A most productive day indeed. We started out by meeting Rudy and Bonnie a J&J Café. fuego looked around the place and said, “This is a lot better than I thought from the pictures.” We discussed how we were going to make the shots work, how we were going to build the counter, and so forth. We had a viable location and the director had blessed it. *Whew!* We could get going on the serious set preparation.

Still, the other site under consideration, Wild Horse Mesa Bar, was just plain better on the outside. Sitting alone along a stretch of 2-lane, there’s just nothing else like it. We discussed ways to perhaps cheat the WHMB Exterior onto J&J, but the places are simply too different. It was still morning, and WHMB doesn’t open until two. fuego and I ran around town, getting his phone set up and other essentials and peering through the window of a defunct diner whose furniture we may be using. The stuff was nice, if a little too shiny and new. It didn’t really match J&J’s that well, though.

In the early afternoon we met back up with the others and we headed out into the desert to choose which stretch of highway worked for which shot. It’s beautiful out there; our little flick is going to be gorgeous. After a few photo stops we were at White Horse Mesa Bar. It was open and busy – not with patrons but with painters. Genie, the owner, is sprucing the place up (and adding more Christmas lights).

fuego looked around a bit, found a great shot through the front door, across the parking lot, past a faded sign for the bar, and on to the red mesas beyond. I been aware of the shot, but I had not communicated the potential to fuego effectively. Sometimes you just have to be there. Pending a conversation with the Art Director, we selected White Horse Mesa Bar as our location. If Bonnie said OK, we could get going on the serious set preparation.

That evening it was back to Los Alamos for fuego and me, to recover the Hotelsmobile and see the folks. And heck, as long as we were up on the hill for the evening, we took the opportunity to stay out with Jojo (my beer slave) and Spencer until the wee hours of the morning. We enjoyed the distinctive ambience of Canyon Bar and Grill. We even got to see a bar fight! Woohoo!

1

Sweet!

Thanks!

It was a series of short meetings, with legwork in between. I’ve been in the car enough now that one arm is darker than the other. I headed up north, to a small town a few miles west of I-40, where I knew there was a cafe/bar but I knew nothing else about it. On the way I stopped off at Raphael’s, another potential location, but it had been closed every time I passed by. Apparently the hours posted on the door have nothing to do with the hours that they are actually open. It was still pretty early but I thought I’d drop by and see if there was some kind of license or better business bureau ID number on the door that I could use to track down the owners.

Unlike my previous visits, there was a car in the parking lot. The door wasn’t locked. I stepped in to the smell of ammonia. “We’re closed, buddy,” called out a man from across the room. There were three of them in there giving the place a good scrubbing down. I looked around a bit – the place was much more of a bar than a roadside café, but the folks there had no problem with us filming. The daughter asked to be in the movie as an extra. I had no problem with that. I checked sight lines and all that, decided it wasn’t perfect but would do in a pinch, and got contact info and called Rudy from the parking lot. “Oh, we talked to them,” he said. “The Director of Photography likes J&J’s better. It’s more like what Ruthie would have.” Here is the problem when you have a mix of very experienced industry pros and rookies. The inexperienced producer took the DP’s word as more or less gospel, without assking the people who invented Ruthie what we thought. While I’m inclined to agree in this case, a decision like that is no time to be bypassing the director or his surrogate. And at the very least, tell me about it.

Right, so, on to Peña Blanca I went. Before I even got there I knew that it was just too far from Albuquerque to be useable, unless it was absolutely perfect. It wasn’t, not even close, so I turned around and headed back into town. Next I headed out West a few miles, to the very end of Central Ave. The terrain was good, still more buildings than I would have liked, but workable. I passed a sign for Angel View Cafe. A cafe? Out here? Sounds promising! Only, I couldn’t find the cafe. Signs last a long time out here, often outlasting the buildings they mark. I’ll make one more attempt to find the place using high-tech tools like the phone book, but I suspect once again that time has overtaken the sort of place I’m looking for.

In to town, a couple more errands, a meeting with Archie about props. He had welded up an anchor from scratch the day before, and was starting fabrication on the nuclear warhead. We discussed snow globe styles and limitations, and other props. Apparently the machine gun is not a given. He can make a fake one from photographs, but we would need a belt of ammo hanging out to really sell it.

Then to callbacks. Going in I was reasonably sure who I wanted, but I wanted to see if the people who looked best for the role could iron out some of the flaws in their earlier performances. When I got there I discovered I would be looking at two more people than I thought I would. One Moab had said he was unavailable because he was going to be at a pirate party, but the role was just too juicy for him to pass up. The dude lives and breathes pirate. The other was a potential Ruthie that had not been available for the previous auditions but was well-known as an excellent actress so they tossed her into the mix.

So, things were a little more complicated than I expected. There were a couple of actors who could have made my choice easier by nailing their parts, but they didn’t. I could coach them so they would get one key phrase right, but then they would lose track of the rest. In one case it was nerves, I’m sure, but we just don’t have the time for our lead actors to get over the jitters and start performing. In the end, there was only one Moab, Izzy was a slam dunk, Kentucky Jack fell out of the mix, Miguel was decided long since, but for Ruthie there was no clear standout. The new candidate did a good job and had excellent chemistry with Moab, but just came off a little, well, lightweight. The other top Ruthie contender isn’t as experienced of an actress, which is a risk, but she projected a stronger personality, though not as much range. I had not been prepared to direct the actors myself, and in retrospect I don’t think I put the Ruthies through enough.

