don’t have any right to complain about the weather in southern California, since most of my east coast friends are currently living in igloos, and no one should ever complain about rain in a region where drought is an everyday reality… but I didn’t really want to spend our vacation in a “mud and rags” western (think: SHANE). In my imagination, Tombstone is the heart of the mythic Great American Desert, where it never rains. In reality, Tombstone lies at the heart of the Sonoran Desert – one of four North American deserts, and the one that gets the most annual rainfall.

We turned south at Indio because I wanted to make a movie-themed stop along the way. Once again my expectations were thwarted. I expected the landscape east of Anza Borrego to look like the Mojave Desert… or at least like Anza Borrego. Instead, we found ourselves in a thriving agricultural region – fed, I suppose, by water from the Salton Sea, and in great enough quantities to turn a desert into a relatively lush garden. A staggering sight which fairly begs questions about long-term sustainability.

We continued on to our first destination: the Imperial Sand Dunes near Glamis, California. Even if you haven’t been there, you’ve probably seen this area before. It’s better known as “Hollywood’s Sahara,” the setting of contemporary films like RETURN OF THE JEDI (remember the Sarlacc pit where Jabba the Hut tries to execute Luke, Han and Chewbacca?), STARGATE, and THE SCORPION KING.

As a horror fan, I also know it as the backdrop of the final confrontation in THE HITCHER (1986) – the one where serial killer Rutger Hauer pursues mama’s boy C. Thomas Howell across the desert in an attempt to either kill him or fuck him… you be the judge. (Don’t look for any such subtext in the paint-by-numbers 2007 remake.) As we crossed over from Edenic landscapes into Saharan waste land, the first thing we noticed was an appropriately ominous sign warning us not to venture off the road into the…. LIVE BOMBING AREA! I don’t know about you, but it makes me a little nervous to think that the local grocer’s fruits and vegetables are being grown right next to a contaminated bombing area. No wonder the region is producing monsters like Sarlacc and Rutger Hauer.

Like so many desert areas in the southwest, the Imperial Sand Dunes (as seen from Osborne Overlook, the highest point) appears impassably vast and unmercifully monotonous. On this particular day, however, it was neither hot nor dry – so my memory of the area is a little inaccurate. There was no blue sky, and no mountains in the distance. We drove past the nearby town of Glamis (where Jennifer Jason Leigh met her untimely end at a coffee shop in THE HITCHER), then turned south toward Yuma, Arizona.

As we neared Tucson, we quickly realized that there is one natural feature that clearly distinguishes the Sonoran Desert from the Mojave and the Great Basin: the saguaro cactus. Just as a newly arrived Brit might expect to see camels and Bedouins on the Imperial Sand Dunes, I came West three years ago expecting to see this particular cactus, because it’s featured so prominently in desert-based films (and Road Runner cartoons). Saguaros are common in a number of classic westerns – which is one way to determine if the film was made in the Tucson area.

Equally striking for someone who’s lived in L.A. for a few years were the clouds. On our second day in Arizona, we drove around listening to The Orb song “Little Fluffy Clouds,” which samples Ennio Morricone's harmonica and Rickie Lee Jones’s stoned ramblings about desert clouds. After the rain, the clouds were even more imposing than the landscape – the scenery was like something out of a John Ford movie. (I’m thinking in particular of the storm scene in SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, and of Howard Hawks’s homage to Ford in the funeral scene in RED RIVER.) After nightfall, the clouds cleared off and we saw more stars in the sky than I’ve seen since I was growing up in rural Virginia.

Around dusk, we were still an hour or so away from Tucson – perfectly timed for our second stop of the day, in Coolidge, Arizona. Coolidge is a sleepy farming community, distinguished mostly as the home of the nation’s first archeological reserve. The main attraction at Casa Grande National Monument is a 4-story “great house” built by an ancient tribe of Sonoran Desert indians sometime in the 14th century, at the height of their civilization. Think of it as a southwest Stonehenge. The openings in the walls are said to align with the sun and moon at particular times during the year, signifying the best times for planting, harvest and celebration.

The builders, a relatively unknown tribe of hunter-gatherers, had already ceased to exist by the 17th century when Spanish missionaries found the structure in ruins. The Pima Indians referred to their extinct neighbors as “Hohokam,” meaning “all-gone” or “all used up.” What the Hohokam used up was their water. Although they crafted elaborate irrigation systems to channel water from the nearby Gila River, they couldn’t control nature. In his book The New Desert Reader, Peter Wild writes: “Quite surprisingly to tourists today squinting against the glare of 100 degree heat shimmering over the huge ruins of Casa Grande National Monument rearing before them, some of the desert Indians prospered, at first planting corn and melons along the moist places of riverbeds, then over the centuries developing vast irrigation projects and sedentary, hierarchal societies necessary to maintain the complex waterworks… [but] though these ancient peoples grew in power, building the cities that have made the Southwest dearest to the hearts of American anthropologists, they did not prevail. Every few hundred years of so drought struck…”

I confess that I didn’t track this monument down because of its historical significance. I knew about Casa Grande only because Coolidge was the filming location of another outstanding 1980s horror film. Like THE HITCHER, the punk-western-vampire movie NEAR DARK was written by Eric Red, who deserves some kind of lifetime achievement award from horror fans. NEAR DARK also boasts a great director, a great cast, and a great score. No matter what accolades Kathryn Bigelow receives for THE HURT LOCKER on Oscar night this year, to me she will always be the director of NEAR DARK (well... and maybe POINT BREAK... and STRANGE DAYS...). The film is also, in my opinion, one of the high water marks of Lance Henriksen’s career, and he’s well supported by his ALIENS co-stars Jenette Goldstein and Bill Paxton (at his most gleefully sadistic). Adrian Pasdar and Jenny Wright also turn in solid performances as the star-crossed couple at the center of the film (though this in no way justifies the TWILIGHT-inspired art on the new DVD re-release of the film, which reduces the rest of the vampire family to minor characters). The whole movie gels perfectly to the rhythm of a typically pulse-pounding yet ethereal score by Tangerine Dream.

Visiting the Casa Grande National Monument made me appreciate NEAR DARK that much more… because it’s not hard, while standing in the shadow of this immense hand-built structure, to imagine an ancient race of people being granted immortality through their deeds. What we know about the Hohokam is based entirely on their craftsmanship, which has outlived many droughts. Casa Grande stands as a reminder that, in the desert, water is as precious as blood. And what better way to preface our trip to “the town too tough to die”?













Sonoran Desert

“Dante Alighieri, it has always seemed to me, made the mistake of his life in dying when he did in the picturesque capital of the Exarchate five hundred and fifty years ago. Had he held on to this mortal coil until after Uncle Sam had perfected the ‘Gadsden Purchase,’ he would have found full scope for his genius in the description of a region in which not only purgatory and hell, but heaven likewise, had combined to produce a bewildering kaleidoscope of all that was wonderful, weird, terrible, and awe-inspiring, with not a little that was beautiful and romantic.”
- James G. Bourke, On the Border with Crook (1891)


The first known description of the Sagauro cactus in English literature:

“A species of tree, which I had never seen before, here arrested my attention. It grows to the height of forty or fifty feet. The top is cone shaped, and almost without foliage. The bank resembles that of the prickly pear; and the body is covered with thorns. I have seen some three feet in diameter at the root, and throwing up twelve distinct shafts.”
- from The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie (1831)


Case Grande




As much as I like Lance, I'm glad he wasn't our driver...