While we writers spent our days in air-conditioned luxury, squabbling about lunch orders, our crew spent
two days this week baking out in the desert around Lancaster and Palmdale. For those of you unfamiliar
with Southern California geography, that’s the home of Edwards Air Force Base, the housing development they burned down in Lethal Weapon 3, and so many joshua trees that you half-expect to see Bono and the Edge standing in the corner of every frame. Rod Bearden, our transportation captain and head teamster, said what was on our minds as we all looked at the dailies of lonely gas stations, beat-up trucks, and two-lane highways stretching into the arid distance: “It looks like ‘No Country For Old Men.’
High praise, and not just because ‘No Country’ is a favorite, oft-referenced film in the writers’ room (my
partner Ashley calls it ‘the perfect Terminator movie,’ and notes its many structural similarities to
Jim Cameron’s 1984 original). Because it turns out Rod actually worked on the film, getting vehicles
across the vast expanses of west Texas for the Coen brothers. He showed us a very classy letter from the Coens thanking him for his hard work on the Oscar-winning film and lamenting the fact that in an industry that freely gives out credits for doing nothing, Rod got no screen credit for busting his butt on the film.
Aside from being a very cool artifact from a justly celebrated film, Rod’s letter is also a reminder of
how lucky we writers are to be working with some of the best in the business, and not only high profile
jobs like makeup, special effects, and stunts, but also in the positions like Rod’s, which are less celebrated but every bit as necessary to making a television show work.
And we’re equally blessed in that our crew members genuinely like the show they’re working on and go the extra mile to make it as good as it can be. When on a different episode we asked our prop master, Scott Buckwald, to get us a gun that looks like the .45 automatic AMT Hardballer Arnold used in the first
Terminator movie (that’s “.45 long slide with lasuh sight” to you, pal), he actually tracked down the
original gun and brought it to set. When he unwrapped the thing, the writers, actors, and crew treated it like it was Excalibur pulled from the stone– a tangible link to the roots of our franchise. Getting Arnold’s gun…that’s not going the extra mile, that’s running the whole damn marathon.