Now, I must decide.

1

Sweet!

Thanks!

Much of Pirates of the White Sand takes place in a diner/bar on a lonesome stretch of highway. I don’t mind a few other buildings around, perhaps a gas station maybe even a fleabag motel. Urban is right out. Little outposts like that used to dot the highway along the famous Route 66, back in the day when half the fun was getting there. Now Interstate freeways have been cut across the land, draining the life and the commerce from the smaller roads, replacing Ruthie’s diner with a drive-through window where quality is measured in seconds.

Still, I figured there must be something around here that came reasonably close to that description. Maybe on the outskirts of town, where buildings get sparse but there are still people nearby. Maybe along some 2-lane blacktop that allows savvy motorists to cut a corner and save a few miles.

Nope.

There are some restaurants out there, big contrived things built to appeal to yuppie bikers and Sunday drivers. There are few of those, but they outnumber the crappy dives. We’re not looking for either of those, so now we are going to construct one. Yep, that’s right, unless a location miracle happens in the next couple of days, we will begin the task of converting a somewhat suitable cafe into a diner. Ahhh, the miracle of film. Need a counter? Put one in. We’ll have to be able to remove it during the café’s regular business hours. No problem, apparently. Alas, no matter how much we dinerize the place, it’s still lacking, especially the exterior shots.

So I was back from the Black Hole, and searching for the miracle location, when I got the call from our part-time editor, Charles the First. (Charles II is a camera operator.) First Chuck was calling with (for me) good news. He had suddenly and unexpectedly become unemployed, and wanted to celebrate. I considered, and realized that there were several important issues I needed to discuss, in particular if they could somehow edit out the big, busy freeway that went right past one potential location. (“No problem”, 1st Chuck said, but I’d have to see it to believe it.) I invited Bonnie along, but she wisely demurred. We went our separate ways and after I armed myself with a twelve-pack of ESB I was on my way.

1st Chuck was in fine fettle, and had a good head start on me in the drinking department. It was a lead he would never relinquish. Ken was there as well, and 1st Chuck’s mother substitute/landlord. 1st Chuck fired up the barbecue and one rack of ribs later we were all feeling just fine. We stayed up too late and I slept on their couch, where I was visited in the night by giant dogs.

1

Sweet!

Thanks!

Since I had last seen the black hole, it had grown, bursting out of the confines of the former Piggly Wiggly and sprawling across the parking lot. The neighboring ex-church, once a separate singularity, now has been absorbed by the sprawl. Outside the ex-church is a sign proclaiming it to be the World Peace Institute, or something like that.

The Black Hole is located in Los Alamos, New Mexico, birthplace of the atomic bomb and still big in the devastating explosion business. And that’s how many of the folks see it up there – as a business. That pisses off Ed. He has been working long and hard protesting the activities at the Los Alamos Lab and the cavalier attitude that many of the employees take there. He has also been profiting off the Lab at the same time. Ed is a junk dealer, but oh, the junk.

Ed has a point – the scientific community (it’s more about the biotech than big physics now, but the principle still applies) has not taken a leadership role in helping society come to terms with new technologies that can transform it or sweep it away. “That’s for the government,” they say, but that’s a copout. The government is a bunch of idiots elected by the rest of us idiots. Just as Universities have awakened to the ugly truth that businessmen need training in ethics, people designing weapons of mass destruction need to understand the meaning of the device beyond the megatons, and they need to help the rest of us understand. A much more coherent expression of this idea is in the novel A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller. The book also has the best explanation of the Catholic position on the sanctity of life I have ever read.

But I digress.

Ed would like our movie. When he and his crew like a movie, sometimes props are loaned for free. My goal was to pitch the movie, get him on board, and get his support. Bonnie was with me, and I’m told the presence of a pretty woman is always helpful.

Alas, this day Ed was not wearing his hearing aid. It’s bad enough trying to talk to him ordinarily, I understand, but in this case it was impossible. He couldn’t hear Bonnie at all, so it fell to me to shout into his ear. There was no way to communicate even slightly complicated ideas. We listened to Ed’s lecture and watched a video he has that was “smuggled” out of the lab, showing a portion of a lecture about the nuclear weapons business at Los Alamos. Ed shows the video because of the cavalier way the lecturer discusses making nations cease to exist. After the video we “discussed” the current situation around the world. I put the quotes around the word discussed because he couldn’t hear my comments.

After that we went poking around the place, gathering up an assortment of electronics, a geiger counter, and some bits that might be good for making a nuclear warhead mockup. We had gone there because we heard that Ed had his own mockups, but they sucked. Ah, the stuff, the stuff. Strange things, sinister things, mysterious things, and lots and lots of pure worthless junk. Most of it was older stuff, so if you ever need the retro look for a film, you can’t go wrong there. Near some really expensive vacuum pumps in the back there was the semi-dessicated poop of a small animal on the floor.

Then it came down to time to pay for the stuff, and this is where the gravity well of the Black Hole distorted mathematics beyond all reason. We needed the stuff for three weeks, but the rental cost was as much as (if not more than) the purchase price. At this point I think Ed thought we were doing a feature film with a big budget. Haggling ensued, and putting things back, and numbers spontaneously appeared out of nowhere, connected to nothing, and then disappeared again with a faint popping sound.

I am now the proud owner of a geiger counter.

1

Sweet!

Thanks!