My new feature, A Desert, is an intense and surreal neo-noir set in the high desert of the American Southwest that follows photographer Alex Clark as he attempts to rekindle his lost creative spark.
The way I approached the screenplay to A Desert was very different than other scripts I’ve previously written. Before I wrote a page of the script, I decided I would first create the body of work of Alex, the fine art photographer character I was interested in exploring. For a couple of years, I shot as Alex would shoot, amassing a large collection of photographs. Some of these feature prominently in the movie, such as the photo of the drive-in theater and the images in Alex’s book Death of the New West. (The title of the book is a nod to the work of the prominent New Topographics photographer Robert Adams, which captured the evolution of the American West.)
I immersed myself in Alex’s artistic practice by going on multiple photography road trips across California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah, a unique and exciting way of really getting to understand the character. These trips also served as a springboard for ideas for A Desert and was time well spent in terms of location scouting.
The following photographs had a significant impact on shaping the script and the conceptual core of A Desert.
Movie Theater – Victorville, California
Discovering this shuttered movie theater was one of the most important things that happened in the photography period of developing A Desert. The blandest movie theater to ever exist, the text “the movies” makes it feel like the Repo Man version of a movie theater. What you can’t see from this angle is that massive mounds of dirt had been pushed up against its entrances and exits to prevent people from getting inside, making it a weird generic tomb to cinema. Discovering it got me thinking about our present relationship to cinema. The theater is also adjacent to a massive, decommissioned military base which became a key location in the movie. We actually shot a scene where Alex pulls up to this movie theater, but we cut it from A Desert, as I thought people would be distracted by how phony baloney “the movies” looked.
Smith’s Ranch Drive-in – Twentynine Palms, California
Taking this photograph of a drive-in movie screen in Twentynine Palms was another key moment. Connecting with my reaction to finding the abandoned movie theater, it crystalized A Desert as a film in which I would explore the idea that movies can function as a mirror to our own experiences. The image above hangs on the wall in Alex and his wife Sam’s bedroom, and Smith’s Ranch Drive-in features prominently in the finale of the movie. I’ve always had an affinity for the drive-in, even with the poor image quality and horrible audio coming through that crappy speaker or your car stereo. One of my earliest childhood memories is being at the drive-in. It’s summer, the sun’s just gone down, I’m in the back seat, sipping on an ice-cold soda and watching Return of the Jedi unspool on the screen. It doesn’t get much more American than that.
Billboard – Baker, California
Billboards and remnants of billboards like this one litter the landscape off desert highways in the Southwest. Often the billboards are blank, which always reminds me of a drive-in movie screen. The concept of billboards as an analogue to the movie screen – especially in the open expanse of the desert – is very much part of the DNA of A Desert. In one scene, Alex stares up at a blank billboard outside his motel room and reflects. It was fortuitous that a blank billboard happened to be in the parking lot of our motel location, as it foreshadows Sam’s experience at the drive-in movie screen later in the movie. This photograph became the cover image of Alex’s book, Death of the New West.
Decommissioned Military Base – Victorville, California
In the work of the New Topgraphics photographers Alex is influenced by, there is frequently a sense of irony found in the images, much like in this one. Once I discovered this decommissioned military base in Victorville, sprawling and rotting away in the hot sun of the high desert, I became fascinated by it. Multiple scenes in A Desert revolve around the unseemly goings on in the bowels of an abandoned military base. Apparently, it is too expensive to demolish the structures properly, so they’ve just left them so the elements can slowly do their thing. Nearby there’s a preschool and a prison, both of which seem totally appropriate for this corner of the desert.
Roadside Memorial – Calico, California
Much like the billboards, these memorials are found all throughout the desert on the side of two-lane roads and highways. This one in particular really stood out, with its flowing American flag set against the backdrop of the Calico hills. Calico is an old mining town turned ghost town tourist trap and is featured in one of my favorite noirs of the ’50s, The Prowler. I wanted to capture the flag swaying in the breeze as best I could, so multiple attempts were made. Taking the time to wait for the best moment helped me think about Alex’s process, and his observing and patient eye. This photograph also became the final page in Death of the New West and is a pretty on-the-nose summation of the artistic statement Alex is attempting to convey with his collection of photographs.
