It was just, it was long, y'know? It's not the same pace as contemporary movies and that's the problem."Ĭlay Evans stands before the ruins of the mansion built for the 1956 film Giant.
#MOVIE MAGIC SHOW MOVIE#
"I saw the movie when we came to town," says Allyson Feeney, a 26-year-old Californian teaching art classes in town. But the current newcomers to the town seem puzzled by the film's cult following. Giant junkies have been visiting Marfa for decades. The 3 1/2-hour epic about a clash between a rancher and an oilman starred Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean. There have been other movies shot out here over the years: Andromeda Strain, Fandango and The Good Old Boys, but Marfa's place in movie history begins in 1955 with Giant. "And I think that probably translates magically onto film."
"My grandfather would always say you can see clear into next week," Lambert says. Although she is a successful hotelier living in Austin, she says her heart is in the Trans-Pecos. Liz Lambert, who owns the El Cosmico hotel, comes from a ranching family that has been in far West Texas for decades. He too was attracted by the primordial emptiness of the country, where he installed large-scale steel and concrete sculptures. Though ranching is still the region's mainstay, Marfa's artistic side has been growing ever since the artist Donald Judd came here in the 1980s. On the edge of town, there's a new hotel called El Cosmico where you can stay in a vintage trailer, a yurt or a tipi.
In the land that created the Highland Hereford cattle breed, it is now possible to get a specialty coffee served by a young man with a verse from the French poet Rimbaud tattooed on his forearm. In red, red West Texas, Barack Obama carried the county. With Hollywood types, it doesn't hurt that Marfa is, well, a different sort of Texas town, with just one blinking traffic light but 14 art galleries, an independent bookstore and an organic grocery.
#MOVIE MAGIC SHOW SERIES#
Which makes it perfect to visit as part of our series On Location, which looks at the places where great American movies were filmed.Ĭowboys on the MacGuire Ranch, where There Will Be Blood was filmed, drive Hereford cattle to the shipping pens.
Why is Hollywood so attracted to Texas? The drive-in movie critic, Joe Bob Briggs, says it's "because evil thrives in Texas." People seem especially drawn to West Texas, a land of limitless desolation - and possibilities - onto which they can project greed, lust and violence. It was the site of the 1956 epic Giant, which starred James Dean as a rancher turned oil tycoon, and recently, two Oscar winners, No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. But it's been the backdrop for some of Hollywood's most notable movies. Marfa is a tiny town in West Texas with just 2,000 residents, about 60 miles from the Mexican border and nearly three hours by car from El Paso. The skeleton of the mansion in the background still stands on the ranch today. James Dean on the set of the 1956 film Giant, which was filmed on the Ryan Ranch, west of the town of Marfa.
0 kommentar(er)
